¡Andando!

About a month ago I had a car accident. Another driver called Anwar Kamal S. sped through the GIVE WAY sign at a roundabout and hit my Mazda 2 sideways. Luckily, I was not hurt. The car was written off, though. The accident temporarily revived some fleeting memories of feeling (seeing) my own body pushed, pulled and dragged by a force way beyond my control more than four years ago, in very different circumstances.

Over the next few days many different thoughts crossed my mind. I thought about Jason Carney and his best friend Alina, both of whom lost their lives after being broadsided by a drunk driver twelve years ago. I never knew Jason or Alina, but I feel sorry for them, for their senseless, absurd deaths, for the unbearable pain their parents were inflicted. I also thought the same could have happened to me – except it was at a roundabout (you have slow down even if just a little!) and in my case the driver (I firmly believe) was not drunk. Muslims (the vast majority of them at least) do not drink.

As days went by, I also thought about how the little car had been an integral part of our lives, Clea’s life included. Not that I feel any special attachment for the car itself, but rather for those indelible memories I cherish more and more as I get older.

The Mazda was the car in which Clea and I drove together to Sydney Airport one unforgettable night in September 2008. It was also the car where Clea and I shared those morning conversations every parent loves to have on the way to school. I reminisced about her first year of schooling, when her brothers went with their mother to a Childcare Centre in a different part of town, while Clea would jump in the car with her school bag, so full of vitality, so keen to learn.

It was the car whose engine I often had to turn on five minutes before leaving because the frost would make it impossible to drive off to school straightaway. I thought about Clea’s reply whenever I locked the home door and said ‘¡Andando!’ (literally, ‘walking’, but it’s one very idiomatic way of saying ‘Let’s get going!’). Although she already knew what it meant, Clea invariably said: ‘Andando no, ¡en coche!’

I have also been thinking that, regrettably, somewhere, there will be parents who will return home after the summer holidays without their child. Nothing can prepare us for the loss of our child. It is utterly unthinkable to consider that our child may predecease us. Nothing can bring them back. All we can do is to face up bravely to a new day every day. And that does feel too much sometimes.

¡Andando!

Tenses

A few weeks ago I read a blogpost titled ‘Forever 19 or What if?’ by Rebecca Carney, in her blog Grief:A Woman’s Perspective. Like with everything Rebecca writes, her words resonated in me, they made me think. This one post, however, made me think especially long and hard about language, not just the words in her post but rather about how our daily grammar has changed.

You see, I can't help being a linguist. A philologist. I have taught English and Spanish as second languages for many years. I have also been a translator and an interpreter for many years. I take notice of language and grammar. I perceive changes when they occur.

The conditional perfect is defined as “a grammatical construction that combines the conditional mood with perfect aspect”. One typical example of the conditional perfect in English is ‘I would have done things differently’. Thus, the conditional perfect is “used to refer to a hypothetical, usually counterfactual, event or circumstance placed in the past, contingent on some other circumstance (again normally counterfactual, and also usually placed in the past)”. All of those quotes are from Wikipedia.

For most people, the verbal tenses of their daily lives are both the present and the future. The rhythms of the everyday dictate their lives: the things they do or are doing at a certain time of the day, but also the things they plan to do or wish to do in the short and the medium term.

But for the parents of a dead child, their present and their future have been truncated. Their lives are anchored in the past, in a past that has become a ‘forever’. Forever 19. Forever a young man full of promise, like Jason Carney. Forever 6 years and 9 months. Forever a schoolgirl enjoying her first real holiday on the tropical sands of a paradisiacal beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, like Clea. Forever.

The conditional perfect is the verbal tense that defines the daily life of the grieving parent. We no longer think about our child in the future tense. We think about them – a lot, constantly, continually – but we do not think about what they will be doing in months or in years. We think about them and use the past tense as we reminisce about their interrupted lives. We think about them and use the conditional perfect as we muse over who they would have been, about what could have been, what should have been, what might have been.

For the parents of a deceased child, “What if?” is a ubiquitous question in our lives. And the answer is always in the conditional perfect, never in the future, forever in the past.