When I was 27, my dad went away for a weekend on a walking holiday to the Lake District and asked me to come home to look after the cat. The cat was old by then and kind of high maintenance: you couldn’t palm her off on a neighbor.
We also felt a higher duty of care towards her because she had been my mother’s cat. It was only a few months since my mother’s death, and we were still laboring under the delusion mum was looking over our shoulders the whole time, saying, “is that how you’re going to do it?” when we broke one of her rules. I told my dad of course I’d come home – and promptly collapsed into panic.
I hadn’t lived at home since graduating from college five years earlier, but, as with so many children in their 20s, then and now, you wouldn’t have known that to look at me. Every two minutes I was on the phone home. Even before my mother got ill I was back every few weeks for a visit. My parents had declined to convert my bedroom into an office or something similar, and I hadn’t bothered to change the décor, so the orange walls were still covered in posters of Madonna circa Like A Prayer and Andre Agassi in his Wimbledon whites, which I’d ripped from the pages of Serve and Volley magazine. (In my defense, this was the Home Counties in the late 1990s, and I was coming up off a 1980s childhood. It could’ve been worse; it could’ve been Sampras.)
My parents lived an hour outside of London and, if my dad hadn’t been going away that weekend, I would in all likelihood have gone home anyway, as I had every week since the funeral. It was a sad, painful time, during which my dad and I tried to find a way to be together without her. But it hadn’t, to that point, been actively frightening.
Quite the opposite, in fact. The early stages of grief can make a person brazen; for awhile, you have nothing left to lose. For example, I’m terrified of airplane turbulence – I go the whole nine yards: palms sweating, heart racing, grabbing the thigh of the stranger sitting next to me, in case he isn’t panicking, too – but for a short period after my mother’s death, I was icy calm when I flew; I couldn’t have cared less whether or not the plane went down.
Another example: like a lot of English people, I’m hyper aware of small instances of social embarrassment. I lost that, too, for a while. If the lady in Sainsbury’s thought I’d jumped ahead of her in the queue, I hadn’t the energy to die of embarrassment.
And yet the prospect of spending a night in my own bed in my own house struck me as so uniquely horrifying that I got breathless just thinking about it.
For weeks I had been kidding myself that I was fine, or rather FINE, and the prospect of walking into a cold, dark kitchen where the radio, which my mother had on at all times, was off, and there was nothing in the fridge and the air was sour would force me to confront the fact I was not fine. Many of us regress to childhood the instant we cross our parents’ threshold, so that even now, when I walk into my dad’s house, I can’t stop myself from asking, what’s for dinner? and, why did he buy the wrong kind of orange juice?
But that weekend there was no transformation. My mother had barely left the house during the last months of her life. If I was home alone, it meant she was gone.
I had to go. I wanted my dad to have a nice few days away, the first time he’d done anything social since the death. And so I tried to dupe myself into not caring by finding other things to be frightened of – an old trick based on the assumption that the more you have on your plate, the less space each item can take up to torment you. But that didn’t work, because everything else I was frightened of had already happened. Then I thought I might get my friends to mock me into going. I told my friend Sam about my fears, confident he would take the piss the way he always did, but to my horror he was sympathetic and offered to come with me.
In the end, perversely, it was Sam’s kindness that triggered the necessary antibodies. Of course I didn’t need to be accompanied. How absurd. How pathetic. I wasn’t a child. And so I went home on my own. I fed the cat. I watched TV til 1am and when I went upstairs to bed, I left the volume on low and every light in the house burning. Then I slept like normal. A few years later we sold the house and my dad moved to London.
Occasionally, I go on to Google Maps to look at the house. The new owners have built an extension over the garage and bulldozed half the yard, for which, even now, I have to stop myself from hating them. Instinctively, I glance at my room, looking for long-gone stickers in the window, the one for Mix ’96 (“Bucks Best Music” – the lack of apostrophe still irritates), and an aquapark we once went to in Spain.
The house looks back at me blankly, as if it would shrug if it could. There is nothing there to be frightened of. We take our ghosts with us.
Open contributions: When have you faced your fear?
