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CHAPTER 142- Marcus, Declining
publish date:
2026-08-01 22:47:56
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Staying with him CHAPTER 148- The Baby At Six Months
Life continued.This was the thing she had not fully understood about grief, the specific quality of it thatwas different from how she had understood it professionally. She had understood griefprofessionally in the clinical sense, the stages and the timeline and the specific thingsthat helped and the things that did not. She had understood it from the outside of it fornine years of the consulting room.She had not understood how much life continued inside it.Life continued in all its specific and demanding particularity. The baby continued to existand to need things and to develop and to become more specifically herself with everypassing week. The academy continued to run and the sessions continued to happen andthe under-sixteens continued to need coaching. The practice continued, the Tuesdaythrough Thursday of it, the clients who came and the work that happened in the roomwith them.The baby turned six months old on a Thursday in May.She had been sitting up for three weeks
Staying with him CHAPTER 147- The Note
He read it to her in the dark.Not the night he found it. Months after the finding. She had not known when he wasgoing to read it to her and she had not asked, which was the right approach, which wasthe approach of a person who had learned when asking was the right thing and when thewaiting was. She had waited.She had been in bed, one evening in October, when he came in from the other roomwhere he had been after the baby was asleep, and he sat on the edge of the bed and hesaid: I want to read you something.She sat up.He had the note in his hand. The piece of paper from the filing cabinet that had been inhis jacket pocket and then somewhere she did not know and now in his hand.She did not turn on the lamp.The dark seemed right.He unfolded the paper.He read it.He read most of it quietly, not sharing the reading, and she sat in the dark and she lethim read it, let him have the whole of it for himself first, which was his by right.And then he found the line.She knew when
Staying with him CHAPTER 146-After Marcus
The academy without Marcus was a different quality.Not a lesser quality. Not the academy diminished. The same work, the same sessions,the same players at the same pitches at the same times. But the quality of the space hadchanged in the way that spaces changed when the person who had made them was nolonger in them, the specific ambient of a place shifting with the absence of the personwho had shaped its ambient.She noticed it the first Thursday.She had been in the office before and after the session and the office had the quality ofan office that was now fully his, not in the transitional sense of a space being handedover but in the complete sense of a space that was simply whose it was. Marcus’spapers were gone — his daughter had come and taken them, quietly, the week after, andDamien had helped her. What remained was what had always been there alongsideMarcus’s things: the filing cabinet that Jenny maintained, the whiteboard with thesession diagrams, the fixed blind, th
Staying with him CHAPTER 145- The Funeral
It was small.This was what Marcus had wanted, Damien knew, because Marcus had told him, once, inthe specific off-hand way Marcus said the things he had been thinking about for a longtime: if something happens, small. The players I made. Nobody else.Small was how it was.The chapel was not full. It was not supposed to be full. It was the people who needed tobe there and not the people who would have come because it was the occasion to cometo. The people who needed to be there were a specific and particular group, connectedto the man in the specific and particular way that forty years of the right work producedconnections.The players he made.They came from different decades.The ones from the nineties were forty now, some of them. She had seen a photograph ofone of them on the wall of Marcus’s office at the academy, a photograph she had lookedat many times without registering the age of the player in it, and the player was now inthe chapel at forty, the specific quality of
Staying with him CHAPTER 144- What She Carries For Him
She let him fall apart in every room.Not all at once — grief did not work all at once, she had been in rooms with grief for nineyears and she knew the shape of it, the specific way it arrived in waves rather than in asingle event, the way a person could be alright and then entirely not alright in the samehour, the way the not-alright arrived without warning and the warning was the point, thepoint was that you could not prepare for it so you simply had to be in the room when itarrived.She was in every room.He fell apart in the kitchen on the Monday, standing at the counter, in the middle ofmaking coffee, the coffee half made and then stopped, his hands flat on the worktop inthe position she had always associated with the hip maintenance but which was not thatnow, which was a man needing the counter to lean against.She went to him.She stood beside him and she did not speak.He stood at the counter.After a long time he said, I keep forgetting and then remembering.Yes, she
Staying with him CHAPTER 143- Marcus
The call came on a Sunday at seven forty-three in the morning.She knew before he answered it. She was not a person who believed in premonitions.She was a person who understood that the body knew things before the conscious minddid, the body that had been attending to the patterns of a life for long enough to readthe departure from the pattern before it was explicit. The specific quality of the Sundaymorning, the quality of the phone on his side of the bed, the way he moved to answer it— she knew.He answered.She lay in the bed and she listened to his side of the call, which was nothing. A silence. Along silence. Not the silence of a call that had not yet connected or the silence oflistening. The silence of a man receiving something.He said: when.He said: alright.He said: thank you.He put the phone down.He sat on the edge of the bed.She waited.He said Marcus’s name.Just the name. Not a sentence around it, not an explanation. Just the name, said in thespecific way you
Staying with him Chapter 1: The Neighbor from Hell
Olivia had a system.Not in an obsessive way — or at least that’s what she told herself. It was just that life ran smoother when things were predictable. Coffee at seven, two cups, no sugar. Breakfast with something quiet playing in the background — Sade, maybe, or just the sound of the city waking
Staying with him Chapter 4: Caught
She woke up before him.6am, grey light coming through the gaps in his curtains, the television having switched itself off sometime in the night. For a moment — just a brief, disoriented moment — she forgot where she was. Then it came back. The flood. The knock. The blanket that smelled faintly of
Staying with him Chapter 3: Flooded
started with a sound.A low, persistent dripping that worked its way into Olivia’s sleep sometime around 3am and sat there until she couldn’t ignore it anymore. She opened her eyes to the dark ceiling, listened, and felt the specific dread of someone who already knows something is wrong before the
Staying with him Chapter 2: The View
Three weeks.That’s how long Olivia lasted before she stopped filing noise complaints and accepted that Damien Cole was simply a fact of her life now — like traffic, or difficult clients, or the radiator that clicked every night at 2am. Unavoidable. Irritating. Something to be managed.She managed
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