A Reflection on Mrs Death Misses Death, a novel by Salena Godden

I finished this book ten minutes ago but I am still holding it in my hands, not quite ready to let go, so many thoughts in my head and my heart. This book allowed me to hold memories, it allowed acceptance of feelings around death, feelings many of us do not talk about. Perhaps I am not the morbid bastard I thought I was.

I started writing this in my head the second I closed the book, it was all there and needed to come out, the stopped had been pulled. I thought “YES! THANK YOU! AT LAST!”

This is not a harsh book, nor a gentle one. It doesn’t sugar-coat, nor does it yell bullishly but it does scream, a scream thousands of years old, close your eyes and listen, you’ll hear it.

I know Mrs Death, I have heard her voice, I know how she smells, how she sings. I have felt her brush past me, knowing she got there first, I was too late. I have felt her sit beside me on a loved one’s bed. Mrs Death smells like a syringe drive in the final days, she smells like the shake of a head when you ask how a loved one will continue eating. I have felt her gently move me aside at the hospital because she has work to do, she’s a busy woman and you can’t get in the way, Time and Death stop for no one and there are other people in the world you know, or on their way out, excuse me. Mrs Death smells like bandages after a biopsy.

Mrs Death is a 1am phone call that smells like cancer.

I feel like Mrs Death has always been beside me, tugging at my pigtails, my imaginary friend.
I was the sort of child who woke her parents in the deep of night to tell them who had died, to reel off faces and feelings, water in my lungs, I can’t feel my arm. I remember the fear in my mother’s eyes, a look that said “not again”. I didn’t understand it at the time, I was just telling her what I knew, matter of fact, no feelings, no intent. Then at breakfast my parents would watch the news and there it was, exactly as I had said, all of the people I had described. Lockerbie. MS Estonia. The plane on the motorway. My parents would look at each other and silently say, “how did she know?” I carried on eating my jam on toast.
It was you, wasn’t it, Mrs Death? Children are so receptive and I rarely slept so you whispered in my ear.

Your voice quietened as I got older didn’t it? Or perhaps my world got louder, perhaps I learned to fill it with noise so that I couldn’t hear you. I would walk past a man in the street and in my head I saw his blood in the road, my mouth would fill with the taste of metal. No thank you, I am too busy, we’re going to Camden today, block it out with music and colour, but not red.

I’m choking on the train, my neck feels thin, his fingers like a vice, I smell stale beer, “let’s get off here, I don’t feel well”. We stopped watching the news, I didn’t want to know.
It’s 2011, I am heavily pregnant, the phone rings and I freeze, staring at it, willing it to stop. My 3 year old daughter says “I get it!” I say no, I already know who it is and what they are going to say because you told me didn’t you, Mrs Death? I didn’t believe you because there was no reason that I knew of why it could be true but at that moment as the phone rang I knew.
“Lisa…..”
“It’s Mark, isn’t it? He killed himself”
“Yes”
Mrs Death smells like rope.
My dad doesn’t even ask how I know because he remembers the little girl who would appear at the foot of the bed and describe dead people. I never understood how hard it must have been, how unnerving, until my own daughter did the same, thankfully only a time or two.

Mrs Death was beside me twice as I miscarried. She didn’t hold my hand or whisper words of comfort. She didn’t lead me to the sink to wash my bloodied hands. She didn’t hold me while I cried. A cruel mother at first glance but the one who is always there to collect us all at the end of the night and take us home. She just is. I often wonder where she takes us, where she led my loved ones. Across the Endless Sands? To Heaven? Or does she simply turn out the light and close the door?

I want Mrs Death to smell like old age, like a century of love and smiles and memories crisp as yesterday. I want her to smell of all the threads leading from her life web. The friends, the lovers, the children and grandchildren, the successes and failures, the get-up-and-try-agains.

She rarely does.

Too often she smells of bullets in flesh and charred skin. Too often she smells of people without insurance and children with empty bellies. Too often she smells like politicians making decisions while counting their gold and putting sticky labels on the possessions of the dead and dying. They keep Mrs Death busy with their backhanders.

I hold this book in my hands and I need a moment longer, I check the pages again to be sure I have finished and not missed anything. I’m not ready to put it down because it understands, it tugs at that thread in all of us that can unravel the sack of things we don’t talk about, the quiet bits that surface at the worst of times. We are taught to be quiet about them, it’s too messy, we don’t like messy. Get the dustpan and brush and quietly sweep it up.

I often feel that other cultures do death better than us here in the UK, stiff upper lip, don’t talk about morbid things. Don’t mention death and all its smells. Disguise the scent of blood and sweat and sex and shit and death. It’s all dirty, but they’re not so different, Life and Death. We think that death smells rotten, it is the bad smells. While life is floral and streams and sunshine but dirt is dirt and we’re dirtier alive than we ever are dead.

This book puts Death on a banner and waves it in the air shouting “I’M HERE! I’VE ALWAYS BEEN HERE!”

Thank you Salena, for giving this a name, a voice and a vessel.

Thank you for the space to write my loved one’s names. Thank you for the space.