On Loan

On New Year’s morning, I made two cups of tea and brought them upstairs to one of my oldest friends, Toni. I had come to stay with her in her house in the woods in Tuscany and my idea was I would get into bed next to her and we would prop ourselves up on the pillows, drink our tea and talk about the party the night before.

No sooner had we taken our first sip when there was a noise downstairs. We heard a voice calling up the stairs. To our surprise Bernadette, our hostess from the party was then standing at the foot of the bed in her dressing gown, barefoot and with soot on her face.

I heard her say the words, “It’s a total disaster, the whole house has gone up in flames,” but it felt like I was understanding in slow motion. I watched my thoughts unspool. How had she got here? Didn’t she go to bed? Did she think Toni and I were sharing a bed because we were lovers? “We need to find somewhere to stay,” she was saying.

As my brain caught up, time speeded up again and I got out of bed and seeing how cold and shocked she looked, I said, “let me make you a cup of tea.” Toni went to the window and added, “you better make it a big pot, Soph.” I joined her and looked outside. A van was parked outside the house, packed with Bernadette’s five children, Angus, her husband and two guests and their three children.

And then the house was full of the two families, all in their dressing gowns, barefoot, shivering with cold and shock. We fetched them blankets and settled them on the sofa, made them tea. It was a cold morning, so the obvious thing was to light a fire to keep warm. But wait, a fire?

I asked the children would they mind me lighting the fire? They nodded politely. They were cold. Over the next hours, the two fathers went back to check up on the house, and as the others warmed up, Bernadette told us that the fire brigade had taken forty-five minutes to arrive as they had to stand by and watched as their home was devoured by flames. As we cooked food for them and Toni made phone calls arranging emergency accommodation for them on the family farm, I went to sit next to the children by the fire. They were keen to tell me the story. The youngest, a five-year-old girl, had slept the night on the sofa downstairs when she heard a ticking sound. She sat up taller and her face became animated as she told me how she thought it was her toy, as it made the same noise. When she opened her eyes, she saw the room was filled with smoke. The only way she could see her way out was by following the red light of the wi-fi box. She made her way upstairs and woke the family, saving them all. The children were chiming in, each wanting to add their piece, what they remembered, and I realised the power of telling the story. The need to tell it was as real as the need for warmth and food.

“But when she told mummy and daddy, they thought she had a bad dream and they told her to get into bed with them,” said the older sister.

“Oh no!” I shuddered to think what would have happened if they had all gone back to sleep.

“Yes, and it was my mummy who smelt the smoke and told us all to go outside,” added one of the boys of the second family.

“Thank goodness you made it out and you are all here.”

We tell stories to entertain others, to make connections, to pass on knowledge, and to define ourselves. We also tell them to make sense of what has happened to us, to deal with enormous or shocking events which are hard to digest. I remember the need to tell the story of the births of my children soon afterwards. It helped to lay it down, to integrate the experience.

Over the next hours they gradually realised all the things they had lost. “Oh, the children’s drawings!” Angus, their father, himself an artist looked broken as he realised that these had gone forever.

The children watched a film, some of the family had a nap and a bath. When Angus came back from checking up on the house, looking pale and exhausted, his children pulled on his sleeve to ask him, were the rabbits alright? Had absolutely everything burnt? Had all their toys and clothes gone? It was heart-breaking to see his devastation, having to break it to them that yes, all those things had gone. Everything had gone up in smoke. Luckily the rabbits were all right.

Image from Unsplash

Bernadette looked at me with large eyes. “That’s the thing isn’t it, this moment must come. At some point we lose everything don’t we?”

One moment there we all were, feasting together and toasting each other a happy new year around a long dinner table, the family home warm and welcoming, filled with the children’s creative projects, everyone dressed in their sparkly clothes, dancing, watching fireworks, letting off lanterns into the night sky. Seeing them pile back into the van later to drive off to their temporary home, still barefoot on a January day, drove it home how quickly it is possible to become a refugee, depending on the kindness of others from one moment to the next. I was chillingly aware how close they all were to it being a human tragedy. Their loss was immense, but their lives were the most precious thing.

When I saw Angus a couple of days later, he told me that he had had a dream beforehand, and it was about sliding down a precipice. He tried to stop himself, but in the way of dreams he realised that the slide was inexorable. As he approached the chasm, he saw one word written enormously in the sky.

That word was FRIENDS.

Their friends showed up with clothes and a home and they were taken shopping for new clothes for the whole family. They realised this was what mattered most was the community of friends they have.

There is nothing like facing our mortality to remind us of what matters. As Bronnie Ware, a palliative carer wrote in her blog post, Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, those on their death beds didn’t regret making more money, or having more stuff. Again and again, she heard the same regrets. Here they are:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish I had let myself be happier.

• Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

I think about this as I take in a friend’s recent cancer diagnosis, another about to start chemo, as I hear about the sudden and shocking death in a motor accident of a beloved young friend of the family. We don’t get to decide these things, but we do have the opportunity to be with each other, to be there for each other. Bernadette is right, it is only a question of time before we lose everything. The inevitability of loss is one of the hardest things about being a human being. Whether it is the loss of someone beloved to us, of our home and possessions, of our youth, or of plant and animal species, we are going to be confronted by our impermanence. It seems odd in a way, that given the cyclical, impermanent nature of our world that we should ever try and cling on to anything, yet how understandable that we do. It strikes me it might help me come to terms with impermanence, to think of everything as a massive library, where everything, including our bodies, is on loan to us, but one day must be returned. As mortal beings we can take nothing with us. What lives on are the connections we made. The inheritance we leave.