the magnus archives - miscellaneous files

Sonder - Case # 0141303

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Lovise Addens, regarding grief. Original statement given 13th March, 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

I guess I want to start this with an apology. I dunno, I've never really been good at writing things down. Especially when it came to sharing... personal information. I know that must sound absurd to whoever's reading this. That's pretty much every story you have here, isn't it? Personal recollections? That's how the person who recommended this place to me phrased it as anyways. A place to just get this all off my chest and maybe stop whatever is happening while I'm at it. And I really do want to share this, especially if this is gonna be able to help me get away. But even then, there's still that part of me that kind of wants to keep it to myself rather than share it.

And I'm also sorry if anyone here dies soon.

Anyways.

I... I've always known death was something natural. That everyone faces it, there's nothing you can do to stop it so you just enjoy the good times, remember them in a good light, etc., etc.. I guess, in a way, it all sort of just... went over my head. It's just that you never really truly realize how permanent death is until it finally strikes close to home. Like how it feels being told that's just how something works over and over like when you're a kid again without explanation and don't understand why your parents aren't as excited as you are to wake up at 1 am on a Christmas morning to open presents and be the ones to clean up the wrapping paper from the living room floor because you're already distracted with the new toy you got until you're grown and your little sister's doing the same thing to you and you realize just how aggravating it feels.

Or maybe that's just me. And maybe that was a bad analogy.

Growing up, my family had always been pretty closed off to the rest of our relatives. It wasn't that there was bad blood or anything dramatic like that between either of my parents and their sides of the family. It was just that once my parents had the opportunity to leave the little town they'd spent their whole lives in as childhood sweethearts— well, it didn't take them a long conversation to make their decision. As my parents became more and more busy as they got better promotions from their jobs, visits became harder to plan with relatives who also had their own lives to live outside of us. We'd still all meet for the holidays, though. A four hour trip back to St Davids from Birmingham wasn't the end of the world or anything for my parents. And once I moved out to my own flat in London, I just fell into the habit of traveling back again for the holidays. Outside of that, I didn't talk to or visit my relatives.

Only my grandma.

So when she finally died from old age, I... it was like the concept of death had suddenly actually shot into existence right then and there when I got the phone call instead of whatever not-quite reality it'd been in before. It was a numbing sensation when it all really, finally sunk in. That shove back to a reality you can never unknow or unfeel. I remember me and my dad having a cry together over the phone. A few days later I got the details for her funeral in an email.

I'd been to funerals before but they'd always been relatives I either could barely remember or didn't even know were related to me before my parents broke the news to me. It always felt so surreal before, attending those funerals when everyone else was properly mourning for someone you were too young to remember and too young to know how you should be acting.

At Nan's funeral though, it was like I could finally understand something that I thought I already knew. But I really didn't know until then. I think that was the worst part of it all, being sucker-punched by something you thought you already knew how to handle. But I didn't know how to handle it. It was painful, the burning hole in my chest that was a cold void and hurt with every breathless inhale and exhale I managed to take sitting in some dusty old church. Everything felt too much, like I was going to suffocate there from both the grief and just the existence of everything pressing down on me as my throat burned from every emotion I didn't know I could experience this intensely . Most of that day passed by in a haze for me. Having all of these demanding emotions squeezing my heart kind of made it hard to focus on anything that wasn't trying to breathe. Hell, I can't even remember the address or the name of the church the ceremony happened in. I can't even remember the eulogy my uncle gave.