Grief and Ghosts Theme Analysis

There he saw the little boy who had arrived at Christmas with his mother, to the Turret Flat, come running into view. He had some sort of unusual stick in his hand. A black cane, with a silver knob—like Fred Astaire might use for dancing. He was flailing it about in the wind. The square of hedges around the sheltered spot that Mr Tomelty had created, or an earlier owner, was bending and shuddering, like a circle of powerful horses. Threshing the bitter grain of life. The little boy was soundless because the window was closed, but Tom adjudged he must be singing. The child was now twirling himself all about, as if the cane had not been enough of a thing to be twirling, in his short trousers, happy in the wind, the cold, oblivious.

[Neutrinos] passed through [Tom’s] vulnerable soul, itself an item so large it was not there either, at least to a neutrino. But did it speak of the unimportance of Tom Kettle that he was not really there to a neutrino? Maybe God saw him? What of the butterflies, what of the mother spider, what of the mites, striving for life and generations in the old carpet? True, true, in human affairs everything is hastiness and farewell. But there was a sort of proof in this that Tom Kettle was loved, even though he could not see it, as he passed through the world. He had no idea how much June had loved him, nor Winnie, nor Joe. Maybe his sleeping self knew more, intuitive, less complicated by waking thought.

He cradled the memory of his wife as if she were still a living being. As if no one had been crushed, no one had been hurried from the halls of life, and the power of his love could effect that, could hold her buoyant and eternal in the embrace of an ordinary day. The sunlight struck its million pins into the pollocky sea, the whole expanse sparked, and sparkled, as if on the very verge of a true conflagration. Alone, alone, he smiled and smiled. He closed his eyes. He opened them. The sea was still there.

It neatly made him angry now—and he knew it was illogical, he probably looked a great deal put out and vexed, though no one was on the road to see it—that she was always in his mind as the person she had been when she departed. Not young, not old, but human and beautiful. Why would that make him angry? He was angry with who, with what? It was his duty to remember her. It was his duty to remember her. But he was old, he was old, and he had never wanted another, never. He was old and she was gone, never herself to be old.

‘I’m so happy to meet you, I really am. We were in need of a strong presence without fully knowing it. Especially now we have children in the house. That lovely little girl, and her brother.’ She looked at her husband, as if not wanting to exclude him from this conversation. Tom had not seen any little girl. Did she mean the people in the Turret flat?

They didn’t have long in the new house in Deansgrange, in truth, before the little changes. At night she would go to sleep like a body interred—he could barely hear her breathing. She lived so lightly the traces were hard to see. He would hunt for signs of her. Traces of June. Later, a few good years on, he’d come home of an evening and go about the house, looking for her and the children. When he called out to her she mightn’t answer, because sometimes she wasn’t there. In the last times, when he called out, and she was there, she never answered either. Even alive she was every so often like someone you remembered that you had loved.

‘And, Winnie, where are you living?’ he said, suddenly unable to remember. It was very strange. A father should know where his daughter was living, surely. He knew where she was living but where was it? It had just slipped his mind. He was growing demented, he must be. ‘Where are you living?’ he said, in some distress now, a bit of a headache brewing.

‘Deansgrange, Daddy, Deansgrange.’

‘But we’ve left Deansgrange,’ he said, again with the note of panic and misery in his voice.

‘Well, but I’m still there, Daddy.’

‘Not the cemetery!’ he said, with a small cry.

‘Yes, Daddy, the cemetery.’

Talk to yourself, Tom, talk to yourself, calm your heart. Hold on by your fingernails. Something was coming, something was coming, but not yet. He was king over time in the wicker chair. Preserving the beneficence of the present. Not smoking, true, his old cigarillos, heeding at last the intimations of his old doctor. For in a very curious way he wanted to live. He wanted to live long enough to get through the dark forest, like a medieval child in the old stories. To get through the tall, dense trees and the dark light that barely merited the name of light. Along the ancient road with its carpeting of the leaves of a thousand autumns. To see at last the sparkle begin in the distance, the diamonds and fires of the sunlight, where the forest would end.

He had the wild sense that, despite the tyranny of dates and time, she was there, not in memory but really, and he was careful not to open those eyes. He knew the second he did so he would be gone. […] They were both away with the fairies and June was alive, she was alive, beautiful and wise, and she would always be there, bursting with life, calm as any old painted Madonna, as long as he did not open his eyes. He lifted both his hands and reached out to hold that longed-for face. To hold it, the soft cheeks, the dark skin, to hold it, to hold it.

He was genuinely shocked when June took their humble bread knife from her gansey. She took it from her gansey, and then she went in under his coat like a bone-collapsing rat, trying to get in in a manner no human ever could. And she wriggled herself up onto his back, using his spine as a great brace, and she flattened herself like a huge plaster, not a human creature at all. He had clearly married a Trickster.

Without her. The children in their childhood beds. Her in the summer-cold graveyard. Her remains in the execrable coffin. Her heart not beating. Her mind not thinking. Her face not brightening, darkening. No more her thousand different moods, her modes of mind, her enthusiasms, her hated things. And in the kitchen, on the breadboard, chill and dark, the sacred bread knife. Which in killing had not killed. In exacting punishment had not punished. In seeking to be the instrument of redemption had not redeemed.

Even the man highest up thought he should take early retirement, but something deep in him needed to go on to the end. Then the little party and the sombre words and the happy words. Then his niche in Queenstown Castle. His wicker chair, the characterful sea, and the stolid island. And then, those quiet nine months not only of new silence, but also—what could he call it? A sort of blossoming sense of relief, maybe, that the wretched Fates had done with him. Had noticed his great happiness long ago, and emblem by emblem taken it away from him. Then the day that Wilson and O’Casey came to him like Mormons, with the old rhododendron aflame at their backs. The screeching of the door and the whole thing cranked up again, like a Model T Ford.

The hand was delicate and dark, and he wondered, if he extended his own left hand to meet it, would he be able to touch her? And if he could touch her, what did that mean? He was afraid to move in case it made her vanish but at the same time he was brave enough to risk it and he extended his arm a few inches and before he knew it he was touching her warm fingers. He wanted to say something to her now alright but in a way the touching of hands said everything he needed to say. It was like he had just met her, that very same feeling of old in the vanished café, and yet of course in the very same moment he knew everything there was to know about her. The strange privilege of that. The lovely wildness of it.