Too Near the Dead by Helen Grant

Author:Helen Grant [Grant, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fledgling Press
Published: 2021-06-30T22:00:00+00:00

Of course, I didn’t go back to the university that evening, nor the next day. I stayed until the funeral, which was a functional affair at a local crematorium. There were too few of us, in a large room decorated in pale cream and pine wood, as though having light colours and a bland atmosphere would deny the grim reality and somehow make the dear departed less dead. The eulogy was given by the headmaster of Stephen’s old school, who was also a friend of my father’s. It was delivered carefully but was strangely dispassionate, as though he had plundered Stephen’s CV for the content. None of the family wept. My parents were as grim and silent as statues, and I had cried so much in the previous days, in the solitude of my old bedroom, that I felt hollowed out. The only person who sobbed aloud was Stephen’s godmother, and when she did so, I sensed my mother’s head turning like a pitiless searchlight of disapproval. I don’t remember much of the wake. I stayed that night at my parents’, and the next morning I went back to university.

Travelling back on the train did not make me feel any better. I did not feel as though I was escaping from the oppressive environment of my parents’ house to a welcome sanctuary; I felt like a dumb beast transported from one pen to another, the shadow of the killing bolt always hanging over it. I wondered if that was how Stephen had felt: corralled. Trapped.

His death was not intentional. That was the conclusion that was meant to make the family feel better, as though we were still living in the days when suicides were buried at a crossroads or on the north side of the churchyard and a death not being suicide was somehow supposed to be a good thing. It didn’t help me at all. My brother was gone – out of my life, out of his own life.

I’d heard all the details now. Stephen had been working for his Finals – working flat out nearly every hour he was awake. His marks at university had always been good – excellent, even – but still he kept pushing himself, harder and harder, as though a moment with his attention elsewhere would lead to certain disaster in the exam hall. His friends barely saw him outside the classroom or the library. At some point, applying himself for long hours was not enough. Perhaps he became too exhausted to concentrate. He began to self-medicate, using a prescription drug with a stimulating effect. Where he got it from was a question yet to be answered. Eventually he took too much of it, or had an adverse reaction to it. He died there in his student room, with his books piled up around him, probably on the Friday afternoon or early evening. The cleaner had knocked and emptied his bin for him that morning, and Stephen had seemed tired and groggy but most certainly alive.

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