Dead people really piss me off. The way they just keep being dead, and they never relent, no matter how hard you beg. They're just so stubborn. My mother was stubborn while she was alive too. In fact, I think that's why she's dead.
Nine years ago tonight she got knocked down by a car. My mother got run over. She got knocked off her bicycle. She was cycling home and got hit by a car. She was involved in a terrible accident. What do any of these words reveal about what happened? They don't reveal. They hide. They tell, but they hide.
On the one hand, it is true. You have a woman who was riding along on a bicycle who then wasn't riding along, because she was flying through the air and landing in the gutter. And the thing that stopped her riding along was another car, and that other car was moving.
But what I'm thinking of tonight, nine years on, is this:
I'm thinking of the woman on her way home from work. She's riding her bicycle from West Kensington to Earl's Court. There's just one road left to cross. It's Cromwell Road - the A4 - London's spine.
(Who here knows Cromwell Road? Then you know).
The crossing she rides up to has a red bicycle and a green bicycle, in addition to the red man and the green man. It's December, it's dark, it's 8 o'clock. What does she do?
Who knows - she's dead, so we can't ask her.
That might be the ultimate truth, and she was my mother, and I would love to hear her side. But there were witnesses. I heard them. At the inquest. Everyone said, and the coroner concluded, that she had tried to ride across the road when the bicycle and the man were red. I didn't have any trouble believing that conclusion, but I was ashamed of it for many years. I didn't tell anyone about it until two years ago.
"Random accident." Who in this city hasn't crossed a road when the man was red?
But I don't think it was random. I think it was typical of her. And that's why I'm angry. My neck hurts. I'm vibrating.
We were always cycling, my mother, my sister and I. We cycled to school, first in Hammersmith, and then in Fulham. We cycled everywhere. And every time, my mother put the fear of death in me. The fear of her death. "Please," I would say, "be more careful." And every time she dismissed my worry, "Well I've got this far, haven't I?" She suffered from the illusion of immunity and that's what killed her. That, and impatience.
She was not a person who liked to wait. For anything. And I think she lacked a magical sense of the precariousness of life. I think that killed her too.
It wasn't random.
Impatience and the illusion of immunity.
I am angry.
It doesn't matter how happy I am. Every year the anniversary destroys me. Every year I have the sense that I am waiting for something terrible to happen. My whole body tenses as though I, and not she, am about to be hit. And whose fault is that?
I did a cost benefit anaylisis. It didn't take long:
- Cost of waiting for lights to change: one cold and boring minute
- Benefit of waiting for lights to change: not dying
- Cost of not waiting for lights to change: being dead forever*
- Benefit of not waiting for lights to change: getting home a minute sooner
* (the list is actually endless, and is still growing today)
I want to say this. If there is something you can easily do that will increase your chances of not dying, please do it. If you're at the lights and it's a dark night, and the road is big, then wait. If the zebra crossing is a hundred yards away, walk to it. Put your seatbelt on before you drive off. Be late and alive rather than on time and dead. Do not talk on the phone or fiddle with the stereo while driving. Are you in such a hurry that you will risk being dead forever? Or killing someone else? Forever? I couldn't understand it before she was dead, and I understand it even less now.
For the love of life, if you are going to die, let it be for a good reason!
People I speak to, they say, "she's a part of you", "she'll be in your heart forever." But that's not how I feel tonight. I feel angry and empty. When people are dead it means that they are dead. That's what it means.
Einav says I'm too hard on my mother. She says everyone does it, people relax when they get close to home, they take chances they wouldn't normally take. And I think of my stubborn, impatient mother, as she approaches the crossing. And I say: "Really? Cromwell Road. 8 o'clock on a dark December evening. You couldn't have waited for the lights to change?"
This is the crossing. Picture it pitch black. Picture it tonight. You're almost home. Would you wait for the lights to change?
