After Your Health (Sketches from a song)

I

Middle class emotion is always muted or modulated. The compulsion is to put on a brave face and carry on as usual, so sadness is preserved, internalised - becomes part of the fabric of things, the background hum; the family home is retained, the ritual of Sunday lunch continues but rooms are hollow shrines now the children have moved out and the spouse has passed on, and there are empty places at the dinner table. But it must continue for it’s all about family, even though family and its aspirations (for itself, for the world, for its posterity) are also the greatest cause of suffering. These homes are haunted by the spectre of the successful, healthy family unit; melancholy slips into the silences and slender gaps between the ideal and reality, settling there like sediment. No major disasters, nothing alarming, just a slight falling short of expectation, of what was promised. Quiet defeat, entombed.

II

“Old age isn’t nice” my grandmother tells me on a regular basis. This is not just because of the physical deterioration, it’s also because it seems the longer they are alive, the more people become depositories or vessels for distress, sadness and disappointment. Not just their own, but those of their extended family, of friends of friends, of all the people they have known and outlived. Via my grandmother, I’m just a short step away from the War; from poverty on Clyde Bank; from a sibling who never made it out of childhood; from my grandfather’s glancingly acknowledged mental problems and their reverberations; from his mother, a hard Irish woman “incapable of love”; from another mother (herself) feeling no connection to her youngest son, viewing him as some sort of alien perhaps; from a boy I’m related to in some distant way who suffered from paranoid delusions that he was being monitored by malicious agents and eventually committed suicide, and whose parents subsequently separated (I’ve listened to that sequence two or three times). So many stories that have unfolded, played out to their conclusion. Identity is memory, and so many memories end in… well, where does anything end, if the long view is taken? A typical trigger – “I went swimming today, grandma” – leads to the same recollection every time, of going swimming with a good friend, a good friend who died many years ago. Always: from swimming, to death.