When there is nothing left to do

You are in the garden with the secateurs, not really pruning anything. It is the time of year when there is not much to cut, and you are out there anyway.

It comes to you out here as much as anywhere. And somebody has probably said, kindly, that you dwell on it. That it has been a long time. That she would not have wanted this.

Four things, before anything else, and none of them is taken back further down.

It was yours. Nothing in this chapter reassigns it or discovers that the circumstances were difficult.

What is owed is still owed. If there is anybody alive in this, the thing that has never been said can still be said, and it can be said this week.

Taking it seriously is right. The people who want the subject changed are not wrong because they are unkind — most of them are frightened for you, and some of them love you — but they are wrong.

And the going over is yours. Every hour of it, including the three o'clock ones, including the ones that got you nowhere. If you go on doing it every night for as long as you have left, that is yours, and this chapter is not about stopping it.

One thing before the rest.

If what you are holding is what somebody did to you, that is chapter 17, and nothing here asks anybody to take responsibility for being harmed.

Here is the thing nobody has said to you, and it is the whole of this chapter.

The nights are not a malfunction.

Taking something seriously is ordinarily a matter of doing things. Saying it to the person. Putting it right where it can be put right. Not doing it again. Those have bodies and ends, and while any of them is available, that is what it looks like.

You did not say it. You were in the room, she was asking for the ninth time, and you went out instead — and now there is nobody to say it to. That is not attrition and it is not the passage of time. It is a thing you did not do and cannot now do, and softening it would be worse than saying it plainly.

So what is left? Nothing with a body. Nothing with an end.

And the seriousness does not go anywhere just because its outlets have gone. It stays, exactly as it was, and it takes the only form still open to it, which is you, awake, at three in the morning, with nobody's help and nobody's permission.

That is not morbidity. It is not failure to move on. It is what taking something seriously looks like when every other way of doing it has been closed.

Which means there are two things out here in the garden, not one.

There is the going over, which is the last form your seriousness has. It is not pleasant and it is not pointless, and whatever else is true of it, it is the only thing still being done about her by anybody in the world.

And there is the second thing: the shame about it. The sense that a better man would be past this by now, that it has been too long, that there is something wrong with you for still being out here with the secateurs thinking about it.

That one did not come from you. It arrived from the outside, from people who found it hard to watch, and it has been riding on top of the first thing ever since, pretending to be part of it.

The first one is yours and stays. The second one was never yours.

And one question, which is the only practical thing in this chapter.

Is anything still open? Anybody alive, any sentence unsaid, any truth that could be told to somebody who is still here? If there is, that is worth more than any number of nights, and it is worth doing badly and late rather than not at all.

If there is not — and for a great many people there is not — then the nights are not the wrong answer. They are the only answer left, and you have been giving it, every night, on your own, for years.

Most days the shame will come with the going over anyway. They have travelled together a long time and they do not separate because somebody pointed at them.

But some afternoon out here it will be only the first one: her, and that year, and what you did and did not do, and no second voice on top of it telling you that a better man would have finished with this by now.

You cut back the one branch that needed it. The rest of the garden can wait. It usually does.