by Poorna Bell
Regardless of whether you are married or you aren’t, that act of bearing witness seems to hold the key to loneliness and finding meaning in life. It’s not as simple as partying a lot or being constantly surrounded by people. We know as much from high male suicide statistics and men’s mental health insight that the man most likely to kill himself most probably has tons of friends.
I was trying to get to the root of how important human connection was in life, and why.
I had started this journey a bit angry, pissed off about the hand I’d been dealt. Rather than work out how I fitted into people’s lives, I’d decided I didn’t, and therefore I needed to remove myself from that particular life. I did it because I needed time to think, but if I’m being truthful, part of my journey was also about seeking validation for living a remote existence in the future.
People lived in remote spots, and quiet places, so it could be done. But the question was: was my intention about living that kind of specific life or was it about removing myself from people before they had a chance to remove me?
When you’re on a boat, and you need to set sail, you have to ‘weigh anchor’. That’s the term for pulling the anchor up so you can remove what’s holding you down and fixing you to that place.
I had made myself weigh anchor, and had begun this journey to seek validation for leading a solitary life because I believed that being around other people was pressuring me into making decisions that weren’t my own.
I was so sure I was right that before embarking on the next leg of my journey, I asked Eric Klinenberg, who was basically an expert at being alone, and was so sure that he’d agree with me that, when he didn’t, I was rattled.
His observation was that it wasn’t possible to be solitary and happy. Being alone is not the same as being solitary and his observation was that a lot of happiness and fulfilment stems from other people.
Relationships really do matter, he told me. He said we needed not just one type of social support but a lot of different kinds, and some need more of it than others. He also stressed the importance of asking yourself what a meaningful connection looked like to you.
It reminded me of my correspondence with Oliver Burkeman, who said we are organisms who have evolved to benefit from social interactions. At the most basic level, that includes leaving the house to talk to the person who bags your groceries or serves you coffee. Even a small interaction like that can make you feel less isolated. But that has to be underpinned by interacting with people who really know you. Because their understanding of you is a signal to your brain that you are understood and seen, and that is a critical antidote to loneliness.
Being understood, being witnessed – that seemed to be the most important thing to a lot of people. The question is, without Rob, the person who was my witness, how was I supposed to navigate that with friends and family? Or was it a question of recalibrating the level of importance in each relationship?
If I was ill, I could think of three people who know me well enough to come to my sickbed and shout at the nurse for giving me vanilla ice cream. ‘SHE LIKES CHOCOLATE AND ONLY CHOCOLATE!’
It might seem like a trivial thing – ice cream – but it meant I was seen, known and understood. It was an anchor to my past, present and future. It meant someone had listened. Someone knew my history of being aggravatingly annoying by studying an entire ice-cream menu only to always ever order the same thing. It may not be mysterious. But as I have come to learn, love is at its most powerful when it is known. When it is built upon the shore of memory, experience and history. It may not be a fire that constantly blazes, but it is a steady, slow warmth nonetheless.
9
THE WORLD’S SECOND BLUEST SKY
When I arrive in New Zealand, the cicadas have already begun. Their hum fills the warm air, and for the first time in my life, I see the pohutukawas blossoming against the blue summer sky.
I pick up a crimson bloom from the pavement and turn it over in my hand. Fine red dust scatters over my fingertips. There are trees on almost every avenue, branches fanning out from their sturdy trunks, shaking out their skirts of tightly bunched bright-red flowers.
They only bloom in December and January and are known as New Zealand’s Christmas tree because of the time of year. Every Kiwi speaks of them with fondness, and their ability to grow in the hardiest of conditions means they sometimes pop up where you least expect them.
They can live for a thousand years, hold their own against winds, brutal Southern sea spray and drought. If ever a tree could represent a nation’s ability to endure and the beauty that lies within its endurance, this is it.
The pohutukawas mean something else: their blossoming marks the start of the longest time I will ever spend in New Zealand. There is a different shape and scent to this visit; it isn’t so steeped in grief. When I visited two years ago, it was very much a yearning for Rob. I had flown over for the funeral but it was so brief, so wrought in the fire of mourning, that while I was saying goodbye to him, I wasn’t able to say goodbye to the land.
My return, then, was a desperate need to be in the place he was in before he died. I wanted New Zealand’s seas to calm the storm. I wanted her to wash away some of the guilt and regret and tell me it was okay. It was also the place where I felt I could talk about him regularly because I was with his family, and the hurt was deeper here.
But this trip, nearly three years after Rob passed, was my heart saying to my in-laws: there is something more than this now. We’re not just clinging to each other in grief. We are actively choosing each other.
Although this trip wasn’t about grief, there is a dull ache in the days approaching Christmas, as there always is. Each year it lessens, but the advent of Rob’s birthday on 23 December, followed by Christmas and then New Year, always feels heavier.
I always miss him, but this – as with his death anniversary – is more acute. Though as I discover in New Zealand, the feeling is no worse than it was last year; I’ve just learned to recognise it for what it is: a heavy time in which I need to pay extra attention to how I feel and what I’m comfortable doing.
Around this time, I have a few tough conversations with some of my loved ones back home. It turns out a few people were concerned about me coming to New Zealand in case it made things harder.
I want to say, gently, ‘Nothing makes it harder. It is hard, period. If I am getting up, socialising, going to work, then, trust me, I’m doing enough. Whatever I need to do to try to heal myself, I’m going to try.
‘Staying in London, or staying in one place doesn’t make it easier. My sadness is still there. I have been indifferent about being alive when I’ve had my closest friends and family around me. So everything is worth trying.’
A few days after I arrive, I go alone to the cemetery on Rob’s birthday. I know I will be coming back a couple of days later on Christmas Day with Prue and David, and I want this moment to myself.
It’s the first time I’ll be seeing his headstone, and when I get there, I see a lot of cars parked up. A closer look reveals two small marquees in the cemetery and people are eating.
I’m flummoxed. Did someone die and sandwiches were required immediately after the ceremony because a large number of them were hypoglycaemic?
When I tell David afterwards, he says, ‘Was it on the grass near the exit?’
He was referring to a broad patch of clear space that might pass for a small park if you weren’t in a cemetery. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Like literally they could’ve used a headstone to rest their coffee cups on.’ We both shook our heads and agreed it was weird.
Thankfully, they aren’t anywhere near Rob’s grave, and when I approach the headstone, my breath catches in my mouth. It is really real. This really happened. He’s not waiting for me back home. Will I ever stop feeling like he’s waiting for me back home? I wonder.
Forever In Our Hearts
Robert Owen Bell
Beloved Husband of Poorna
Dearly Loved Son of P
rue and David
Brother of John and Alan
Treasured Friend
I run my fingers over his name and my name.
I think of him beneath my feet, and that half of my soul is wrapped around him, keeping him company. As always here, my heart swells with the thought of him.
If I close my eyes, your every movement is a calling song. Your sigh, the rustle of your book, the smooth slip of your T-shirt over your head. I can feel the fuzzy close shave of your hair as my hand rubs over it, the curve of where your bottom lip meets mine as I kiss you to sleep.
The muscle memory of you is the meeting point between haunting and comfort.
I love lists, and when I think of Rob, sometimes I name the things we used to buy in the supermarket or dishes only he knew how to make. Or I think of moments only we shared, such as him coming to meet me at the train station after work with Daisy bounding around scaring the shit out of the other passengers while we said our hellos with a kiss.
The memories of our departed ones are held most powerfully in the moments that made them human, that made them unique in our lives, no matter how mundane it may have seemed at the time.
My Rob Bell shopping list on his birthday is:
• Huge, oversized pasta
• Pork meatballs à la Rob
• Oranges (the big ones)
• Sensodyne toothpaste
• Israeli couscous and feta salad
• Bakers dog biscuits
• Lucozade
• Squeaky toys from the £1 shop
Anniversaries are tough after someone dies because they are the chain connecting your past together and your present alone. I have a friend who says forgetting anniversaries is a good thing because it means you’ve moved on, but I don’t agree.
I think humans by their very nature prefer to forget; it’s a rare person who sharpens their pain daily on a whetstone and marinates in the misery. But remembering is important; it is release.
Anniversaries are the moment when all the universes of your loss converge together and allow you to freefall into the memory of them. You give yourself permission to experience the intensity of the sweetness and sorrow that it creates, that maybe you don’t in your daily life.
He would have been forty-two. I wonder what our lives would have been like. Would we have gotten back together? Fleetingly, I touch my hand to my stomach, the ghost action of a baby that would never come, not from him, anyway.
I think about the idea I have been pushing away for weeks since I turned thirty-seven a couple of months previously.
What was I going to do about having kids?
Here’s what I think I know about people and kids.
If you don’t have them, when someone you know has them, there’s a place they have gone to that you can’t go to, yet. You can’t even pretend this is a place you’ve visited, or perhaps you popped your head in the window – it’s a place so primordial, so heavy and raw, pulsing with life, blood and light.
Grief changes a person, but creating life changes a person too. It literally changes your body if you are a woman and, internally, unpicks every lock to every room inside you and rearranges the contents.
If you are a mother, you are the human equivalent of a female werewolf – strong, powerful and capable of transformation between that wild place where you created your baby, and the calm, serene space where you will raise it.
Afterwards, you struggle between your selves. Between maintaining a balance, feeling the new person you are, groping around for the parts of you from before.
Motherhood, to me, starts like a siren song. There’s a tug in your belly, an urge that presses a switch that overrides everything else. I know, because I felt it. Not very often, and very late in life compared to other people, but I felt that yearning, that every single part of me was unfurling, petal by petal, to give another little person a chance at life.
I first felt that tug when Leela was born. It was indescribable, the love I felt for her. It wasn’t jealousy or regret, and at that moment Rob was alive and standing opposite me in the hospital room. As we gathered around my beautiful niece, it was the biggest glow I had ever experienced.
But I also knew, as that tug began, that it wasn’t as simple as Rob and I having children. I knew he was in trouble with his drinking around that time, and two weeks after that hospital visit Rob had a terrible relapse on alcohol and was self-harming. He then went into a hospital of a very different kind: a psychiatric hospital.
Whatever was going on with him and us, we couldn’t have children at that point. It was too chaotic; his recovery was in its infancy. Mentally I was also shutting down and expending any extra energy on dealing with Rob and the situation I had found myself in. When we separated, I knew that even if we got back together, kids were not going to be a possibility for us.
We may have breathed them momentarily into existence when we spoke about having them, when we imagined what they would look like and who they would become. We may have loved these little ghost children as deeply as we loved each other and the promise of the future they held, but we also both knew we could never bring an innocent life into the chaos of addiction.
When he died, in addition to the many strands of grief my life had become, I grieved the loss of our children. But it’s a grief I would have had to have undergone even if he was still alive. Because that’s what grief is: it’s saying goodbye to your past, present and future regardless of whether death is in the equation or not.
There are so many people who are dealing with a miscarriage, the loss of a child who died before they had the chance to be a child.
The couple who desperately want children but cannot have them, made to deal with their loss privately, and forced to volley questions from other people about when they’re going to have kids. Or perhaps the single man or woman who doesn’t want to have kids by themselves and has reached an age where it’s time to say goodbye to the dream of it all.
All of that is grief; all of that is loss.
At thirty-seven, there is a hard mathematics I have to deal with that I didn’t have to when I was in my early thirties. If I want kids, I have to start thinking about it now. I don’t have endless amounts of time. And although I would never want to relive my twenties, fun as they were, there is a sharp pang of longing for that decade which is so soaked in time, so fat with possibilities.
First, I needed to acknowledge that I’d be doing it on my own. In terms of time, I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for a long-term relationship that may never happen, and I have never been the person to be romantically involved with someone to facilitate a goal.
When I fall for someone, it’s a wild, thick bramble that grows fast and quick; it’s unexpected and intense. I could never imagine being with someone because I had a hidden agenda. I knew that I was lucky to have experienced the love of a person like Rob in a lifetime. To expect it to happen twice would be like a greedy child gorging on sweet strawberries.
So what did that mean for me as a mother-in-waiting?
I was drawn to unconventional stories of motherhood. My friend and agent Rowan, who had been single for a while, had decided to have a baby through a donor.
When we met for coffee – she beautiful and pregnant, me fascinated with her will and determination – she told me that she had reached a point where she wanted to have a child, and realised that, because of her age, she’d rather do it on her own than wait for a relationship to facilitate it. It doesn’t mean she’s given up on dating or a relationship, rather that motherhood was immensely important to her, and all of that other stuff could come after she’d had her baby.
I remember at the time feeling hope. Where once that door had seemed shut, it now opened a crack. But I also wasn’t sure whether I had it in me to physically have a baby on my own. I didn’t know if I wanted it as much.
I was telling Has about this on the phone and she said, ‘Well, look at Sushmita Sen.’
‘What about her?’ I asked. S
ushmita Sen was a Bollywood actress who was really big when we were kids. She won Miss Universe when I was fourteen, and I remember it being a big deal that an Indian woman had won it. She hadn’t done a huge amount of high-profile stuff for a while, though – at least nothing that had come across my radar, because I wasn’t a huge Hindi film buff.
‘She adopted her oldest daughter when she was twenty-four, and then adopted another girl a while after that. And she’s this single mother fitness guru,’ she said.
I grabbed my phone and looked her up on Instagram. I had a thousand questions. I had always loved the idea of adoption even if I’d had my own children, and here was this forty-something Indian woman who had decided at a young age that she wanted to be a mother. It wasn’t easy for single mothers to adopt, and she’d done it not once but twice, and without nannies.
When I thought of the parents I most wanted to be like if I did become a mother, they were people who were most honest about parenthood. Above all, they were still themselves, and still safeguarded that part of them that wasn’t fused to a child. It acted as a second brain, allowing them to think about their choices and dreams, not just their child’s choices and dreams.
And I knew that as much as it was joyous and a feeling unlike any other, it was also tough. I knew my niece was a beauty; a well-behaved, clever child more so than the average. But I also knew she had sick days, and days when, however cute she was, she could be a little ratbag, as all children are. Priya had Shabby, who is a father extraordinaire. Mum and I are continually amazed at his endless reservoir of patience when it comes to Leela. To not have someone to support you through those days – to have to deal with everything: potty training, food prep, nappy changing – it seemed like a lot.
