It was impossible to do more than offer a smiling – or was it grimacing? – acknowledgement to reminiscences and consoling thoughts. Much as I might want to. Much as I appreciated the words and letters of friends and the person they almost conjured up, I couldn’t trust my own lips – myself. The self I thought I knew, or at least had more than a passing acquaintance with, had gone missing.
Trapped in too many contradictions, I was in a perpetual rage in those first weeks and months, perhaps year. Rage – that ancient cornerstone of madness, so much one of its constitutive parts that in American English ‘mad’ is a cognate of ‘angry’.
I couldn’t read, certainly not fiction. Characters’ names and doings would vanish as soon as my eyes had got to the end of a page, sometimes the end of a sentence. If I started a novel I wanted or needed to read, I could never get to the end. I just didn’t want endings. The pile of novels by the bedside spilled over on to his side of the bed.
I couldn’t trust my conversation with friends or children. I could just about watch television, though plot lines had preferably to be no more complex than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could dance to: often enough, while they were dancing, his words and the reassessment of our conjoined lives they brought in their wake would return, and with it the racing anger. Eventually I graduated to Colombo and The Good Wife.
I am not normally an angry person. Quite the contrary. I don’t hold resentments. I very rarely lose my temper. I occasionally shout at the news (more often in these recent years of alternative facts) but almost never, except during my children’s teenage years, at anyone else. But here I was, raging all the time. Had I been bottling it up through those last years of illness?
Too late. The object of my rage was dead. Too soon.
It did occur to me, with a rare glimmer of light, that maybe death itself was my object. My rage would undo it, like those cartoon characters who propel their tiny swords into the fiery mouth of the dragon.
The march of fury with its rhythm of endlessly repeated questions – why did you? How could you? – kept him alive. It seemed he could occupy at least two states simultaneously. He could be the unpardoning, immovable granite body of his deathbed, and the absent presence with whom I argued ceaselessly in the hope that he would one day answer my questions and assuage my fury.
THE ANGER PROPELLED ACTIVITY. Ceaseless doing was the only escape from the flagellations of death, even though I couldn’t altogether outrun them. I knew they would only stop if I succumbed to them utterly, lay down and allowed my own ‘too, too solid flesh’ to ‘melt,/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!’.
Only when you’re in the aftershock of death, do you realize quite how forensically Shakespeare charted that terrain. Hamlet is the great tragedy of states of mourning. Hamlet’s melancholy and partial madness, his ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw’, his sexualized rage, his suicidal self-abasement; Ophelia’s breakdown, her unhinged speech and suicide after Polonius’s murder; even Gertrude’s far too hasty leap into another bed, all spring from the lashings of death and the disturbances of grieving.
My body, which always seemed to know my wishes better than I did, had already opted for death at the end of John’s first lymphoma treatment back at the start of 2014. It could do so again, surely, I now thought. That time I had just lain down on our bed after a dental appointment and woken up in an ambulance where my name was being called over and over. Somehow I couldn’t reply.
All I recall of that cardiac arrest and briefly surfacing from some unknown depths is how wondrously pretty the paramedic was. I told her so, it seems, then passed out again to wake to the faces of my dear ones gathered round the hospital bed.
If he hadn’t been at home that day, I would have gone first. Evidently some part of me wanted to go. Couldn’t cope with the anxiety of his illness. Couldn’t bear him dying. Couldn’t bear the thought of an unanchored future in a land where, without him, I would once more feel intolerably foreign. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy my foreignness and the ethnographer’s distance it affords. But too much tosses me back to the vertiginous childhood condition of being a migrant, who can’t read the signs or tune into the language and with no place called home.
Better that I should have gone first, I now told myself over and over. I seemed to be in pain all the time in any case. My pills didn’t agree with me and I kept passing out, so low was my heart rate. My inflammatory system went into overdrive, as if I had sustained injuries I had failed to notice. Was I mirroring what he had felt without complaint? My back, my shoulders, my head, my fingers, my chest, all the area around my heart ached. My body seemed to be indicating it was doing my dying for me and I should stop haring about.
A friend later told me that I seemed to spend all my time leaning on any surface available – the countertops in the kitchen, the back of a chair, the table – as if there was an unbearable weight in my body, in my bones, that I could not carry alone: ‘like the heaviness that comes in dreams, that terrible inertia, that makes it impossible to run,’ she wrote. I had Lethe-wards sunk, as Keats has it in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
Some die of heartbreak, the medics know too well. The eighteen months following the death of a partner seem to be precarious, particularly for women. So John Bowlby’s study of mourning made clear back in the early 1960s.
The research shows that most women take a long time to get over the death of a husband and that, by whatever psychiatric standard they are judged, less than half are themselves again at the end of the first year. Almost always health suffers. Insomnia is near universal; headaches, anxiety, tension and fatigue are extremely common. In any mourner there is increased likelihood that one or more of a host of other symptoms will develop; even fatal illness is more common in the bereaved than it is in others of the same age and sex.
My mind might be absent, even as it chatted to friends who seemed to think I made sense, but it raced and sometimes my feet followed. The echoing family house, though it had been mine before he came into my life, was now rarely friendly. I kept walking from room to empty room, forgetting what I was looking for. I would rearrange flowers, plump up cushions, fold clothes for Oxfam, move books, papers, furniture. I think it was in those early days that I decided to shift the bed we had placed in the front room in case he was too weak to climb stairs when he got back from hospital. But that meant dislodging something else … and on it went. I was looking for an absence but that absence was also in myself. Neither of us could be found. Meanwhile there had to be the mutually contradictory acts of rearrangement and commemoration.
That I had been left to deal with bureaucracy, with the remains of too many days funnelled into an alien computer whose filing system made as much sense to me as a Rubik’s Cube, was fuel for more rage and more activity.
Not that I can easily recall the particularity of most of my doings. I think I was living in a state of rational delusion. My scrappy, all-but-unreadable diary of the time is crowded with instructions to myself, meetings with family and friends, and crossings out. Pick up forms from hospital. Write to department in Cambridge. Sort out obits. See funeral director. Invite guests. Order flowers. Order funeral food. Contact Highgate Cemetery. Choose site. Confer with children. Write to banks. Find will. Speak to lawyers. Confer with children. Cancel, cancel, cancel. Fill out forms, fill out forms, fill out more forms.
The bureaucracy of death seems to want to compete with death itself in the horror stakes. I began to think it was winning.
At night and at odd times of the day I would pass into a state of torpid exhaustion and sleep the sleep of the dead uncluttered by dreams, or any dreams I can remember. Dreams or, rather, nightmares were daytime activities – at least initially.
One morning, I think it was just before the funeral, I came downstairs shivering. It was a dank, chill November, yet the house felt colder than usual. I wandered into the kitchen, turned the radio on for the sound of human voices, put the kettle to boil. A gust of cold air