Place, Space, Continuity and Change

During the first half of this year, I had a fair few, more than usual, trips to my former city of residence, London. On one of these jaunts southward I experienced a sort of pang of realisation - Tottenham Court Road tube station made me sad. ‘But it has that effect on all, dear’ might be a natural response to such a declaration, but the sadness I felt, I realised, moved beyond the location’s inner-city-inherently-dull nature.  Rather, the flash of melancholy I experienced came from the memory that was prompted - the last time I had oyster-carded my way through the barriers, I had been with my brother. I don’t recall why we were there or why we ultimately separated at that particular station, but there we indeed had been. I remember I handed Martin a tenner to enable sustenance for his stomach and nicotine-need for the afternoon before we headed for our different exits. I can still sense in my body the people who bumped into us both as I rummaged for my wallet. At the time of our exchange and parting, the station was rather dingy, air-less and space-less. Walking through the concourse in 2019, the floor gives a sense of dance studio spaciousness - walls have been knocked through, rebuilt further from one other, now white and lined with light coloured tiles that try to persuade the transiting people hosted that this is ‘a modern place of being’, rather than ‘this is an old pub toilet’. Not a soul bashed into me. It was this altered experience of the tube spot that distressed me so; the passage of time since I last shared this geographical space with my brother so blatant.

As my day in the capital continued, it became apparent that my areas of the city (because everyone has ‘their London’) were intent on pushing forth more memories that made the same point. One in particular surfaced as I walked by the British Library. I had stood with my brother outside this epic building, delivering a sibling pep talk, trying to boost his confidence for the job interview he was about to attend. Dressed in a suit and not wearing slippers, both highly unusual behaviours for him, he was visibly anxious, convinced of his own failure before even approaching the final stepped-strait up to the staff entrance. I was attempting to coax him to breathe, relax, be himself, (spewing the usual guff that means approximately zero when anxiety is through the roof). And I was trying not to show that I was as nervous for him as he was for himself. He had pinned much hope on this interview as a turning point, as an avenue out of his depression-darkness, and I could read this in his eyes as we walked down the black cab adorned street at the side of the library, across from the then building site that is now the Hogwarts-ish St Pancras Renaissance Hotel.

The Kings Cross area looks lovely now, bustling, with the perpetual excitement of travel bouncing off its walls. The atmosphere easily infects, even if travel is not on the agenda. But with a flick of my mind I can obliterate the dust-free present, reverting it back to the mess of construction and regeneration-in-progress; if I do that I can access the image of Martin and I together more clearly, before he didn’t get the job, and before he didn’t take his own life.  

Places are people memories too.

‘Geography’ as a subject is not one I pursued beyond Year 9 - I was 13 when, once the requirement to study it no longer existed, it got ditched. I was therefore surprised to find my interest in the idea of spaces and places increasing after this London meander, and to also find myself typing ‘geography’ and ‘grief’ into a search engine, curious to see what would appear.

Apparently there is actually a specific area of this subject that researches connections between geography and loss. Work talks about things like ‘spatialities of bereavement, mourning and remembrance’ and ‘deathscapes’ (Maddrell, 2015: 166-7). Everything is considered, from ‘medical geography’ (mapping disease and related mortality etc.) to ‘places of memorialisation’ (cemeteries etc.) to ‘absence’ and now ‘online grief spaces’. A large part of the work looks at ‘the places where the death occurs’. For me this would actually mean an entire country - Mexico. Clearly my loss and grief experience very much has its own ‘specific geographical character’.  It was in Mexico that I was last in the physical presence of my brother (ironically on the Day of the Dead…); it was there that I learned via Skype that he had taken his own life; it was there that I learned the coroner had ruled his death ‘Open’ not ‘Suicide’, thereby plunging me into a spiral of self-doubt regarding the actual nature of his mind and vulnerability, and my role in his death; it was there that managing the time difference to feel connected to my UK-based family in the first year of grief became stressful; and it was there that the beginnings of the sense of emotional isolation that often accompanies suicide loss began to develop. It was also in Mexico where, a few months after Martin’s death, that my husband and I were one sleepy Sunday morning involved in a major car crash with a drug-driver, whose actions ultimately made us witnesses to him killing himself in a violent smash. Reeling and shaking from the shock, sitting on the side of an open, tree-lined road, being chastised for my lack of mastery in Spanish speaking by one of the officials, I felt sudden intense homesickness and a massive sense of ‘I am the only one left and I do not want to be in this place’.

They say not to make any ‘big decisions’ in the first year of grief; we moved back to the UK, me convinced of the ‘rightness’ of that move and change.    

I suppose these memories should suggest that Mexico is a ‘hard place’ for me, a place to avoid given its attachment to one of the most emotionally dark periods of my life. During that first year of my ‘new’ life, I confess I had a difficult emotional relationship with the country – if I hadn’t changed my life and moved there, if I had remained in our birth country, would Martin have lived? It’s not unusual for geographical distance between siblings to increase as their ages do (it’s a normal part of ageing and sibling relationships to see moves away from first together-homes), but a change in distance does affect, sometimes adversely,relationships. Part of my grieving was certainly blaming myself for putting a massive chunk of earth and ocean in between Martin and I – Mexico was a big part of my failing him, contributing to the lessening contact I had with him and reducing my ability to provide accessible and swift sisterly support.

But here’s where research can be useful - the ‘Geography of Death’ people point out that places are as much about ‘patterns and stages in relationships’ as they are about the earth itself, and consequently “responses to spaces associated with death and mourningmay vary over time”. I like the description Karen Till uses: places “are fluid mosaics and moments of memory”. Perhaps this helps me explain to myself why my meaning of Mexico has also changed over the last 7.5 years - it is not an unhappy place I wish to get away from, abandon, but rather one I wish to run to, exist in. I find, come the time of year to decide on summer holiday getaways, there is nowhere else I wish to see, hear, feel, smell or touch. The places and spaces I wished so much to return to in the UK initially brought comfort and reassurance with their familiarity, but there is no escaping how being in and at these locations has since changed because of Martin’s death – I still love my childhood city but every street I walk along in it has an ever-present sadness lingering because there is an invisible ‘Martin woz ‘ere’ plastered everywhere. That can be overbearing if not overwhelming at times.

It is now Mexico that provides me with relief. When I’m there, and with the distance of space at play, I can recall little instances like the comfort given by the sun’s warmth and light as my husband helped me breathe fresh air in our coto residencial immediately after the morning

Entrance to our Coto

call that told me of my brother’s death; the way my new aunt-in-law caressed my hands with hers whilst letting me cry later that same day; the way one of my students, who had lost her sister as a little girl, invited me to Starbucks so we could talk, neither of us really able in the other’s language but still able to communicate and empathise and advise.

Abi May writes, after experiencing the loss of her daughter, that “When we’re living with loss, we have memories of special places that may bring us tears or joy – not just cemeteries and memorial gardens, but ordinary places that may still be a part of our daily lives. The people walking past those places have no idea just how significant they are.” It is not the stereotypical sun, sea, sombreros and tequila shots that explain my love of Mexico – it is the everyday experiences and sensations I had and felt, and the daily life places in which I walked, in those first months after my loss that, when recalled, remain calming and grounding.

The way ceiling fans form blurry circles and whirr, producing cool air that dives down to skim

the skin; the way fingers smell after sprinkling finely chopped fresh coriander on a taco; the way eyes seek out the smoothest lime skin in the thousand-strong fruit mountain at Walmart (to ensure the best juice is delivered); the smell of citronella warding off (though not always successfully) mosquito beasts; the elation that springs in the blood with even the merest glimpse of a hummingbird; the glorious taste of picante salsa mixed with maple syrup eaten mixed with huevos revueltos; the sound of a cow bell as bin men come to collect the refuse; the way the traffic noise and accompanying warm road dust fills your head as your taxi cruises the road network; the way café de olla relaxes your shoulders with the first sip; the way your toes fight to stabilise flip flops as you try to walk as normally as possible on uneven paving.

Mexico is obviously volatile, its suffering of severe problems visible to all, the country most

definitely a far from perfect space, but when I revisit my personal everyday as it was when I called it home, it is a feeling of peace that I get.

Most important of all, with the waning of shock and the passage of time since December 2011, Mexico has managed to give me back some happier memories of my brother. I have come to realise that when in Mexico, I experience the separation of ‘old life with sibling’ and ‘new life without’ much less - the rupture that Martin’s death placed in my life is less keenly felt precisely because being in the country reminds me of good images of him when he was also there. Us, just talking, alone, on the morning of my wedding, on a terracotta-floor-tiled balcony, looking out over green jungle to the turquoise Caribbean Sea horizon; him slurping a mango juice on the beach at my wedding and voicing his pleasure to me that I’d included Rodrigo y Gabriela on the dinner

playlist; him crouching like Gollum (a marginally prettier version) on a cenote wall ledge, surveying the waters; him fully engaged with our guide’s histories as we navigated the ruins at Chichen Itza. He remained clearly ill, but I can seen now that he loved being in Mexico those days, just a few weeks before he died.

Last summer, one evening, my family and I were at one point with two friends and their son. Their boy and my daughter sat with the four of us adults, replenishing their playing energy with their evening meal. As they ate, one friend compiled drinks for the adults at the breakfast bar whilst the other played Martin’s music from his still-existing SoundCloud page – our friends had been interested to hear the work, being musicians themselves. As the music played as background to our evening Spanglish chatter, I realised I had introduced my brother (and his musical legacy) to new people on the other side of the world who had never had the chance to meet him. And there we all were, the six of us content and existing in the room with Martin, the manner of his death utterly irrelevant in the enjoyment of his talent. There, there was borderless continuity in co-existence with the dramatic change his death had produced. It was this gathering that made apparent that it is not a case of either ‘he is here’ or ‘he is not here’ - it is simply the manner of Martin’s being in the world that has changed.

Because of all these elements, I can say, as I approach what would have been my brother’s 35 birthday and my 5^th voyage to the country since he died, that (now) Mexico is where I am more ok with my loss, and with the me I have become since his death, than any other location. My being in Mexico allowed Martin to come and experience a respite from his depression, even if just for a moment; travels to and in Mexico give me respite from my loss by reminding me of how Martin experienced happier times, and in giving me space to talk about him as he was, not how he died. Because of this Mexico has become my “emotionally ‘safe’ place”, having morphed with time from the exact opposite. It is a ‘place I shall always have’ as I continue my life as a changed sister to a changed brother.