George had never called Marjorie the Sea Witch. Had flatly refused to do so, considered it catering to delusion where I called it a last kindness to a friend sinking into a darkness no one would ever be able to retrieve her from.
“I think she was more susceptible than I am.” Less settled in the common world. “Come on, George. We both know I’m not the flighty type.”
“It’s never been flightiness that opens people up to Grief,” he said. “You know that as well as I do.” He stacked the letters neatly, almost fussy in his movements — a precision I’d always found slightly incongruous when contrasted with the sheer size of him, and the thick strong fingers that made mine look pale and flexible as tentacles.
“It’s never been curiosity either,” I said, but that was belief on my part, not established fact.
Truth was no one knows what prompted a person to turn to Grief. Some said it ran in families. Others that it came down to vocation or brain chemistry. If there was a shared characteristic there might be hope for inoculation, but there was no vaccine, nor any psychological panacea that had proven effective. It was just waiting, until the day Grief hamstrung from behind and another person started to gnaw on themselves for the things they had or hadn’t done, for the loss they couldn’t recreate.
Marjorie’s transformation into the Sea Witch had made Grief a frequent topic of conversation in our house. I still remembered the both of us in bed, the sheet pulled over our heads, lying on our sides and George’s warm breath in my face. “Do you ever think it will happen to us?” I’d asked. “I don’t think I could bear it.”
“You’d only have to bear it if it happened to me,” George replied, prosaic to the last. That was typical of him — his idea of comfort was a considered assessment of possibility. “If Grief came for you, you wouldn’t care. You’d be too deep in it to mind.”
His ability to reason both side of things wouldn’t save him from Grief, but it made me feel better regardless, as if such careful fairness would act as inoculation. Truthfully, I was more concerned about myself. There, George was less comforting.
“I worry how easily you shut things out,” he said. “It doesn’t seem such a short step, sometimes.”
That was a conversational path I hadn’t wanted to go down. It was too reminiscent of our discussions about children.
I’d wondered if it were passivity that brought it on. George had only scoffed. “It’s not passivity you’re thinking of. It’s accepting the inevitable and not liking it. This business with Marjorie is the first time you’ve really had to do that.”
He didn’t say “Nice for some,” but I could see that he was thinking it. At first I thought he was talking about us, the divorce looming ever clearer on the horizon, but pressed warm against each other under the covers we had both wanted to pretend that our marriage was solid. “Tell me,” I said.
“Hurt’s easy enough to live with,” he said. “If there’s an end to it. Break your arm and it hurts, but it heals soon enough and the hurt goes away. Even a small pain, if it never leaves … It wears you down,” he said. “In the end it isn’t the hurt that gets you, it’s the exhaustion.”
Indigenous peoples suffered more from Grief, he said. The experience of watching the world change around them, the loss of land, was an old wound kept open.
“Do you hurt that way?” I asked, because even if I could no longer see myself staying with him he was my best friend still. The thought of his hurt was painful to me. It was also something I failed to understand. I was afraid if I couldn’t understand it, one day I’d use that lack of comprehension to discount experiences that weren’t mine. It wasn’t a part of myself that I liked, that temptation to discard, but when George said I found it easy to limit myself he was telling an unpleasant truth.
“You’re asking because I left.” It wasn’t a question, and George — who knew my small selfish spaces as well as anyone alive — regarded me with an honesty that silently spoke of the uneasy places he knew existed within himself. It was something I’d teased him about before, when the conversations between us were less fraught. So many New Zealanders had come to live in Australia, and many of those, like George, were Indigenous. The Grief had cut swathes through the people of Aotearoa, as it had with many communities, and Māori, like the other Indigenous populations, were over-represented. “Some lands are easier to love at a distance.”
The last two times I’d suggested we travel back to see his family he’d refused. Not for reasons of dislocation or alienation. At least, that was what he said, and George was never one for prevarication or self-deception.
“I’ve lived here twenty years,” he said. “This is home now.”
I didn’t ask if his new home was less exhausting. If he found it so, it had always been to my benefit. And maybe to his.
We learn to protect ourselves in the ugliest of ways.
Perhaps I should have asked, but sorrow is so terrifying.
George was right when he said the letters were an invitation. By themselves, I might have been able to leave well enough alone, but there was that little note scrawled across the top. The sanest of them all. There was nothing of sanity in the Sea Witch at the end. It had drained away, as it did with all the others like her. The sanest of them all could
