Merry Christmas

It was unfortunate that when my parents got back from holiday, early on Christmas morning, the first thing they saw when they came into the living room was my bloody body lying under the Christmas tree with a blood puddle around my head, like a wreath. I watched them from the corner disembodied and shadowy.

I had been killed, the night before by some burglars. I had been out drinking with my mates Tom, Roofie, Matt, Sweaty and Shane. I had walked home swaying and when I had reached my front door, it was slightly ajar. There was nobody in the living room but even in my state I noted the absence of the television and the computer. I guess I wasn’t very quiet and I didn’t hear that anyone was in the house and I must have taken one of the burglars by surprise because before I could even turn around someone had shot me in the head and my blood was pouring out of me as I went cold. The yellow fairy lights were throwing a ghastly light on me and I had almost a sneer or drunken smile on my now still face.

I woke up clear- headed and opened my eyes. Then I looked down and it was awful.
“No no no,” I screamed. I yelled at myself to wake the f*** up but I might as well have not bothered. My head was covered in blood and disfigured from the bullets. My eyes were closed. I didn’t want to see what happened to your eyes after you were shot in the head. I knelt by my body and I didn’t register that I was kneeling in a pool of blood but was remaining dry.
“I can’t be, I can’t be,” I kept repeating “I’m only 24… I’m not ready. Put me back.”
I looked at myself. I was over six foot and I had dark hair that my girlfriend Gilly had loved to mess with. Before I died. I started crying and begging myself to wake up. It didn’t. And the sneer on its face seemed to be mocking me.

I was interrupted when the door opened and my tanned parents emerged with suitcases and a bag of gifts. I really hoped my Mum had ignored my suggestion about getting me the Six Feet Under box set. My Mum was calling out for me when she saw my body and she dropped everything.
“Finally,” I cried “Someone to help me, you have to help me, I can’t be dead you just need to get me to a hospital now,” But I was struck straightaway by the fact they did not look at me, answer me or respond in any way. I gingerly touched my Mum and again until I was violently shoving her but she did not move or respond in any way. I saw her check my pulse and shake me. My Dad was dialling the police and an ambulance, as she dropped to my side but even then as Mum sobbed and Dad talked rapidly with panic and sobs jarring his speech- they must have known it was no good. There were several pints of my blood on our beautiful, expensive blue carpet and I was cold. I didn’t follow them as the medical staff and coroner bagged my body and the paramedics turned their attention to my parents before the police looked around our house pretty thoroughly, took photographs and then led my parents to the station to find out what had happened. I just kept still in that room listening. I could hear the bells ringing at morning mass, chiming to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, it was the last time I would hear them. There was snow falling gently outside touching everything freezing it so it was still. I was glad my body was gone. I wondered what it would be like to watch yourself autopsied. Maybe that wouldn’t be until tomorrow. Do coroners work on Christmas Day?
Either way I wasn’t going to see it. I looked out the window and I could feel myself drifting away from life and my family. It was harder to think. I wondered if dying was like an overhead projector being switched off, with your soul remaining for a brief moment like a picture, until it disappeared.

I had to get out of the house because I heard my parents coming back. I heard them at the door and I didn’t want to see them grieving over me. Dying had been easy for me. I had about eleven anaesthetics and no time to feel any pain. I was gone so quickly I didn’t feel a thing. But it wasn’t going to be so easy for Mum and Dad and we had been a close family who loved each other fiercely. I was whimpering:
-No. I’m too young. I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want to be finished yet.
I was though and there was nothing I could do about it. I had tried earlier to will myself back in my body but people with bullets in their heads and their blood on the floor didn’t survive. I heard my crying parents come in and I hurriedly went out of the living room into the dining room and stared at the window. It was a large gap and there was glass on the polished wooden floor that was my Mother’s pride and joy. The police would have been in here touching our things and looking for clues.

The phone rang and I could hear it somehow. It was my Aunt Meredith and I heard her ask how they were and how I was. My Dad replied that things were not too good, an understatement. I heard her crying then. I was her favourite nephew because I was the oldest and she had looked after me a lot when I was a baby. I heard her tell him he didn’t have to go through this alone. Wasn’t that the point of death though? She told him everything would be okay. Lies. Silence. She asked about the funeral and I was falling back in time, remembering one of the worst days I’d ever had when I was 17 and my Grandma had died. We were close and she’d helped to raise me.

It was a beautiful June day with the blue sky clear and cloudless. I was in my room getting dressed as slowly as a four year old who had only recently acquired the skill. I was avoiding my family downstairs and I could hardly stand to be inside. I found myself gripping the windowsill while everything went black and I started wheezing. I got more and more panicked and I vomited out of the window until my head cleared. In the other room my Mum was crying horribly and trying to stifle her sobs. My clothes were unfamiliar and uncomfortable and I was sweating profusely. I stayed curled up in the corner until I had to get in the car.

Outside the church I was fine. My grief felt frozen. It had thawed briefly at random moments over dinner, in the shower or on the way to the corner shop; short unmanly bursts of tears and sobs.

Inside the church was much, much worse. It was like I was having surgery and the anaesthetic was administered wrong so I kept briefly feeling the slits all over my skin, tugging inside my chest and intense pain. Any time the service got personal I had to struggle to stay quiet. My self-control was terribly precarious. I felt completely unstable ready to weep or vomit or s*** myself right there in the chapel, next to my weeping mother in Debenhams black and my pale father unfamiliar in his suit. I hardly dared look at them. The sermon was unbearable. My Mum was sobbing so loudly my Uncle had to raise his voice, itself shaky and sometimes incoherent. But having managed to keep my dignity in front of what were mostly strangers- when we got up to file out of church behind the tiny coffin I completely lost it. Tears were pouring down my face and I was sobbing. My Aunt caught my hand and tried to quieten me. It had just hit me she really wasn’t coming back.

The buffet next door passed in a haze of rage and nausea. My Granddad and Aunts were swarmed around by people insincerely claiming to know what they were going through which was bad enough but worst were the old people cluttering the hall like worthless trash, eating, laughing and socialising. I crumpled my plate into a ball without realising but I had no food on it. No one who cared was stuffing their faces and treating this like some f***ing social occasion. None of the family was eating. My parents and I sat in the corner ignored except by my Dad’s parents. Finally we went to the graveyard but my tears were spent, I was mostly relieved the ordeal was nearly over and I looked out into the distance: far away, as the priest told us we were dust and ash and dirt forever.

Then I was back now in the house and my parents were quiet as the grave. Although as it turns out…I try telling my parents I love them and that I am sorry but they can’t hear me.

The urge to escape the house has left me though. I decide to go to my room and I drift towards the stairs. My room is the same. I must have disturbed the burglars before they could look in here or surely they would have taken the new stereo and my TV/ DVD player. My wallpaper is still a deep blue like flowers or the sky in the Mediterranean on those clear sunny days and then suddenly I am crying because it has only just sunk in that I won’t be doing anything anymore. You might think I would have grasped this when they took my body in a black bag like so much trash. I wonder if they are going to cremate me or bury me. Neither option is appealing. I have to be burnt up like coal or interred with the dirt and the worms until my flesh and bones are eaten away? I would like it if they put me on a chair and sat me in the sunshine but people have to hide the dead. Dead people are something we bury so we can move on. It would be too horrific to preserve and keep them like dolls or deserted shells, empty houses that used to be home to people you loved.

What you have to understand is I was only 24.

I had plans. I thought I was going to make something of myself. My Dad always said so
- Your Mum and I have been comfortable with our jobs but you’re a smart lad with a good brain and a bright future. You’ll put this family on the map.
I was just getting used to being an adult. I’d finished university and I was going to quit my job when I had saved up and start my own business. That is why I spent four years studying hard. That looks like a waste of time and money now. Then there was Gilly. I won’t be there when they tell her because I won’t be anywhere in a few hours. But she was the first and only girl I ever really loved. My heart would pound when I was going to see her after a long time.

Then for a second I am with her and she’s in her room, inconsolable. Her Mum is wearing a sombre expression and a more sombre grey dress. Gilly is talking to her. I can’t hear all of it because she is crying too hard but she says it can’t be true and that she thought we were going to get married.

Then I’m back in my room looking at the drawer. I was going to propose on January 3rd when Gilly turns 23. I wonder if she will ever find that out. The ring is well concealed. I threw the box away because I was going to buy another box to put it in. The ring is a beauty. It has sapphires, real ones and diamonds (less real and more simulated). I saved for a long time to buy it when I first knew she was the woman I wanted to marry. I even said it out loud. She was singing in a club with her band and I said it right then. It was too loud for anyone to hear. It was so smoky and crowded but she was singing a song she had written about us and her eyes never moved from mine. She wasn’t sentimental. I think the lyrics went something like You share my joys/ We share our pains/You make me watch you lose at football again/ I ask you to help me clean up in vain/ Your taste in music is a Greek tragedy/ And I love you, I love you. Okay so it was hardly Nirvana but I liked it. And now we won’t get married. She’ll cry and move on and marry someone else and maybe have children. I feel like a main road that has abruptly turned into a cul- de sac. What I want is to wake up and find this is a nightmare. There is a lot I never did. I never travelled much besides the package holidays we took every two years or so, or had children, or got married. And now I never will. But for now my self- pity has receded and I look out of my own window onto the garden.

Some of my happiest times were spent there with my cousins. When I was younger Mum and Dad had no money to spare on extravagant toys. I had a slide though that was given to me by one of Mum’s sisters who had teenagers when I was still a boy. It was more than a slide though. It was a ship and the lawn was the Pacific Ocean. It was a bridge with an evil monster under it. It was a castle. It was a piece of athletic equipment. I would try and jump over it and use it to swing on like a gymnast with a pommel horse. The best times though were when my cousins would come and play and we’d play games of cricket, football or tag that went on for hours.

I stuck my hand out of the window and I had the strangest feeling that if I went outside I was finished right away. The air made me feel like I was coming apart and my thoughts went quiet. I pulled it back but I felt much the worse. I looked at the photos on my desk and saw myself on holiday in Majorca with Gilly, with my parents last Christmas and a picture of the lads taken when we were on a stag night in Dublin. Then I went downstairs. There was vomit on the living room floor. My parents were gone and I was alone in the house. The patio door that led to the garden was open and the day must have been cold, though I could not feel it.

I was not totally ready to walk outside and be finished, since I clearly wasn’t now. Maybe death was reversible after all. I deny I am in Denial. Maybe and more likely death was a process like a birth- that did not happen instantaneously but had stages. Maybe I was in the labour stages of death.

Dying was certainly making me more philosophical than I had ever been. I suddenly saw my life like an account book laid out in stages of school, university, work, and girlfriends. I didn’t think too far ahead. I feel queasy though this is impossible, wondering if they balance and if they have to. Maybe this is purgatory. I have to watch my family, friends and lover suffer the loss of me though I am still in some way here. I wonder if there is a Hell. This is a far less comfortable thought when you are dead, by the way. Possibly I am close to hell and unaware of it but no precipice opens to swallow and there are no three-headed dogs pulling chariots materialising in my living room. I wonder if I’m there.

If there were hell would I be there? Maybe I am if Hell is merely the absence of God. There is no paradise that I can see. But if Hell is a place somewhere very south of here, subterranean I don’t think I’d merit it. I didn’t break any of the major Ten Commandments and I mostly loved my neighbour. Sure I wasn’t perfect but in my heart I know I never enjoyed hurting others and I tried to be good. Maybe I’d be better if I’d had more time with which to be better in.

I started thinking about Christmas and whether there had been a virgin birth and the miracle of God’s son being born onto earth. I wondered if it mattered if there hadn’t been. The story or retelling had moved billions of people to lead their lives in a certain way. Good in that Christ inspires people to try and lead lives of love and bad that the same people had killed forcing others to believe in loving others and worship as they did. When I was alive I had wondered if religion was worth the trouble it caused and hadn’t reached an answer. Standing here post- life I still didn’t know.

Either way Jesus’ birthday was my death day and I shuddered thinking of the ruined Christmases to come for my family. I wondered if they would ever enjoy it again. I hoped so. I knew they must feel guilty about the fact if they had not been on holiday, I would not have been alone, we might not have been robbed and they would have been here, so I wouldn’t have taken the burglars by surprise. Or if they had tried harder to get me to come with them on holiday, I would have been alive now as well. I wondered if I blamed them myself and then realised I didn’t thankfully. I hope. I wished my death were as easy for them. They had to paper over the cracks in our family if they wanted to go on. Not for the first time I wished I had brothers and sisters. Other children would have provided comfort.

Human life is too easily taken. A tiny piece of metal had ruined us. Before my life had still been an accounts book but one that was blank and ready to be written on, until I was maybe seventy or even older, with a marriage, children and a successful career. I had seen my life as a right and it was a right taken by those thieves along with copious amounts of our possessions. Too bad the house insurance could not get me back so easily. I was wrong though; life wasn’t a right really but a gift to be treasured, no matter how little we have and whatever the quality. So I said thank you. Outside the Snow covered the ground like skin but the sun was there bringing light. I looked around me for the last time. Then I stepped outside into the shadows.