Athol loved to tell the story of how we met. In October of 2011, he was a visiting fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies, and I a PhD student at the Stellenbosch University music department. One day, Athol had a chance encounter with my academic supervisor, who had been invited to lunch at the institute. During the course of their conversation, Athol enquired about attending a performance of live art music. My supervisor offered to ask a graduate student, me, to find out what was on offer in the town, and to accompany Athol. After exchanging emails and a phone call, we headed into the weekend with two dates lined up.
I knew who Athol Fugard was, but I hadn’t read or seen any of his work except People are Living There. So I spent the Friday night reading Blood Knot. I remember feeling shivers running down my spine. Not because the writing was exquisite, or because the play reverberated so profoundly through South Africa’s past and present, both of which were true. But because I realised that the man who had written it must, in his mind, be capable of going everywhere in human experience, of imagining anything a human being can feel. That is how I articulated it to myself that night. The prospect of meeting him was both thrilling and strangely terrifying.
When I arrived the following afternoon to pick Athol up for a concert of twelve-tone music, I almost landed my car in one of the narrow stone irrigation channels that line Stellenbosch’s streets, a relic from the town’s farming past. I drove around the block and tried again, and there he was, the 79-year-old author wearing a tweed jacket and his Tilley hat, resting his back against the wall. We exchanged a look over the roof of the car as I got out, which he later described as ‘the moment I knew my life would never be the same again.’
During the interval, a fellow graduate student remarked that it looked as if we had known each other forever. It felt that way to us as well. After the concert, we sat on the couch in his rented apartment until the early hours of the morning drinking coffee, talking, and reading each other our favourite poems and bits of prose. I recited my favourite chapter from Moby-Dick, ‘The Lee Shore’, and he performed Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. The next evening, after a choral concert and dinner, we continued. We sat together like this night after night, with Glenfiddich whisky and cigarettes. Soon we weren’t on opposite ends of the couch anymore, desire having become physical despite the fifty-three years lying between us. At the time, I was twenty-six years old.
Every morning, we’d have breakfast at the sunny table in the corner of his apartment, then head off to our respective desks at the university. But not before Athol fed his beloved birds, a gaggle of impatient red-eyed doves and speckled pigeons who gathered on his little balcony. In the evenings, we’d come together again for dinner, walking down from the apartment to one of Stellenbosch’s restaurants, and back up again. Once, I drove us to Cape Town to attend a performance of his play Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act directed by Kim Kerfoot and staged in a small church hall in Observatory. We listened to the play’s final monologue with our white-knuckle hands locked together in the dark, and drove home on the empty midnight highway with hot paper cups filled with bitter, black coffee. Athol returned to the USA a month or so later, but not before he had presented me with the first of his many gifts: an empty notebook and a fountain pen.
Over the following weeks, the occasional phone call we promised each other turned into daily conversations. We devised a plan to meet again. That happened in the July of the following year when I visited Athol in New York during the season of his plays presented at the late Jim Houghton’s Signature Theatre where he was a playwright-in-residence. We spent our days walking and eating our way through Manhattan and our nights watching Broadway plays. We took a train up to Sag Harbor to spend a weekend in Herman Melville’s world. I attended the first rehearsal of The Train Driver, my first chance to witness Athol holding a room with that commanding, but loving authority he brought to the rehearsal process. After two weeks, we committed to one another under a tree in the Southwest corner of Central Park by exchanging matching whale necklaces made of scrimshaw. Our only witnesses were the grey squirrels.
In certain respects, my and Athol’s coming together was made possible because, in the beginning, I wasn’t that familiar with his work. He appreciated that I saw and engaged with who he was, not with his reputation. Falling in love with me was also an affirmation of his love for South Africa. Athol had spent the previous decades living mainly in the USA and found it easy to love a young South African whose native language was Afrikaans, the language of his mother, Elizabeth Magdalena Potgieter. Our vast age difference informed his love as well. My twenty-six years were hardly untouched by bad decisions, regrets or pain. But he saw me as a complete innocent, someone whose life – unlike his – had not yet sustained nor inflicted any deep wounds. He was a scarred leviathan carrying a weight of barnacles. For him, I was simply without blemish, and a chance to begin again. In later years, he said he had been searching for me his whole life. And that his mother would have loved me very much. In a way, I think he had also been searching for her.
I don’t remember thinking too hard about the consequences of tying my young life to such a very old one. What I do remember is once reassuring him that there was enough meat left on his bones to keep me going for quite some time. I wrote a series of poems in Afrikaans that year about love, physical and mental decay, and loss, which I pasted onto the backs of photographs and mailed to San Diego where Athol still lived. He kept them in the drawer of his desk. After his death, I found them. Thirteen years later, I realise that I had some idea, after all, of the road ahead. In one of the poems, I imagined how I might react if he wet the bed or forgot my name. In another, I hoped I’d have the courage to celebrate the maggots that would one day devour his body.
In another of those early poems, I railed against the fact that there would come a day when I would be expected to throw away his body like a pair of old sneakers, writing:
En wanneer jy op ‘n dag van my voete af val
eensklaps vuurwarm teer wit lig
sal ek by treinstasies wag en die klitsgras fynkam
dan versigtig my stinkvoete bestudeer
op soek na ‘n versteekte woord tussen my tone.And when you fall off my feet one day
at once burning tar white light
I’ll wait at train stations and fine comb the bristle grass
then carefully study my smelly feet
searching for a hidden word between my toes.
Athol used the same metaphor as well that year, writing in his notebook:
You loved my body the way Van Gogh loved those old boots which so inspire me. In painting them, Van Gogh was loving them as symbols of all of toiling, suffering and, finally, dying Humanity. What he really painted with that canvass was the soul of all mankind that an undeserving God claims as his in the right to judge the value and virtue of that tired, sweat-stained leather. But, and it’s a big but, my beloved, if Van Gogh himself needed a new pair of boots for all his tramping around, would he go out looking for a pair like the ones he painted? So I ask you my beloved, isn’t that the way you love my body? But is it what you need?’
In another entry, he pleaded, simply, ‘Walk one more mile in me.’
By 2014, Athol had returned to South Africa. I had since graduated, and we moved to the small village of Nieu-Bethesda, the setting of The Road to Mecca, where he owned a house. We had no television and no internet. We wrote, read our work to each other, fed the birds on stone slabs under the pear trees and tried to heat the old Karoo house with a simple fireplace. He taught me how to meditate during quiet mornings in his den, the wintry sun glowing through the bars of the shutters he kept closed so that his writing space resembled a monastic cell. In the afternoons, we took our dog, Jakkals, for long walks in the Karoo scrub. At night on the stoep at the outskirts of the village, we braaied sheep’s tails. Ahead of us was only veld and starlight and we imagined we were the last humans of the age, flung against nothing.
For a part of each year we were back in Stellenbosch where Athol had a recurring residency at the institute, and where I continued my research into the South African musician Taliep Petersen whose biography I was writing. We also spent months in Cape Town and New York while Athol, and eventually the two of us together, directed his plays at his last two artistic homes, Eric Abraham’s Fugard Theatre and the Signature Theatre. Nights, we walked the stretch of Cape Town’s Sea Point and sat on the bench around the corner from the pavilion that made us feel as if our feet were dangling in the Atlantic Ocean. In New York, we watched the sunset over the Hudson River from the window in a little apartment just off 42nd Street that we had come to think of as our own, planning the next day’s rehearsal over a bottle of wine.
In April 2016, armed with $50 wedding rings bought in Chinatown, Athol and I married in City Hall. He always remembered how the clerk who officiated told him to take good care of me. It seems such a New York story that we received a standing ovation from the other couples lined up for their own nuptials. Afterwards, we had a champagne breakfast at Trestle on Tenth with our two witnesses, took a carriage ride through Central Park, made love, and had dinner at our favourite Japanese restaurant at the base of the New York Times building. Those restaurants don’t exist anymore. Neither does the Fugard Theatre. The Signature Theatre is a vastly changed organization that no longer rents ‘our’ apartment. The spaces we once filled fell away one after the other.
During the South African run of The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek in September 2016, Athol fell backstage and shattered his left wrist. He underwent an operation and a few days later, we returned to New York for the off-Broadway revival of ‘Master Harold’ … and the boys. Every few days I prised off his brace to wash and rebandage his wound, an experience both of us found extremely difficult. Stopping over at my parents’ house that December, we were walking Jakkals on a dirt road outside Franschhoek when Athol began to list to the left like a leaky ship. He mumbled something about a bee having stung his lip, and so I rushed him to hospital where he was treated in the ICU for a transient ischemic attack. After that, living in a place as remote as Nieu-Bethesda didn’t make sense anymore. We knew it was time to slow down. We bought the house where we’ve lived ever since, a property on the banks of the Eerste River in Stellenbosch. By then, he was eighty-four and I was thirty-one.
Over the years, Athol and I faced what now seem like countless medical emergencies. Once, in Nieu-Bethesda he collapsed a few minutes after we finished the rehearsal room script of The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek. Rushing to the nearest hospital, forty-five minutes away, he was worried I’d hit a Kudu jumping across the road. Another time in New York, after an argument, Athol headed to the nearest bar for a few drinks, then slipped on the icy pavement trying to pick up his pipe. I found him in an ambulance with his head cut open. On a flight from Japan to South Africa, he developed a urinary tract infection that required treatment in a hospital in Dubai. In San Francisco where Athol was due to deliver an address, we had a romantic bath with oils and champagne. Hilarity quickly turned to dread when, despite one attempt after the other, we couldn’t seem to get him out in time for his speech. But most challenging of all, I think, was Athol’s three years with bullous pemphigoid, a self-limiting autoimmune disease that left him with angry blisters and itchy hives which could only be controlled with large doses of corticosteroids that ate away at his muscles.
When Athol got Covid in 2021, I was allowed to visit him in full PPE twice a day. I fed him mashed papaya and banana for nearly two weeks until one day I found him new-born, parched, cracked lips gaping for life. I shaved his beard and bushy crown and he lay there angelic, wide-eyed, searching. He asked, ‘Was this Covid?’ and I choked, trying to respond. After that, Athol came home again, unphased by his latest dance with death.
Athol recovered only days before we were due to transfer the first embryo from our recent IVF cycle. He was eighty-nine and I was thirty-six. Because of Athol’s age, we had conceived using donor sperm. In the process of choosing a donor, Athol populated a complicated spreadsheet in which he gave outsized importance to prospective donors’ favourite books and their relationship to nature. He chose the man he thought was most likely to abandon his studies and hitchhike through Africa as he had, to which I added, ‘and become the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world’, the 1985 Time magazine line that always made him squirm.
For nearly fourteen years, Athol and I lived towards death, and simultaneously, in defiance of it. It posed a specific question to each of us. For him, how to live as if he were about to die. For me, how to build an adult life that could, at any point, be called upon to survive the loss of a central pillar. After his stroke, it seemed irresponsible to dare to want too much from those lives. We longed to travel together again, but never made it further than a quick visit to Nieu-Bethesda to pack up his things. As the years passed, and he didn’t have another stroke, we became more brazen. It felt mad to adopt a second dog. We went ahead anyway; his name is Solo. We co-authored a play, Concerning the Life of Babyboy Kleintjies, not knowing whether Athol would live to see it staged. He did; we directed it at the Stellenbosch Woordfees in 2022. When, a decade after our first meeting in Stellenbosch, we dared to wish for children, it was an act of open resistance.
Halle Fugard Fourie was born on 11 August 2022. Athol was besotted with his golden, long-lashed girl with the banana-smears in her hair, and she with her Dada. He drank her in from his chair on the stoep, taught her how to feed the birds and showered her with silly songs, all the while gratefully receiving every pebble, leaf and feather. She wore his eyes like jewels, and when she beamed at him, he sloughed off the years. To her, he wrote shortly after her first birthday: ‘Heavens above but I dote on you as if I have to say Goodbye to you tomorrow. I never for one moment imagined that you would have so profound an effect on me!!! But yes, Little One. When I look at you a volcano of emotions erupts in me. Nothing before you has had such a deep heart throbbing effect on me. What I also know is that you will look after yourself. That you will say “Yes” and “No”, whichever is called for to protect the moral fibre of your beautiful life.’
Was it during one of our weekly picnics that he convinced me to have another? Or was it after I had pushed his wheelchair close enough to the beach one morning so that he could watch Halle build a sandcastle? Cognizant of the terrible loss in her future, we both knew we should try to give her more options, more family, a co-conspirator who shared her extraordinary story. But we were desperate that this child, too, should get a chance to know their Dada.
Lanigan Fugard Fourie was born on 1 January this year. When I went into labour, Athol was lying directly under me in the general ward, about to be discharged after being treated for a bacterial lung infection. He joined me for my C-section, and while I was being sewed up, had the thrilling experience of ‘skin-to-skin’ with his son. ‘It left me sobbing with ecstasy,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘I completely broke down in the hospital when I realised that the bundle of life in my arms was mine and when I go, will be Halle’s and mama’s to love. You see, little one, I have been ill, and every day is a blessing.’ It was a blessing Athol was determined not to waste, and so he also wrote, in the same notebook, of his attempts to write a new story. ‘I will use today to find a beginning,’ he wrote. ‘That is not as silly as it might sound.’ At nearly ninety-three, Athol had grown comfortable living in the space between exits and entrances. For me, he became simply immortal.
Athol spent his last years on the stoep with his binoculars, notebook, and pen. He retreated gradually from public life. Interviews left him exhausted and depressed. Frustrated with the problems plaguing contemporary South Africa and disillusioned with its government, he didn’t enjoy talking about the difficult years he had spent writing against apartheid. He also couldn’t stand yet another confrontation with versions of himself from what he considered to be the long-distant past. But, at least in private, his earlier plays never failed to elicit in him wonder and pride. One evening earlier this year, after idly paging through a book that someone had dropped off for his signature, I read him the endings of ‘Master Harold’ … and the boys, Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena. Athol was completely overwhelmed. He was struck as much by the power of those words as by the realization that they were his. Forgetting the writing that lay behind him had always been a prerequisite to generating new work. This was never truer than in his old age.
Finally, he went back to where it had all begun and he saw himself as nothing more than a man holding a pen, staring at the blank pages of his notebook. In it, he never stopped trying to write against injustice, sketching ideas for new plays and short stories about the world around him. He also returned often to his childhood, listing the songs he and his father used to sing at the piano and writing down fragmented memories of the Port Elizabeth of his youth and young adulthood. The steady stream of birds who came to enjoy the scattering of seed in the footpath featured prominently, as did his growing family.
Athol had developed advanced macular degeneration that made it difficult for him to see what he was writing. He couldn’t read the news on his phone anymore, either, and struggled to make out much of what was on television. In the evenings, we still binged British murder mysteries and detective shows, me pausing frequently to explain what was actually going on. But what he had written in his notebook in February 1981 proved true: ‘In any case, the final landscape is within.’ Most of the time he spent communing with the birds, thinking, looking inside, waiting. A lot of that waiting was for me to come down from my study where I was writing a book. I finished it shortly before giving birth to Lanigan, and 2025 was meant to be the year during which we together completed a handful of unwritten stories – both his and mine – which were waiting for us. The last text we worked on, a few days before his death, was a play I’d written. At one point during my reading he stopped me to say, ‘Paulie, you don’t need me anymore.’ He was terribly mistaken.
Towards the end, Athol spent most of his waking hours being a father. When I went to fetch Halle from her bedroom in the mornings, he and Lanigan lay examining each other nose to nose. On the occasions that I breastfed during our coffee and (chocolate) milk ritual, he had to help Halle into her clothes. If the two of them managed to get her arms and head into the right openings, she’d applaud him and shout, ‘Well done Dada, you did it!’ He eagerly awaited her return from play school, poring over her daily artwork during lunch. In the afternoons while I played outside with Halle, Lanigan slept for hours in Athol’s arms. His failing eyesight meant he could no longer replace a spat-out pacifier, yet he was unmatched in his ability to drone our son to sleep with Buddhist mantras. During bath time, he rocked him in his Moses basket, endlessly repeating his name and talking the same exquisite nonsense that had already turned our daughter into a consummate speaker. On 16 January, Athol wrote a note to him: ‘My foot will always be there to rock you in your basket as you bravely sail down the river to meet your future, although you might not always be aware of it once I’m gone.’
Some nights, I had to leave the table midway through dinner because Lanigan needed me. On those occasions, Athol handled Halle’s dinner without me. That happened on the night he died. I remember, while breastfeeding in the bedroom, listening to him politely trying to refuse the slices of kiwi she kept offering him. He hated disappointing her and ate them anyway, though I knew he wasn’t hungry. Athol and I were both sick. He was receiving daily lung-physio from his long-term physiotherapist who had already added years to his life with the weekly exercise regime she put him through. His doctors had taken urine and sputum samples and were treating him for a urinary tract infection and a respiratory virus. If he deteriorated, our instructions were to visit the emergency room of our local hospital.
We spent part of the afternoon debating whether we should do just that. Not because Athol was getting breathless, but because of all that was at stake, because of all we had to lose. I also had what I now recognize as a vague sense of unease. ‘Things feel dire’, I remember telling him at one point. He was against it. So was I. Hospitals drove him out of his mind, his nighttime hallucinations populating his room with disorientating and frightening figures. Very often he ended up stranded at the Johannesburg Train station where John Harris detonated a suitcase bomb in 1964, the subject of his play Orestes. Besides, he said, ‘I’m getting better.’ I was still anxious, but we decided not to go, affirming that we had made our decision together and that whatever happened we should always remember that. The previous day he had told me that he felt very near to death, and a heavy depression had settled on him. But Athol spoke like that for years, declaring, often, that he was busy measuring his coffin.
As much as death stalked us, the house was bursting with life. Halle had torn through the afternoon with her relentless enthusiasm and Lanigan gave us his first toothless smiles. The rolling blackouts that are a feature of life in South Africa had cut short our entertainment – Disney’s 1940 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the only film we could agree on as a family. We spent most of the afternoon talking. Later, during story time, I paced around the room with an out of sorts Lanigan while Athol tried to read Halle the books he could no longer see. Her frustration was palpable, but they made the best of it. She corrected his mislabeling of a cow as a dog and guided his hand to the book in her lap so that he could turn the page. At one point, they were laughing together as she pretended the ‘snake’ she had made out of salt clay at school had bitten him and made him suck out the venom. When she fell asleep, Lanigan woke up again, and I spent another session on our bed trying in vain to breastfeed him back to sleep while Athol waited in the living room. It took so long I called him on his phone to tell him that Lanigan was still drinking, and he said that he knew that, that he could wait forever for us to finish.
Finally, I gave up, and we joined Athol on the couch. It was time for the last ritual of the day. For the first time in years, we no longer watched television at night, it riled Lanigan too much. Now we took turns holding him, listened to music, and talked over a carafe of wine. Sometimes, I read to Athol. These last few weeks we had been reading Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. But I was too tired to read anything out loud that night. It had been a long day working on what sometimes felt like the impossible project of our family. We had help – my mother stayed over once a week and our thrice-weekly housekeeper tended to the kids and increasingly to Athol’s needs – but co-parenting with a 92-year-old was hard. We flourished as a family, but it was a delicate instrument. When one element fell out of place – if one of us got sick – it threw the whole thing off kilter. Daycare sicknesses ravaged our family more than most. But the difficulties we faced were more than offset by the love that radiated among the four of us, and by the contentment Athol and I felt at the end of each day. It was satisfying when we managed to handle the consequences of our hopelessly romantic decisions all on our own. Such was the contentment with which we drank our glasses of merlot that night.
Less than an hour later Athol walked to the bedroom, my guiding hands on his waist. Once he reached the bed, he began to gasp for breath. I ran for the nebulizer, trying in vain to keep the mask on his face as he lay down and began to writhe. He turned on one side, then the other, then on his back, then on his side again, trying to find a position in which he could breathe. After a minute or two, he became still. His eyes looked past me to where I couldn’t follow. But despite everything I knew to be true about the years and months and days and hours, I couldn’t believe that he had died in front of me. With the help of neighbours, I got him into a wheelchair and into the car so that I could race to the emergency room of our local hospital. Halle did not wake up. But little Lanigan, who witnessed the entire event from his bouncer next to the bed, was inconsolable, screaming into the night long after we had left.
At the hospital, attempts to resuscitate Athol were unsuccessful, and he was declared dead at one minute to ten. It was there that I learned his heart had caused his sudden death, and not his congested lungs. For the first time in nearly fourteen years, I had been powerless to save him.
I sat with Athol’s body until the early hours of the morning, oblivious, in my shocked daze, to the passage of time. Red blotches had appeared on his trousers and sleeves from our mad rush to the hospital. After years on blood thinners and corticosteroids, Athol’s skin was papery thin. I knew this, and was angry with myself for not being more careful with his body. It wasn’t just an empty shell. How could it be? When he was a young man, the prickling of salty sea water drying on his back made him imagine butterflies were stabbing him to death. As an old man, he worshipped the feel of the sun on his skin as he sat on his stoep. Athol was his body.
I was also devastated that at no point had it occurred to me to put my arms around him and to tell him that I love him. I was so focused on trying to save his life that it never occurred to me to say goodbye. As I sat holding Athol’s hand, I couldn’t shake the lines from a poem I’d written a few years earlier while holding vigil at one of his many hospital bedsides:
No one
saved a life, not
ever. What’s possible:
postponing a death like burning
wet wood.
I turn forty this year. These past months, I have felt like the revolving door between life and death. I used to lie awake at night with a hand on the two heads lying on either side of me. Between them was nearly a century of living. One was a warm velvet egg, rippling with life. The other, cooler, prickly, hard-boned, vaster than continents. When Lanigan and I went to view Athol’s body at the undertaker a few days ago, it had turned to ice. I was expected to throw away the body that I had lovingly cared for more than a decade, whose every inch I have come to know intimately. With Athol’s leaving, I gained a phantom limb. Halle’s vocabulary has exploded, as if she somehow got all his words when he went. Sweet, chatty Lanigan has become the safety blanket I wear everywhere I go. He is the only antidote I know to the hard, cold memory in my right hand.
Athol gave me many more gifts over the years, among them eyes to see the material suffering of those less fortunate around me, and the writerly freedom to rifle through my life as if it were a treasure chest. He taught me to be fearless in putting words on paper and to trust them, even if they were brutal. But the most important of his gifts was the very first one, the discipline of a near-daily notebook entry. Reading what I wrote two days before he died I realise that I knew he was about to go:
I am painfully aware of the impending loss our children will soon face when Athol can no longer hold onto this world, and my own fingers, too, lose their grip on this remarkable giant of a man. Because, in truth, I am not so much guiding him into the next world as I am fervently trying to keep him with us in this one.
And what to tell the children? We’ve agreed to tell Halle that he is dead. And that ‘death’ means going on a long journey. That she will see him again, though not in the form she has become accustomed to. And that, for now, he is everywhere around her, especially in each bird that visits the garden. Is this a lie? A fantasy? No, it is a story. And that is all humans have ever told themselves about death.
Athol used to have little faith in any sort of existence after death. I once heard him say he hopes he’ll turn into a sweet potato deep underground. Now he is increasingly open to the idea that it might not be a complete full stop. Both of us refuse to say anything definitive in either direction. And that is, of course, as it should be. Humans! The arrogance of those who propose to know what happens when we slip past that sheer curtain.
Athol must have known as well. His entry for the same day reads as follows: ‘My very dearest Halle and Lanigan. Let me start off by saying I am sitting outside on the stoep with a barrage of flies and heat. I can already see in both of you, the beginning of qualities that will make both of you into responsible and loving human beings. But I also live with the very bitter regret that I will not live long enough to see the two of you into the fine man and woman taking shape in your beautiful young souls.’ These are the last words Athol Fugard wrote.
He no longer made daily notebook entries but penned perhaps a handful each month. Most of them were in the form of letters to his two young children, a project he had started when Halle was still in utero. But Athol’s failing eyesight had begun to make it nearly impossible to write with any clarity. He scribbled as many as three lines on top of each other, often letting me read what he had written so that the two of us could decipher his handwriting together. He also became frustrated when he couldn’t get his thoughts sufficiently together to express them on paper. I know he sometimes wished I wouldn’t put his notebook in front of him. But he also recognized that to write was to regain his ikigai, the difference between a good and a bad day. Once I had convinced him that a barely legible scrawl was better than silence, he wrote as eloquently as he ever did. On those days he roared to life and saw nothing but possibilities.
On 8 February, exactly a month before his death, he wrote. ‘I can’t deny that I have an itch to be in the middle of a story, so who knows. And I think I know the story!!!’ Afraid that he’d forget, I asked him what it was about. He said only, ‘sunbeam’. I have come to believe that Athol, watching and waiting downstairs, had gradually begun to inhabit a different temporality. Eventually, he could see things the rest of us couldn’t. Most recently, he had discovered a beam of sunlight that slanted down from a skylight in our roof and travelled slowly through the house. He became consumed with charting its progress during his last days. He never got around to writing the story. But I’m confident it was about a movement he himself, was about to make. His second last entry, days before his death, went like this:
Dearest Lanigan, I write to tell you of my very interesting discovery. I used to believe that the golden glow of the sunbeams was to provide light so that I could make this entry and that once they had done that, they would just grow weak and eventually just fade away and die. But that is not the case. They are alive. Alive!!! They don’t just fade away!!! They are alive!!! They do not just fade away. They move on!!! Yes! They are alive. They move on!! The sun beam that was helping me make this entry is alive. Yes! It is alive! I think it is trying to rejoin the sun. It will splash its soft light on the wall as it has now begun to do and leak its radiance on the framed photographs going up the staircase. It will kiss the books in the shelves. And it will start its journey back towards its source. My crossed thumbs are irrefutable evidence of that life. So, enough for the moment. I am now going to take a coffee break. Angels are, of course, behind all this magic.’
It is only now – having spent hours with Athol’s spidery handwriting in the aftermath of his death – that I know what that last line was. Trying to decipher it together just after he had written it, we had settled on: ‘It gets tiring, all this magic’. But I was doubtful. ‘I’m not really sure that’s what you wrote,’ I said. ‘It’s ok,’ he answered. ‘Because it does. All this magic does get tiring.’ Then he closed the book.
Feature image courtesy of Gregory Costanzo
