By Lucy Harbron

Grandad was a logical man. An engineer on the London Underground, he told me time and time again that he built the elevator at Hampstead station. By his old age, he meticulously built his Lego projects, but the extreme kind of Lego, making cranes with working hoists or cars he could drive from an iPad. His retirement passed with a parade of projects and when he got ill, his mind stayed sharp.

One of the last times I saw him, my mum leaned over his hospice bed and asked him a question about his accounts. He spat out a number in seconds, the quickest response we’d had in days. And there was a sadness to that. We watched as his body failed him far faster than his brain. He stayed so lucid; terrifyingly, upsettingly so. Once he’d finished telling whatever story he chose to recount that day, remembering it in intricate detail, he’d lie back and sigh as a cough bubbled up from the tumour in his throat and silenced him. The interruption made him quiet. He didn’t want to fight through it anymore. He wanted to tell his tale fully with intonation and a chesty laugh, or not at all. His brain gripped to life without him asking it to, coming further apart from the body that trapped it, and none of us knew how to handle that.

He asked the big questions at the end, seeking instructions for an afterlife. Straight-faced, sat up in bed with the same tone of voice that used to scare me as a child with its sharp authority and booming wisdom, he would put it so plainly: “How do I die?” “What is death like?” “How will I know when it’s about to happen?” “How do I let it happen?”

No one knew what to say. Shocked to silence, blindly feeling around for comfort to give, wanting to say something like “it will be peaceful” or “it will be beautiful”; we couldn’t.

This was month six on end-of-life care, when we were told he’d be for a few weeks if we were lucky. He was in arrears and, as Mum said, he seemed sick of it – somewhat eager for whatever might be next but then, all at once, outwardly terrified. She said that’s probably what comes of being such a rational person. How does a man like that let himself settle into stories? All the maybes that come along with huge religious questions, how do you let yourself free fall into the possibility of something as seemingly impossible as heaven? You always assume the brain is first to go, making it easier to slip into it; seeing light as something divine rather than just your eyes failing.

The nurses assured us that this was common. They smiled small smiles and clutched their clipboards to their chests. I wondered what they believed, looking out for small crosses on necklaces or clues for faith because if you can keep hold of God in a place like this, encountering death every day, maybe that was some kind of proof. Surely you’d see something some time if you watched souls slip from skin every day; some kind of heavenly glint in a closing eye or some rough battle where someone tried desperately to grip to life, fingers clawing onto the ledge as they saw nothing but black.

Maybe that’s what my Grandad was doing and the nurses saw him dangling off the edge of life. They said when the time was coming, they’d prescribe an anti-anxiety medication but it’s best not to do it too soon as it can make them confused. That’s stayed with me. Sedating the atheist until they soften into God. I’m still wondering what signs they knew to look for, how they knew when to deploy the parachute to comfort the fall. Me and Mum talked about that in the car, but neither one of us wanted to get graphic. One day she said, with a surprising strength in her voice, “I hope euthanasia is legal before I end up like this”, and I pushed any possible image of her own inevitable death from my mind.

On the drive home from Grandad’s ward room, God loomed over like a face on a missing poster, some person I think we all wished we could find or at least a big part of me did, or does. Looking over at my Mum from the passenger seat and I saw it was a family-wide struggle.

Barely able to get to the first roundabout before she got epistemic, she turned into a daughter in front of me, begging for understanding in the why-phase, pondering God on the housing estate. Within a few seconds, she was onto ontology; a futile hunt for answers: what is there after this? Or what is there to believe in the vastness of that question? Where to even begin?

My Aunty Kay, my mum’s sister, had believed in the true sense of the word. Christian with a big C, a noun, a vital trait in her vibrant life. If Grandad was a logical man, my Aunty was a romantic: all dreams and dare as she gathered up degrees and sporting medals after Lupus threatened to slim her life down to just survival. She exists in my mind as the poster child for God’s love. Church on Sunday, sunny disposition, finding a community and eventually ascending to the afterlife, leaving behind packed pews at her celebration of life where everyone was instructed to wear bright colours – still cheerful in death. God gave her answers as she found reasoning for her chronic illness in a divine plan. To her, design was all-purposeful and loving. Everything was packed with compassion and I remember going to visit her in her home littered with hospital equipment and being baffled, even at eight, by how she kept it up. Already envious as a child who didn’t believe, that I didn’t have something in my life to make me as optimistic as her. I thought religion made her bright. I reach back in my memory to find her there with a glow about her like a halo.

“God gives his hardest battles to his toughest soldiers”, she had said from her sick bed. “God doesn’t give you what you can’t handle.” But back at my family home, in the car with my mother losing a father and my Grandad losing a life – none of us could handle it and didn’t know how to even begin believing that death, let alone loss, was manageable even with some higher force.

Hours after my Aunty passed, my family wrote our own gospel. Returning home to two children and having to summon the courage to tell them her sister had died, I imagine my Mum gulping her grief down and letting the story soothe her too for a brief moment. I’ve heard it a hundred times now, always told the same. As they left the hospital, two rainbows cut through the sky like tracks. It was Aunty in her wheel chair, going up to “God”. Nana dares use that word when she tells it. The rest of it use it interchangeably with “heaven”, imagining a comforting setting for a comforting story; even the most atheistic need to go myth-making from time to time. We want a crutch to lean on without the work of believing, or practicing, or pleasing Him and rejecting things to do so. It’s the nice bits of religion we all secretly want, the concluding points of “this is all part of a plan” or “someone is looking out for me”, not the process. I want the reassurance, to say “God won’t give me more than I can handle” and genuinely believe it, feel it like a good, deep exhale, dropping all the weight into His hands.

Amongst his logic, my Grandad was also funny and deeply cynical. Death was talked about candidly and always with humour. “That one will see us out” he would say anytime they bought something new, like a new toaster or the latest phone. When we were younger and over for the day during the summer holidays, they’d take me and my sister out for walks down the hill past the graveyard, telling us we were “checking the graves are still reserved.” I always thought it would make it easier when the moment came. I never thought my Grandad was immortal because his own mortality was so often the punchline, giggling about death at the dinner table.

But grief is different. It’s silent and tricky, spoken in roundabout ways as we made a hushed language of the image of the rainbow.

It was a sign to look for and we often found it. When moving houses or running marathons, rainbows appeared like a wave hello or a round of applause. Sometimes the moments were so perfect, shining colour over weddings or birthday celebrations, that for a moment we could’ve all got on board with the belief that there was some bustling heaven. Some place up there where you could go to an office and register yourself to take over the elements, book in the dates and purchase a sign from above to beam down on those you left behind. I’d send my mum photos of the colours outside my windows with no other message. We didn’t need to say anything else. It didn’t need to come along with some agnostic debate. It was just a way to say “I remember her, don’t worry”.

“I’m waiting for Kay to come”, Grandad said one day, no colourful light coming through his window. I had to leave the room, choked out by the air that suddenly felt so heavy with waiting. Anticipating some holy apparition, the divine was deserting him. I hated the thought of him sat there awaiting a grand something more than I hated the thought that maybe it would never come, that there was nothing to come after it all.

Looking at my Mum in the car after, neither of us brought it up, hitting too close to the heart for philosophy on the flyover home. Staring at the side of her stoic face, I wondered if she had ever tried to pick up the habit of praying.

I knew things were getting bad when Nana went to church. About a month before the end, she suddenly turned religion from a laminated poem on her wall loosely mentioning a character called God, into a practice, a place to go and beg. I don’t often let myself think about how she must have really felt. The most I saw was a voice crack at the wake, a shaking hand raising a glass to her husband. Grandad’s final wishes were simply that she got her glasses tightened, wanting to solve a minor annoyance for her as a last act of chivalry in a life where sixty years had been dedicated to one another. It was the truest love I’d ever seen, the type that makes nurses people ask “what is the secret to a long marriage?” as my Nana sat cheerfully by his bedside for the full six months, never letting the all-consuming, devastating fear she must have felt slip up to the surface.

They want their ashes to be mixed when she catches up. There’s now a picture of him by her single bed and the home they shared for 50 years is no longer theirs.  I can’t think any more of it, except hoping, or wishing, there is a room somewhere in some light on some cloud that they might meet in again. They’d have younger bodies to dance, they’d find their daughter – it must be nice to see death as a turn to take, the certificate a ticket to find whoever’s gone before up there somewhere.

But it’s the logistics that make it hard. Do you open your eyes again? Does cremation change things? Are you actually judged on your life before? Facing up to a big doorman that remembers that night in 2019? How many times do you have to pray to get a lifetime wiped from the record? Or could my Nana do it for him? Going to church to ensure entry for the man she loves first and then setting about working on her own.

When Mum said Nana was going to church, her voice was unemotional and I couldn’t find any opinion in it. When I was 12 and wanted to go to church, she was horrified. It’s funny to think that my grandest rebellion was God – asking to be driven to an Americanised church on the industrial estate to sing the songs. They were so catchy.

Over the weeks, I built the courage to sometimes put my hands in the air, maybe one on my heart, teasing euphoria and twisting the feeling into epiphany. God knows the two are close. I’d feel my blood rush down like sand in a timer, colourful blobs of lava, like a bubble in a spirit level. Everything raced and fizzed. I’d spread my fingers to let more surface area feel this special air. I’d close my eyes and sway, raising my hands like I knew the right answer and desperately wanted to be chosen. I wanted to know the words by heart and get so settled into it I could harmonise like the other girls. I wanted their smoothed hair, their simple 2009 style that made girls from the North East England dress like Portland hipsters, all modest and bright with their radiant joy, their happy family – I wanted their ability to look so natural when they spontaneously reached up to God. I thought he’d definitely hold their hand.

How lonely does a teenager have to be to go looking for God?

I don’t even think it was Him. I wasn’t looking for religion, I was looking for the youth club by the factory with a loose association. I played with his feelings for attention, so the leaders would talk to me and make me look preoccupied. When they invited me to level up from the Friday night to the Sunday service, it felt exclusive. I was a chosen one and the feeling of being special was so sacred to me, it felt God-like when realised.

Just about growing too old for being an attention seeker, I almost got baptised. I wanted my new friends to watch me dunk into the pool.

I wanted her to watch me dunk into the pool, I’d have asked her to do it. With a Taylor Swift tour T-shirt, two parents she loved, an acoustic guitar and a Tumblr full of positive quotes in perfect handwriting; she was the coolest of them all. I wanted to be her friend and would believe my way into it happening. When she got baptised, I drew her a sign and meticulously coloured in the bubble font like a fan preparing for a concert. I raised my hands as high as I could and coaxed some tears from my eyes for such a special, moving occasion. When she emerged new, I hugged her with my hand stroking her wet slick t-shirt. I wanted to be wet too. I wanted to be closer to something like that, to someone like that.

That’s where mum put her foot down. I think she thought the church was grooming me with the gift of a purple youth bible and the invites to BBQs at the older teenagers’ houses. She would never let me go and I hated her for holding me back when I wanted, desperately, to be sucked in deep.

I wanted to drown in it, maybe I wanted a family that would drown in it too, like the ones I saw at Church, helping each other find the wafer-thin page of their well-worn scriptures. Or maybe I just wanted all the decisions about who I was or what I might be to be taken out of my hands and just be Godly. A disciple, a member of this place where you’d find me on Sunday singing soft-rock hymns and eating bulk-bought cakes. I wanted to believe someone had a plan and put me here, with one hand on her top and the other in the air. If I waited there long enough like that, I wanted to believe something would grab it and pull me up, hand me some kind of permission to live this life and not concern any of the others I could have. I wanted singularity, manageable battles, exactly what I was meant to have and nothing more than.

Then Mum said no to the baptism and I don’t even remember what prompted me to stop going to Church anymore. I can’t tell now if I ever believed in any of it. I don’t know if I felt anything in my chest, or if that was just the joy of a good song racing into teenage loneliness, echoing round the hollow desire for a friend. It was the first lesson in feeling set to a good chorus, teaching me that rapture and euphoria and fun and envy existed and could exist all meshed together. Either way, I turned 13, turned water to blood, felt the locusts swarm, sat through the days of darkness and turned 18 – so far slipped from the grip that never quite caught my raised hand.

But in the car on the way home, looking to each other for comforting philosophy or impossible answers, I wonder if Mum ever wished she’d come with me. Maybe we both wish we’d been saved. Pushed under water again and again, bobbing for understanding in a pool of God, fishing for nice things to say to Grandad. But we were bone dry, looking for helpful directions to the light, or at least enough belief to see something nicer than the fluorescence of the ward or the shadows from the dusty window where his final Lego project sat, keeping watch for rainbows.

BIO

Lucy Harbron is a writer born and raised in the North East of England and now residing in London. While working as a music journalist for Far Out magazine, her writing has also appeared in VICE, i-D, the Evening Standard, Glamour and more. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in several zines including South Bank Poetry’s anthologies, Sticky Fingers Publishers’ FDBN pamphlets and being listed as one of the top stories of the year for 2021 on Ellipsis Zine for The Ick. She self-released her debut poetry collection, Chrysalism, in 2017 and is currently working on her debut novel.

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