last, cold and small in the great vaulted chamber that, in my memory, dwarfs everything inside it, though the figures – the prostrate one of my father, my mother bent over him – glow as if someone had turned a stage spotlight on them.
My mother is talking. She is whispering to my father, wrapping him in endearments, speaking Polish and Yiddish and French, though not English. I don’t know why she is talking to him, since to us, her nearest family, it seemed he hadn’t heard her for years and certainly can’t now. Anyhow, I tell myself, she didn’t love him – at least, not any more. They were always battling. She’s not crying, I can see that. Where are her tears? Her keening? Her visible sorrow? Her words are empty and have no resonance.
I gaze at my father and know that just the evening before he had pleaded with me to get him out of there, out of the hospital. It was me, his daughter, he had asked – though in the delirium that took him back to the terror of the war years, I was his sister. He hadn’t asked my mother: in his hallucination she was off cavorting with the SS guards.
Without realizing it, and because I probably preferred it that way, I took on the mantle of my father’s wayward emotions. I didn’t yet understand that the fragility that accompanies extreme illness, with the inevitable sense of diminishment it puts into play, often induces persecutory fear. Nearest to him, my mother had appeared complicit in his illness, so for him I was the loyal one, she the traitor.
That’s why there are no tears in her wide blue eyes, I told myself, back then.
Through the lens of time, I recognize this as a daughter’s narrative, one that comes with a propelling mythological force and is often replicated in ordinary families. The father-daughter bond is strong. Even where there’s paternal jealousy of the line of suitors, the bond has none of the murderous or competitive charge of that between fathers and sons. Mothers are far more difficult for their daughters to come to inner terms with.
Athena, goddess of wisdom, never needed a mother at all and leaped fully formed from her father Zeus’s brow. In Euripides’ play, Electra urges her brother Orestes to murder their mother, Clytemnestra. She helps him push the sword down her throat, thereby avenging their mother’s murder of their father, who had himself brutally sacrificed their sister – a fact Electra chooses to forget, at least until the deed is done. Antigone, at the end, leads her blind, ailing father Oedipus to Colonus. Freud, who reinvigorated the Oedipus story for modern times, called his own daughter, Anna, his Antigone. She became his voice and companion in older age, never betraying him with another man, often deprecating her mother, not only where intellectual matters were concerned.
We grow into our families and our myths simultaneously, the latter often enough shaped by the former, but the shaping also happens the other way round.
The mother-daughter bond is both trickier and stickier than the paternal one: daughters love their mothers but they need to leave them as far behind as Persephone did Demeter, descending even to Hell, to wriggle or leap somehow into independence and sexual awakening.
In adolescence, and often far beyond, it is imperative not to become the clone of that irritating, delimiting figure. The mother’s ageing body – in Elena Ferrante’s resonant Neapolitan Quartet, Lena’s mother even has a telling limp – needs to be shed like a constricting skin and certainly barred from any associations with sex, even with Daddy. Yet we’re glued to our mothers with that formative, largely wordless bond, which is a set of embodied gestures and rarely visible habits. She keeps coming back, smiling through our lips, lifting a hand to our hair, chiding the child we no longer are, but who is now another.
Back then, when my father died, I distrusted my mother. I was suspicious: she had never been able to give me a full medical history of my dad’s ills (or hers, for that matter). I couldn’t bear the thought that she harassed him for smoking. I would point out that she was killing him by forbidding him his killing cigarettes, so that he had secretly to wander the streets in search of them, losing his bearings in the process.
The daughter I then was treated her mother none too well. I couldn’t fully embrace her. I questioned her judgement. I questioned the reality of her love for her husband of a lifetime. How was it that she could smile at a passing attendant, even while my father lay dead in front of her? Indeed, I colluded with my dying and delirious father’s view of her: as we stood over him in the morgue, both terrified by the inert body between us, one of my few thoughts – or, rather, fantasies – was that perhaps if I had led him out of the hospital the previous evening, he would still be alive. Some part of me believed or wanted to believe there were hidden truths in his diabetic delirium.
After the visit to the morgue, I took my mother home. Once my brother had flown in, I left her in his hands. I convinced myself she preferred them. After the funeral, just a few days later, I went off to make love to a man I barely knew – as if enlaced bodies could save us from death’s inertness.
Am I wiser, now that I have grown children of my own, about mothers and daughters, about the tug of unknown forces that lurches us into word or act or simply overwhelms and undoes us?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Whatever the case, my children will inevitably see my blind spots and limitations. I know this, just as I know that I treasure them and they hold me dear. But knowing, though it helps, often can’t save you from feeling, and the contradiction between the two, and everything it brings in train, can create a condition akin to madness.
I suspect we all experience it, just as we are all thrown into disarray by that other universal experience: death.
THIS IS NOT A ROMANTIC TALE. I would have liked it to be a story of adoring and honouring and tears of sadness over the great loss of a fine man. It is that, too, but it’s not that alone. Death, like desire, tears you out of your recognizable self. It tears you apart. The eyes and arms, the recognition that used to hold you together as you, are no longer there. That you was all mixed up with the other. And both of those have disappeared. The I who speaks, like the I who tells this story, is no longer altogether reliable. Though now that I can begin to shape a sentence with that pronoun in it, I feel a little more like my old, if altered, self.
A day before he died, the morning after he had been moved into the fortress-like high-care hospital room from the cancer clinic next door, John uttered the words that resonated through me for months. Words can be performative.
We had been living for two weeks on the top floor of a building overlooking London’s busy Tottenham Court Road, a three-minute walk from the shiny new clinic where the daily treatments took place. This was the hospital hotel. Each room had a patient and a partner or carer in it. There was a lounge and a breakfast-dining area. From one point of view, it was a tourist’s delight – modern, clean, functional, central – but it was also a hellhole of illness and suffering. Everyone smiled, pretended cheer.
I was a star Pollyanna: though I’m a terrible and impatient nurse, I seem to be able to see the bright lining of most clouds, even thunderous ones. That night, I couldn’t. It might have occurred to me then, or perhaps it was later, that no one at the hospital – in all respects a wonderful and pioneering institution – ever talked of death. They talked only of chances. We were gamblers in a high-tech casino, playing against unknown odds – unknown not only because of the newness of the treatment but because each body, let alone each mind and set of emotions, is so uncooperatively individual.
That evening, we had watched a DVD of some stand-ups and laughed uproariously. In the middle of the night, John fell over on his way to the bathroom some three metres from the bed. I was meant to take him to the clinic if that happened. Falling. It was a signal we had been warned of. He was in neutropenia – a pretty word used to describe a scary state of no immunity in which infections can rampage. It was four days after Day Zero – the apocalyptic name given to the day when the harvested stem cells had gone back into his chemically cleaned system. But the cells hadn’t yet started their rebooting activity.
John flatly refused to leave the hotel room. He said he was fine and we