Word: Deadstock

Word courtesy: The uncertainties around the Strait of Hormuz have made this word a source of quiet anxiety in every retail conversation lately. Goods that don't move. Inventory frozen in place.

The story I have with it:

Today’s word reminded me of my dad’s aunt. His mother’s sister. Every time I visited his aunt’s home as a child, she was on the bed.

Not resting. Not reading. Not waiting for someone to arrive. Just there. Occupying the large four-poster bed in a room that felt more like a held breath than a living space. Two four-poster beds facing each other, a Victorian dressing table that had seen better decades, wardrobes standing in the corners like quiet sentinels. And in the middle of all that stillness, her.

Immobile. Present. Part of the room’s furniture in a way that unsettled me without my being able to say why.

I never saw her walk around the house. May sound strange, but when I was a kid, most people in my family were youthful, middle-aged, steady, and fit. Perks of being a firstborn to young parents. Contextually, in this backdrop, when you visualise her, one would never have seen her go to the kitchen. Never saw her at the dining table during the grand family meals. Never saw her in the garden. She was always exactly where I had left her the last time.

Eventually, as children do when something doesn’t make sense, I asked.

“Why is Granny always in bed?”

My mother told me she had no feeling or pulse in the lower half of her body.

My first reaction, which I am not embarrassed to admit, was not sympathy. It was pure logistical curiosity. How does she pee? How does she manage at night? And then, somewhere underneath the practical questions, the one that actually mattered:

“Why is she like this? Was it a disease? An accident?”

My mother said I needed to grow up to get more answers.

So I waited.

She passed away before I was old enough to ask her directly. Her immobile presence on that bed was replaced by a photograph on the wall she used to face when sitting immobile on her bed. And strangely, looking at the photograph felt less heavy than looking at her had. The stillness of a photo is honest. It does not pretend to be life.

When I finally got the answer, I stood very quietly with it for a long time.

Uncontrolled childbirth.

Thirteen children over the course of her lifetime. A pair of twins folded somewhere into that number. Miscarriages in between, each one close enough to the next that her body never fully recovered from anything before it was asked to begin again.

At some point, a doctor had told her husband to stop.

Her body was deteriorating. The damage was visible and accumulating. Stop, the doctor said. This cannot continue.

But childbirth was a normal aspect of life, wasn’t it?

So they continued.

And her body, having given everything it had and then everything it did not have, simply stopped responding from the waist down. Became, in the truest and most devastating sense of the word, deadstock. Existing. Warehoused. No longer in circulation.

I don’t know if she was ever asked what she wanted.

I don’t know if the question even existed in the vocabulary of her life. Whether no was a word available to her, in that marriage, in that era, in that body that was treated as a vessel for continuity rather than a human being with limits and a right to them.

Half her life she spent mothering thirteen children.

The other half she spent sitting on a four-poster bed in a room that smelled of stillness, unable to feel her own legs, staring at a Victorian dressing table that stood witness to her reflection through the different phases of her life.

Sometimes I think about what her life might have looked like with two children. Or three. With a body that was consulted rather than consumed.

I think about the garden she never sat in.

The dining table she never came to.

The rooms of her own house, she spent decades not walking through.

Deadstock, in retail, describes goods that have no movement, no future transactions, and no possibility of return.

She was not ‘goods’.

But nobody in the room seemed to know the difference.