Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  A Day of Our Life

  Memories are stored as snapshots, flashes in the cortices.

  Nine months after we married, we had our first wonderful child, and two years later, our second. We were delighted with our children, and devoted to them, but in retrospect it is clear to me that we missed having a honeymoon period. After the secret relationship, with all its problems, we plunged directly into parenthood with all its challenges. We were good enough parents, and the children turned out well, but life was sometimes stormy. I held down a full-time job that I didn’t really want for some of the time, a part-time job for all of it. Bo was full time and then retired. Both of us were committed to writing. There was a constant struggle to find time to fit in everything. For instance, when I went on maternity leave – just three months, in 1983, and officially the first month was supposed to be taken before the child was born – I immediately started writing a novel. When the baby napped, I sat at my typewriter and wrote. Bo too was always anxious to work at his transcriptions, editorial work and articles. This was a desperate need for both of us, and it caused tension and friction. There were ongoing arguments about housework and childcare – I was obsessed by feminism, and aware that it was outrageous that women still did most of the housework. Retrospectively, I know I was right in theory but in practice we would have had a much more pleasant life if I had let those theories go, or if I had relaxed them a little. Quarrelling is such a waste of time.

  Could it have been otherwise? Possibly, if I had felt secure enough to give up my job, stay at home, and combine writing and looking after the children. But I didn’t feel secure enough. I was always worried about money, even though we always had enough. I was worried about the future. If I gave up my job I might never get another, was my view: Ireland was like that, in the seventies and eighties. There was no flexibility, there was massive unemployment. Apart from all its other downsides, that limits people’s freedom. Anyone who has a job stays in it, for fear of never getting another one. Economic paralysis ensues.

  I had reason to be careful. Bo, worn down by stress and smoking, had a heart operation just as our first baby was being born – he was in hospital, getting a triple bypass, when I was in hospital giving birth.

  From that time I felt afraid that Bo would die.

  That he lived for another thirty years was a blessing. But almost every day I was aware that life was precarious – his life. My own I never considered at risk. I was going to live for ever. And actually I had no health problems.

  Nor did Bo, after the bypass, until the day in September 2011 when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

  It’s possible to have a career and be a parent, and handle everything efficiently and smoothly. But it is doubtful if it’s possible to have two careers and be a parent with ease. That’s what I tried to do.

  Although I always knew I was in love with Bo, I was not completely happy with our life together until the children were grown up, had left home, and until I had left my job in the National Library and had enough time to write. This happened in 2007, the year my mother died. We had six years of perfect happiness together.

  That’s lucky.

  SATURDAY

  DAY 12,000

  Thin ice

  Marja and I spent Friday night in the green room, sleeping on the slippery sofas, our coats doing duty as quilts. The rest of the family stayed in our house in Shankill. At 6 a.m., the night nurse told us Bo’s blood pressure had gone down. Marja phoned Shankill and everyone arrived. We spent Saturday morning in the green room. We took it in turns to go in and out to Bo – I was there most of the time.

  At about one, we were all allowed in together.

  Bo was stretched on the bed, his eyes closed, his mouth stretched. I had been talking to him all along.

  I go on talking. I tell him the story of his own life – all the anecdotes I remember, from his childhood on. He was always telling me about his life so I know the stories very well. About the boys’ room and the girls’ room and the room where the apples were stored in winter, giving off such an intoxicating fragrance. About his mother who tended a garden full of flowers and fruit – red raspberries and yellow raspberries – who cooked pike and perch with wonderful sauces. About Anderson’s Epicerie, the big general store not far from the Almqvists’ house in Edsgata. About running wild all summer in the forest with his friend, Yngve. About skiing to school in winter, skating on the lake. Going to school on the train, to Karlstads Läroverk. His first trips away, to Switzerland, Paris, then Iceland and Ireland. I tell him about our holidays together, I describe them, I tell him I love him, I ask him to forgive me for the times I was angry and mean, all those things. We sing ‘Santa Lucia’. I sing ‘Cuaichín Ghleann Neifín’. I talk and talk. I recite sonnets by Shakespeare. I say Fröding, Fröding, Fröding, now you’ll have to supply the rest (this Hanna, Bo’s granddaughter, tells me later. Fröding was Bo’s favourite poet, partly because he came from the same place as he did, namely the parish of Alster in Värmland. He is, or was, one of the most popular of all Swedish poets, somewhat on a par with Yeats or Kavanagh or Heaney in Ireland.).

  At about ten to two the nurse tells us his blood pressure has gone right down.

  We kiss him goodbye.

  Me, his daughter, his sons, his grandchildren, his in-laws, his nephew Emmet, who has appeared at the last moment.

  We are all still there, gathered around the bed, when a doctor comes and tells us that Bo’s heart has stopped beating. It stopped at a minute past 2 p.m. on Saturday, 9 November 2013.

  I sit with him alone for a while.

  Soon I get impatient.

  I have lost the battle; what is the point of this? I flounce out of the ICU.

  In the dreadful green room, somebody has produced a bottle of whiskey. Although I can understand this, I find it disconcerting. Just minutes ago Bo was alive. But the Irish wake is already beginning.

  Ragnar takes my arm and we go back to the car.

  I insist on driving.

  The petrol tank is close to empty and I also insist on stopping at the garage. Ragnar fills it for me and goes into the cashier while I sit at the wheel, looking at someone driving a Volvo into the big crushing wheels of the carwash. The last time I filled the tank was in Lifford, at Daly’s Garage, on the way to Gweedore in the lashing Donegal rain. Bo beside me, reassuring me that we’d probably be in time for dinner with Micheál.

  Ragnar comes back and I drive home, in bright November sunshine.

  PART TWO

  Afterword

  The world is full of widows – several among my closer friends. We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged, but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage … alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad. Every decision now taken alone, no one to diffuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience – everywhere, always, so get on with it and don’t behave as though you are uniquely affl icted.

  Penelope Lively, Ammonites & Leaping Fish. A Life in Time

  Penelope Lively, one of the many writers whose work comforted me during the first shocking years of grief, describes it succinctly, but well.

  When your spouse or partner, the person who is closest to you in this world, dies, and especially if they die abruptly, you may go into a state of shock and denial. As is well known, these reactions are part of the stages of grief. There is plenty of debate about the concept of the ‘stages’ – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous ‘five stages’ – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. This catalogue originally described the reactions of terminally-ill patients to their own diagnoses, and was later expanded by Kübler-Ross to cover responses to many kinds of loss. She herself questioned her original theory that the affected person moves chronologically through the various stages, and her
concepts in general have been questioned and criticised. Nevertheless they are almost always cited in any work on bereavement and grief. George Bonanno found that the most significant response of the bereaved was ‘resilience’: they recover to the point where grief is absent. Colin Murray Parkes, in his investigations of bereavement, also notes the role of resilience. A majority of widows investigated by him in a London survey in the 1960s reported improvements in feelings after a year. If considerable improvement was not in place after eighteen months, he suggests that ‘complicated grief’, rather than ‘natural grief’, is involved.

  The bereaved may experience some or all of the ‘stages’ of denial, anger, sorrow, acceptance – in a random order. (Bargaining does not seem to fit into the catalogue of emotions for the bereaved; obviously those who are terminally ill or attached to the terminally ill may bargain with God – take me, rather than him, or whatever. But I cannot see a place for bargaining in the catalogue of emotions felt by those whose loved one has died, unless they believe in miracles. If you send him back I will give all my money to the church? It doesn’t make sense.) These strong emotions are likely to assault the individual in a series of waves, which overwhelm, then recede. As time moves on, the recessions or gaps become longer, and the waves of strong emotion less intense and easier to cope with. That’s the theory, and in my experience, it is more or less accurate.

  In the few weeks immediately following Bo’s death, I felt the numbness and emotional denial that is described in the literature about bereavement. It seemed to me that I had no feelings at all. Rather, I had a curious sense of being hollow, without anything inside my skin – no stomach, heart, or emotions. Perhaps I was aware, viscerally, that the part of my identity, my personality, myself, which was Bo, had now gone? It was as if my innards had been scooped out and I was like a blown-up plastic doll, empty inside. Or transparent, like a ghost.

  On the surface, I assumed I looked and behaved just as usual. I was surprised at what I was happy to call my ‘resilience’, the term I quickly picked up from reading Colin Murray Parkes’ book. One latches on to any concept that offers hope or comfort.

  And certainly one seems resilient, at first. The theory is that the mind shuts down, so the body will have time to adjust to the new situation. This may be an exaggeration of the response, or just a piece of folklore. At first, it seemed that I just didn’t have time to absorb the fact of Bo’s death – it had come about so suddenly. On Thursday, 7 November, I assumed Bo would recover. On Friday, 8 November, I was still being reassured by medical personnel that he would be okay. On Saturday, 9 November, he was dead. And as is usually the case when someone dies, the first week or two were extremely busy, filled with events and people. My children and their partners stayed in the house; there was a constant stream of visitors, bringing casseroles and cakes and flowers, memories and sympathy. And of course there were visits to the undertakers, decisions to be made about the funeral, a service to be designed. The few weeks around the funeral were as filled with activity and tasks as very busy periods at work – it was not unlike the weeks leading to the opening of a major exhibition in the National Library, or coming up to a conference for which one has had organisational responsibility.

  No plans for the funeral were in place since Bo had died unexpectedly. We had on a few occasions talked about death and funerals, but in a light-hearted way. Once, long ago, Bo had asked to be cremated, and to have his ashes scattered in Dunquin Kerry. But in later years he wondered if it would be nice to have a grave, and asked me if I would go and leave flowers on it. ‘Are you mad?’ I had said. ‘I never go to graveyards! I don’t like them!’ Which was true. Back then. Before.

  Now, however, I decided that I would fulfil both requests. Bo could be cremated. Some of his ashes would be buried in the cemetery close to where we live, so he would have a grave and headstone that I could visit and lay flowers on. Later we would scatter the rest of the ashes in his beloved Dunquin.

  When Bo died on Saturday, 9 November, the consultant asked if I would agree to a post-mortem examination of the body, an autopsy. I agreed. I would have requested such an examination myself, if it had not been suggested. On Monday, 11 November, somebody telephoned from Loughlinstown and suggested that we skip the post-mortem, on the grounds that it would cause me further upset. But I didn’t find the idea upsetting; on the contrary, and I insisted that it go ahead. (Later, the consultant told me he had not authorised the request from the hospital to cancel the autopsy, and he knew nothing about it or why it had been made.) The post-mortem was carried out, and this meant that the funeral was delayed for a week. This did not concern me in the slightest. I needed a week to make all the arrangements, which were complicated since Bo was originally Lutheran, but for most of his life an agnostic, with a strong affection for Irish traditions – including the Irish traditions surrounding funerals. I tried to design a funeral that would honour all his affiliations, and was helped by family and friends to put together a service which was appropriate. In Sweden, Bo’s country, it is normal to hold funerals about three weeks after the death, so a week seemed like a reasonable period of waiting to me. I find the Irish tradition, holding the funeral a day or two after the death, almost unseemly in its haste. It is as there is a desire to get the whole thing over with and resume normal life as fast as possible. Since for the widow, normal life will not be resuming any time soon, if ever, there is really no rush.

  I don’t think I cried at all during that week, or at the funeral. A non-stop party was going on in my house. I was constantly aware that the most important person, for me, was missing, but the atmosphere was lively. Somebody gave me Xanax and I slept reasonably well. I could eat. There was little time to ponder what had happened. Even when I did, I could not believe that Bo was really dead. The phrase ‘I don’t believe it!’, uttered so often, in Ireland, in response to any surprising news, made perfect sense. I didn’t believe it. My body insisted that Bo was just away somewhere, on a trip abroad, or in Kerry, and would come back soon if I just hung on. He had to come back. How could it be otherwise? The arrangements – Which sort of coffin? Cremation or burial? Where will we have the service? – seemed to relate to someone else, some stranger. The funeral seemed like a toy funeral, a weird game that for some reason I was obliged to play. It was held in the small church in Belfield, since Belfield had been such a key locus in our lives, and everyone said it was a lovely service. Even during it, I felt no emotion, apart from a mild impatience with the whole thing and a wish to be elsewhere – at home with Bo. After the cremation in Mount Jerome, as people came and offered their condolences, I found myself looking over my shoulder, wondering where he was. I had had enough, as he or I often had at a party. It was time to escape, get into the car, go home and have a chat about the social event we’d just been at, and then return to our normal lives.

  One of the things I miss most is the possibility of relaxing totally with Bo, chatting frankly and ironically about the party or the lecture or the visit or the funeral. And then going back to reading and writing companionably, cooking and eating, watching the nine o’clock news.

  After about two weeks the fuss died down. My children went back to their own places and occupations. I was alone in the house. Good friends, especially two of Bo’s good friends, Pádraig and Roibeard, telephoned me every few days, to make sure I was all right, and my sister and some of my own friends were in frequent contact. But my sense of transparency and hollowness increased. I felt as if I were made of paper, moving through the rooms like a shadow, and the house seemed large and cold and alien. What was I doing here? I had hardly ever been in the house without Bo for longer than a few weeks.

  After two or three weeks, the soft grief, the tears, began to hit. The metaphors – waves, inundation, floods – are accurate. Grief dissolves you. I could no longer sleep upstairs in our bed; the big bedroom overlooking the sea was cold and frightening. I took to sleeping on the sofa in the front room. In the mornings I woke with a tight knot in
my stomach, and rocked myself in bed for half an hour before I could get up. In my diary I described the sensations of grief, ad nauseam – they lasted for several months:

  This is how grief feels: there is a heaviness in the chest. An iron ring around the heart. Tears on the bubble behind the eyes. Sometimes an empty feeling in the stomach.

  All these feelings can go away temporarily. But they return, as if the ring around the heart were the default position for the body.

  I began to panic about financial issues. There were many forms to fill in, at a time when the last thing I wanted to do was this sort of work. There was actually no immediate financial problem. But even when everything was sorted out the household income had been more than halved overnight, although all the main expenses remained the same. I didn’t know how or if I would manage. As it happens, everything fell into place gradually and this is no longer a problem, but dealing with a new economy and a new – lower – income is one of the issues, one of the immediate losses, that widows face and that adds to the terror of the experience, and this aspect of the new life is seldom discussed. Bo always helped me deal with worries of this and of any kind, reassuring me that everything would work out, and helping in practical ways: he was efficient at paying bills and so on although he was an unworldly person. Now, when I was down, I was faced with many bureaucratic issues and had nobody to help me deal with them.

  I began to have difficulties sleeping. All night I would relive the last week of Bo’s life – the pills, the rash, the argument about the private hospital. I could not get the image of Bo trussed up like a turkey, intubated, his mouth pulled to one side cruelly, out of my head. I was convinced he had suffered pain. I went over all the mistakes I had made. If I had done A or B or C, Bo would be alive. If I had insisted on doing what I knew was right, if I had shouted louder and got him out of the hospital. I had promised Bo that I would make sure he never suffered pain. But he had suffered great pain, in the end. I had stood by and let this happen.