Amends

There aren’t many things in life that are worse than getting old. Getting old alone might be one of them. It’s something I think about a lot now that I’m 85. Today is my birthday - June 15th, 2025. For me, it was the same as every other day. Another day alone, in the house I’ve lived in now for almost 50 years. Another night of solitude, of having the shadows on the walls as my only company, of listening to the reluctant silence of this house. Just another night.

Let me back up a bit. I haven’t always been alone. My wife Betty died seven years ago - the big C. Cancer, of the bone variety. It wasn’t pretty, but death never is. We had a long, complicated marriage, although saying any long marriage is complicated seems the height of redundancy. And there is Simon. Our only child. He’s in his fifties now and his kids are all grown up.

You might be wondering: why the complaining? Seems like you’ve lived a good life. Sure, death sucks, but you’ve still got your son and grandchildren, right? Wrong. It’s hard to put my finger on when it happened; our estrangement was like the slow erosion of a waterfront by waves, each surging breaker another millimeter of distance, each year the widening of an ever-deepening fissure.

It wouldn’t make sense to try and do the forensics, anyway. It’s a part of life - he grows up, gets his own family and wants a lot less to do with his folks than he did when he was a kid. Seems natural enough. It’s not like we never talk. I still get a Christmas card and so maybe I don’t get the invite to his in-laws place in Colorado - they just don’t have the space and I just don’t want to travel. So maybe I could have reached out more. And maybe I wasn’t present all the time when he was younger. And maybe I didn’t show an interest in what his kids were up to when they were the age when it all seemed to matter so much. Who knows? Who can tell?

I sure as hell can’t. That brings me back to my birthday. I’m sitting in my chair - it’s a recliner - and sipping a Balvenie 15. No rocks, I’m not a heathen. It’s a good bottle and I only get it out on special occasions. But it somehow never tastes as good alone, although I guess I don’t have many experiences these days to compare to my current situation. I put the glass down and stand up. This takes time, I’m sure you can picture it, and there is wincing and swearing. These meat suits sure aren’t meant to last long, are they? I’m on my feet and moving through the hallway. I’ve kept the paintings and photos on the wall the same as when Betty was alive - making the house a home was always her thing and she was damn good at it. I look at a family portrait done around the time that Simon was 12. There’s me, towering above the two of them, furry beard and dark eyes. Simon with his big smile, his youth and his hope and Betty with her kind eyes.

That’s when it happens. After I look at the photo, I see something - or someone - in the house with me. It is Betty and Simon and they are sitting at the foot of the stairs. He is young, maybe 5 or so, and she is helping him tie his shoes. They aren’t there, like flesh and bones, but in a hazy sort of charcoal outline superimposed onto the actual world.

I blink. Blink again. Still there. Immediately, for I am a man of reason, if not much else, my mind comes up with three rationalisations:

The scotch had somehow gone bad and I was hallucinating.

This was A Christmas Carol situation and ghosts actually are real.

These memories were stored in the house itself, in its bones, and the house was sick of being so empty. Houses aren’t meant to be empty, to be quiet, and it couldn’t take it anymore. This one is a bit farfetched, but once you’re on the crazy train, you might as well make all the stops.

These rationalisations materialise and disperse in my mind like the puff of a dandelion in the wind. I am struck by their presence, so I stand and watch as she gently guides his hands to make the lace into bunny ears and cross them, pulling it tight. There is frustration in his eyes and she soothes him, pats him on the back when he messes it all up and smiles when he finally gets it right. He hugs her and it’s like a Hallmark movie. I think, then, about myself. Where am I in this memory? Probably at work. I worked a lot, but so what? I was a highly esteemed professor of Modernist Literature and I damn sure brought home the bacon. And just like that, they are gone. Wisps of smoke after a candle has been blown out. And I’m alone again.

I make my way to the kitchen and let my mind wander. Maybe I’m dreaming, I think. Part of what I studied and taught was the Freudian interpretation of so many great writers, so I know a thing or two about dreams. But this feels too lucid for a dream. I pinch myself - cliche, I know - and feel the burst of pain immediately. As I turn around, there they are again. This time, they are sitting at the kitchen table with pages of homework and textbooks open around them. They are still that thin grey of charcoal-memory, wispy but just opaque enough to be seen.

They speak in their dream-figment language but I can’t hear them - I wave my arms around and they can’t see me. Simon stares at the textbook in front of him and I can see his eyes narrow and his lip lift at the side, like it always used to when he was concentrating. Betty points at something in the textbook and says something - Simon thinks and then the lightbulb goes on and he writes something down.

Again, I wonder about where I was during this memory. Sure, it was a fairly common occurrence to see the two of them at the kitchen table, and I can remember cooking dinner or being in my study and coming out to get a drink and seeing them there. Surely I stopped once in a while to help him, right? Surely.

Having been struck by an idea, I make my way upstairs. This takes some time, but I get there eventually and go into the bedroom. It doesn’t take long to happen - swirling remnants of grey form themselves, and for the first time, I see myself. We are sleeping. I sense a presence and I look near the door. It opens slowly and I see a still-young Simon, eight or nine maybe, and he tiptoes his way into the bedroom. He skirts around my side of the bed and goes straight to his mother. Taps her on the shoulder gently and she sits up to console him. There is real fear in his eyes (even through the smoke of years and the ashes of remembrance, I can see it) and she holds him close. She puts a finger to her lips and looks at me - the implication is that we don’t want to wake up your father. They both tiptoe out of the bedroom and close the door and I am left alone. Again.

I sit on the bed and feel the weight of these memories come to life. Whether or not they are real, I am dreaming, drunk or having a death-related sensory experience, matters very little. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out, to understand why I’m alone. Hell, Betty could barely stand me, even before she got sick, but I knew she was too tired to do anything about it. It’s not like I was a monster to them. I didn't raise my hand or get drunk all the time, though that seems a pretty low bar to set for a successful husband and father. No, these… visions… show me something else: try as I might to rationalise my past, the truth is that I wasn’t really there. I was just a placeholder, a stand-in, an extra on this movie set where the people there really needed me, really wanted me to show up and actually care. To actually be there.

Sure, I went to the basketball games and cheered… most of the time. And I asked him about his life and girls and homework… most of the time. But when I really think back, I remember a lot of work. Time in my study poring over books, reading articles and writing. Always writing and thinking of the next thesis, the next challenge, the next idea. Time at the university teaching, marking, discussing, challenging. Conferences, trips to Europe that I told them not to come on because it would just be a distraction for me and what I was doing was important, this research mattered and you can’t say that it didn’t just because it isn’t something flashy or interesting like astrophysics or engineering, because literature mattered - it was how we could truly understand the world around us.

And so maybe when I was home, they didn’t get the best version of me. There. I said it.

I think there would be some sort of release or catharsis by acknowledging this, but there isn’t. There is only a heavy feeling in my chest like putting on a lead apron.

‘Failure.’

It comes to me quickly and escapes my lips like the last words of a soldier who has just realised they stepped on a land mine. The certainty of it is undeniable. That my loneliness, my solitude, my isolation is not actually the product of aging and loss, but is my punishment. The bedroom now feels too dark, the walls too close, the air too thick, so I stand and make my way back downstairs.

I’m a few steps down the stairs when a voice somewhere deep inside, maybe even the voice of the house, speaks to me:

‘No one would even know if you were gone.’

I stop and look behind me, thinking that this is another one of those visions or maybe even the next phase, my Ghost of Birthdays Present. But it’s not. I shake my head and keep walking.

‘How many days would it be before anyone discovered you? Or would it be months? Would it have to be the mailman who ended up smelling you before anyone actually came looking?’

I stop again, not bothering to look around. The voice is the truth, and wherever it comes from, it brings an icy chill through my body. True despair is not just realising you are alone - it is realising that you don’t matter to anyone. What good are all of the books and studies and lectures if the people that matter most to me don’t even care about me? I think back to Betty’s last days, and how her eyes looked through the haze of morphine, and how when I told her how much I loved her, she said it back to me but her eyes told the truth. I had chalked it up to the drugs but now I know the truth. That she didn’t love me by the end. And it would be the same if someone told Simon that I’d gone. That he would say all of the things he was supposed to say, do all of the things he was supposed to do, but what would his eyes say?

*

I wish I could tell you that I was about to have my Scrooge-on-Christmas-morning moment - that I was about to have my last thirty minutes of It’s a Wonderful Life return to what matters most and run (or walk very slowly) out of the house and hop on a plane to see my son. But it just didn’t happen that way.

Instead, I had come to the realisation that my life just wasn’t worth living. I had become a drain on the system, a fault in the machine of life, someone who didn’t need to be here anymore. There was a moment when I thought about calling Simon, forgetting about everything that had just happened and making sure that from this point forward, I was the best father and grandfather I could be. But I was just too tired. Too far gone. That kind of stuff only happens in the movies.

In real life, it was just me in my empty house, the sounds all drained from it, the echoes and creaks and groans of life leeched from its bones, left to rot and decay until I died and it was left to Simon and he would sell it and some other family would move in and the house would be happy again, there would be squeals and laughter and conversation and happiness would rise up like the steam from a kettle and fill the house once again.

So I decided that I should let that happen. I’d had a hip replacement a few years back and had had to get some sleeping pills. Getting to sleep was a bitch of a job, but those little pills were a miracle and I still had some left.

I went back up the stairs to the bathroom and grabbed the bottle. Back down the stairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water. The water came out of the tap and I ran my fingers under it then filled a glass. Right as I was about to pour them into my hand, pop them in my mouth, take a swig of water and sit in my recliner, I thought about a note. It was cliche as all hell, but cliches exist because at some point, they made sense. I thought I should write something. I went to the study and grabbed a notepad and a pen. Everything came out then, and I hoped that if he read it, he would accept my apologies. My attempt to make amends. On a whim, I decided to write one to Betty as well. Why not?

I picked up the papers and brought them back into the kitchen. I took a deep breath and was about to open my mouth when I stopped. It was a feeling like when someone was looking at you but your back was turned, and you somehow sensed their eyes on you. I waited for it to pass and it did. With the pills in hand, I opened my mouth and - someone knocked at the door. I swore under my breath and felt the weight of the moment really hit me. I didn’t want anyone around for this.

So I figured I would wait for them to leave and put the pills back down. There was another knock. Heavier this time. I even heard some muffled words. I couldn’t make them out, though I thought they sounded like something short. Monosyllabic. But there was no way. More knocking. Heavier this time, a worried knock.

‘For God’s sake’, I muttered. I hid the pills under the sink, then went to the door. I recognised the outline through the frosted glass but still my mind would not accept it. It was all too convenient, too scripted, too serendipitous. But my brain couldn’t reason away what was right in front of me as I opened the door. Simon. My son.

‘Hey, dad,’ he said with a tired, apprehensive smile. He was carrying a suitcase.

‘Simon!’ The surprise in my voice must have been evident.

‘Mind if I come in? It’s a little cold out here.’

‘Sure, sure, of course. Come in.’

He did and I met him in the kitchen.

‘So you want something to-’

‘Look, I’m sorry to barge in on you like this. But it’s your birthday. And I didn’t want you to be alone. I know things haven’t been great with us and I just wanted to-’

I went to him and put my arms around his shoulders. Soon, my arms embraced him and I hugged him close and hard, feeling the life in him, the vitality, the love that resided in him that flourished somehow, no thanks to me, but that still grew and flourished like a tree’s branches that follow the sun.

‘I know. And believe me, I have more to be sorry for than you do.’

I took a step back and wiped my eyes. He did too.

‘Let me fix you something to eat. You must be hungry after the flight.’

His eyes found mine: ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s your birthday! Let’s order a pizza.’

‘Sure,’ I said with a smile. He reached into his pocket for his phone and saw the paper on the table.

‘What’s all that? Doing some writing?’ A familiar, practiced look came into his eyes. It was a look that said he was prepared to hear about something that was more important than he was.

‘Just some stuff I was working on. But it’s not important now that you’re here.’ I picked the papers up and crumpled them into a ball, stuffing them far enough in the wastebin that they wouldn’t be seen by accident.

‘So, tell me, how’s it going? Tell me everything.’

I looked at him then and it felt like I was seeing him for the first time, really seeing him, and it felt good, like watching a sunrise for the first time or holding a baby for the first time.

I was there, with him, and finally ready to actually be there. It has taken me long enough, but I was finally ready.