Perfectly Preventable Deaths

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Our father died in flames when he was twenty-six and we were two.

We don’t remember. All we have is story. Sense memory, the feeling of soft earth. His name upon a pitted slab, limestone, lichen-pocked. Orange, white and crinkled dry as paper. The smell of grave implanting in our nail beds. Our fingers scraping through to trace his name.

They found him lying in the woods, a group of children on a nature walk. In a small, round glade between the trees – the beech, the oak, the hawthorn and the elm. The leaves beneath him weren’t even burnt.

‘He always cared for everything around him,’ Mam said once. ‘Even in death, he kept the forest safe.’

It’s not something we talk about too often.

The images I have might not be real. A voice. A lap. Helping plant the flowers in our garden. Little hands and big ones thick with earth. Memories are versions of what happened, stories that we’ve told ourselves enough. The fiction ivy-winding around the real, to strangle out the bad, promote the good. If you’re not careful, ivy eats a house. It lets in rot.

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