Can Whimsy Die?

 Foreword

I haven’t written a word yet this year. Well, I’ve texted. I changed a line in a poem, too. I also made notes for a Youtube video- sorry, I started making notes for a Youtube video. I haven’t properly written, though. No prose or the like. Not until now, at least. The me of January 2024 would have been mildly embarrassed by this. What sort of ‘proper’ writer gets two (plus a day) whole weeks into the new year and hasn’t written a word? Is what I would have thought. Fortunately- and it is fortunate, because the agonising self-torment one engages in as an egotistical tortured artist is truly exhausting- I don’t really care anymore. Art is art because it's an authentic expression of one’s self. That’s how I’ve learned to see it. My writing will be written when it's time to write and not a moment sooner. With that preamble, I present to you- a middling piece of flash fiction that I had not even remotely planned out before I started typing. 

Can Whimsy Die?

Grief is a funny thing. Well, not really. Grief is actually rather sad. Stressful, too. Not to mention confusing. The insanity surrounding how the average person chooses to express it and live with it- that’s funny. It should be, at least. If we can’t laugh at what doesn’t make sense then it’s about time for somebody to ring Oxford up and have them delete the word ‘whimsy’ from the dictionary.

To Roger, it was as if the powers that be really did go and delete whimsy from the world. Roger adored whimsy in its entirety. The unbridled capacity to inspire joy held by the things in life that dare to strive away from the mundane gave him a reason to get up every day. Nothing produced serotonin like seeing a dog in a raincoat. Dogs aren’t meant to wear coats- clothes are famously for people. His personal favourite is when clouds look like things, such as the one he saw last Thursday that looked just like Willem Dafoe. Clouds aren’t meant to be things- they’re just clouds. The ones that dare to dance to a different tune than their decidedly non-Willem Dafoe like friends always get a chuckle from him. 

There was nothing for Roger to adore about life today. From the moment he crawled out of bed (the couch in his parent’s living room) and arrived at his great aunt’s funeral, not one thing had been even remotely entertaining. He understood funerals were meant to be sad, but he did not understand why Eunice had to go and take the world’s whimsy to the other side with her. No, today was a day for grey. Grey skies, grey suits and grey faces. It was as if he had slipped and fell into a world consisting entirely of monochrome.

As if the dullness of the day wasn’t overwhelming enough, Roger has to speak. Four siblings and two cousins who all knew Eunice at least as well as he did, if not better. Not to mention his father, uncle and grandparents. To top it all off, the chapel was full to the brim of all friends and acquaintances who knew his great aunt and wanted to see her off. Alas, the speaking fell to the one family member with the brains and the confidence to come up with a fitting memento to her better days. Roger didn’t mind speaking, after all- he offered. Still, though, he couldn’t help but falter under the weight of it all. Why did nobody else want to say anything?  Did the world know something about the kind old lady that he didn’t? He knew about the heroin, but that was decades ago. He knew about the brief prison time, too. Again, that was decades ago and for nothing more than cumulative petty misdemeanours. Oh well, the past is the past.

Before he knew it, the woman who worked for the crematorium had finished reciting the facts about Eunice his father had prepared for her and it was time for Roger to speak. The world stood still the moment he arose. How could he go through with this? His grandfather had only reconnected with Eunice ten years ago. Roger was ten by the time he met her for the first time, there were no fond memories of early childhood to look back on. What's more, he only really saw her a few times a year at family events. How was it his place to look back on the life of a woman he barely knew? His grief felt like nothing more than an obligation, a silent pact made by polite society when someone they knew departs this world. 

As much as he did not know how he was going to go through with this, time unfroze and his feet kept walking. He regaled almost one hundred people with tales of a life well-lived. The adventures of a woman who knew the ins and outs of casual misdeeds like most people knew the ins and outs of their favourite pair of shoes. The capacity she held for love and her uncanny knack for brightening the lives of any person she stumbled upon. Roger was realising as he spoke that he held as much right to regale the people of the world with the saga of Eunice as anyone. Telling stories such as these is no different to academics reciting the works of Homer. These people had never and will never meet the man, but the Odyssey is an adventure that everyone deserves to hear. 

Grief is hard. Grief is easy. Grief is sad and with the right people grief can be happy. Grief is everything a therapist will tell you it is and nothing like they’ve ever discussed before. It’s all the emotions in one and none of them side by side. The only difference between the concept of grief and a snowflake is that snowflakes are always cold- share your grief with a fellow griever and it provides a warmth unlike any other. All of this made sense to Roger three hours later, surrounded by all the people Eunice had befriended in her sixty-eight years around the globe. It clicked when he saw a man proudly roaming the pub in a fedora he must have dug out of a recently unearthed time capsule from the 1950s. 

Whimsy didn’t die- it just took a respectful break.