All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  I have called ours a culture of grief worship; I have blamed it for deceiving me. And it’s true, I think, that we have become invested in the idea that grief has on us an unconditional impact, that it alters us, that it explains us, at the same time as it brings us to our knees. How many contemporary books and films purposefully allude to the earlier death of the protagonist’s mother—or brother or fiancée or son—as if that fact alone proves the existence of a deep, irrecoverable wound, and not mere laziness on the part of the writer or director? How many adopt for this allusion a tone of oblique, quiet stoicism, as if to convey what can only have been a crushing experience of loss? And how many, should the protagonist maintain he is intact in the wake of his bereavement, insist that he is rather in a state of deep denial that must be exploded later on? I have lost count. Of course there are works that, taking loss as their subject or backstory, treat it with the necessary thoughtfulness; of course our grief can wound us, leaving scars that never heal. But I rebel against the notion that the death of a loved one is necessarily disfiguring, and that, as such, it may be used as a substitute for character development. There is no more validity to grief than to boredom; grief need not be more transformative than joy.

  Virginia offered her own critique of society’s untenable expectations around mourning, one that clarified for me the great cost of these narratives. Starting with the nurse who sobbed beside her mother’s deathbed—“She’s pretending, I said”—she often turned to the metaphor of theater to describe the kinds of behaviors that, in her view, concealed a more authentic response to loss. Her mother’s death forced her and her siblings “to act parts that we did not feel,” she wrote; it gave rise to countless “foolish and sentimental ideas.” The same is true of Mrs. Ramsay’s death in To the Lighthouse, in which Mr. Ramsay enrages Lily and his children by enacting a version of Leslie Stephen’s own appalling scenes: “Sitting in the boat, he bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his part—the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft.” It’s this kind of playacting that alienates the searchers among us, those of us who bridle at its false prescriptions and its melodrama; but it’s this kind of performance, too, that leads—through fraudulent example—to the bewilderment and shame we share with Lily at not feeling more. “All these tears and groans,” Virginia recalled, “reproaches and protestations of affection…were doubtless what we should feel if we felt properly, and yet we had but a dull sense of gloom which could not honestly be referred to the dead.” The adult writer’s tone may be tongue-in-cheek, skewering the notion of a “proper” way to grieve, but the child who lived it still felt herself a failure.

  But for all this—all we absorb about grief making—my own innate assumptions about the toll that loss must take were most deceptive. I couldn’t conceive of a world in which my father could die and leave me whole; I couldn’t conceive of that world even after I had made my home in it. Those clichés about grief endure precisely because they play well with our expectations.

  Over a decade has passed since I called my mother from that university hallway to learn that my father was dead. Not once in that time have I taken leave of my senses or even managed to escape my own self-consciousness; I doubt I ever will. At some point, I stopped waiting for shock or denial to pass, confident that I had not been prey to either one. I had longed for a steep, rocky terrain upon which to stagger and fall, Colorado perhaps, but if my experience had been a landscape, it would have looked like Iowa, with its hills and vales and fields that sometimes flatten in the breeze. Today I think the flatness was the grief, the way that grief expressed itself for me; that grief is above all a malaise, awful because of its monotony and not in spite of it.

  It’s writers like Woolf, their refusal to give in to popular ideas about bereavement, who have helped me to accept the nature of this misery. For all her anger at the “unpardonable mischief” wrought by the conventions of sorrow, and at those play-actors who force upon us insincere performances, she is equally attuned to the disquiet that arises when it feels as if our capacity for grief has malfunctioned; she knows the utter loneliness of this sensation. “It was a miserable machine,” Lily thinks of the human apparatus for feeling; “it always broke down at the critical moment.” There may be readers who find this unrelatable—certainly my mother, who had more regrets than I did about the life she lived with my father, struggled more than I did with his death. Yet there are other readers for whom Woolf’s nuanced portrayal of loss—which acknowledges the frustration, inconstancy, and even tedium of grief in addition to its horror—provides not just a welcome challenge to the prevailing wisdom but also a vital consolation. From my father’s death, I learned that grief is personal and unpredictable, that it will confound our expectations as often as fulfill them, that the disappearance of a loved one, even the most loved one, is not necessarily the insurmountable setback we foresee. But it remains at once comforting and validating to find these lessons mirrored on the page; it makes one feel that one is not alone. And I know that even my mother would recognize something of herself in To the Lighthouse—in Mr. Ramsay’s underlying strength, perhaps. For even she recovered, even she rebuilt her life. As I think my father realized all along—“You’ll be just fine,” he always said—human beings are resilient things.

  * * *

  IT WAS NEARLY fall when, still alone in Rhode Island, I woke from a bad dream about my father. I was used to bad dreams about him, of course, and used as well to the jarring juxtaposition between them and consciousness. On that morning, though, I had the sense that the dream had crossed over into real life. I felt it as soon as I opened my eyes: here was a raw new world, clear and hard as a diamond, in which everything that normally pleased was dripping with death, in which everything that had all summer seemed the same had suddenly revealed itself to be sinister. Am I overstating it? Perhaps, but then again, neither before nor since have I brooked such a strong sense of what Virginia, her evening shot through with the sight of a woman pinned beneath a motor car, once described as “the brutality & wildness of the world.”

  I made the bed, I went downstairs, I put on the kettle, I opened the blinds; for hours I quivered, half-present (drinking tea, reading the paper) and half-behind a scrim of memory, or rather a sort of demi-memory, for I felt that I was nearly flogging myself in an effort to recall him. I began with an August just two years earlier, when my mother was in Australia—I remembered that we had carried in the rolled-up sisal rug from the studio for the cats to climb, had propped it against the window in the living room, and that my father was so delighted by their scampering that we turned off the movie and watched them instead. I remembered that he helped me to make a denim skirt from an old pair of jeans, that he asked our neighbor Pam to come round and show me how to use the sewing machine. I begged him not to bother her, embarrassed, and he chided me as he often did for being so shy.

  But I could summon nothing else from those weeks, and so turned to the house itself, moving from room to room, scouring each one for the habitual. From the living room I retrieved the image of him next to the CD player—he had just put in Mozart and was standing with his eyes closed, swaying slightly, humming happily in time to the rich, smooth opening sounds—Bom, bom, ba-bom. (He often closed his eyes in anticipation of a glorious movement, smiling faintly and holding up a finger while he listened.) On the deck I saw him sitting in the far chair, feet planted on the wooden planks, and later sitting along the railing, looking out across the water: the now-spent vision of the way he grasped the roof with one hand and reached for a glass of wine with the other. Then I tried to imagine him lighting the coal stove in winter, but could not picture how he must have kneeled or squatted—I have no image of him crouching. Every memory is like that, even now. Certain details are clear—the arm holding the roof; the finger raised to halt the drift of life—but the whole is shadowy, and the more fiercely I try to seize the center, the more quickly it eludes me, and grows not like him at all.

 
So having failed I went down to the dock and spread out my towel; returned to War and Peace (the death of Prince Andrei loomed); and then saw out of the corner of my eye something white floating in the water. It looked like a feather, but it was fleshy, like a tiny squid—I never did learn what it was—and the little green minnows, the same green as the sea when the sun shines through it, were pulling at it with their dumb, round mouths, flicking it away, then drawing it near, playing tug of war, until a larger minnow snatched it decisively in his mouth. He swam in tight circles, chased by the others as he was, until eventually the feather-like thing, which was growing smaller all the while, disappeared completely. It was in the minnow’s belly, shining palely and grotesquely through his translucent skin. But then, splah, and the white thing was expelled and returned to its original shape, and the game of tug of war recommenced, stopping only when a school of bigger fish—who are the size of salad plates and swim nearer the sea floor, making it seem when they pass beneath the minnows as if the ocean is made up of shelves of glass—rose suddenly to the surface and frightened the minnows away.

  And then Prince Andrei died, and the day grew harder and clearer and even more diamond-like, and I remembered, as I sometimes remember, that I was not the only one who was mourning, who had mourned—that there was death after death after death, and that it was not my sorrow alone on the waterfront, but mine and many others; that John’s wife, Barbara, sunning herself the next dock over, might have lost her mother a few years back; that the doctor two doors down might think daily of his younger brother’s memory. And suddenly the thought of all that sadness—both incompatible with the brittle beauty of the day and somehow equal to it—was terrifying to me, and terrible, and I saw it expanding, a filmy, diaphanous fabric settling over everything and at the same time rising up into the bright blue vibrating sky, and I wondered where it all went, and how it all fit, and how we as human beings continue. I had thought it before, of course—remembered how, in the months when my father was dying, being human and alive suddenly struck me as a larger, greater task than it had ever seemed before, and how the dimensions of the world abruptly changed as what we face crept in. And how was it, I wondered on the dock, that I had not noticed this fabric before? How was it that just yesterday I had laughed on the phone with friends and thought the blue sky big and ordinary? This was not grieving, surely, but yet more biding of time.

  Toward the end of To the Lighthouse, the anguish that Lily has been trying to summon all morning reaches a dreadful climax—a caution, perhaps, to those like me who would court suffering, who cannot conceive the misery of the very misery they seek. And yet coupled with Lily’s pain is her conviction that it must hold great power, even the power to raise Mrs. Ramsay. I get it: How could something so consuming, so gigantic, so utterly undoing, contain no force at all? How could the despair I’d felt that night of the eclipse not power whole cities; how could the heartache that consumed me on the dock not call back not just my own father but Barbara’s mother and the doctor’s brother as well? That, I think, is the final point to be made about grief: that it recalls to us our impotence, reminds us that our longing counts for nothing. Lily’s “heart leapt at her and seized her and tortured her. ‘Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!’ she cried, feeling the old horror come back—to want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still?” To want and want and not to have—my god, the primal, powerful injustice of that phrase! and the terrible simplicity of the problem, insoluble, that death presents us with.

  Lily’s agony will pass, of course—it’s just moments after she cries out for her friend that her yearning begins to recede. And so too on the dock in Rhode Island, where even as I was trying to figure them out, the fabric was lifting and the feeling passing on. The sun beat down on my face; I wanted a swim, and the minnows kissing the otherwise smooth surface of the water seemed no longer sinister, murderous, but like small stupid fish that would leave me in peace when I broke the surface myself. And the basin was beautiful again, only beautiful, and the sound of a neighbor repairing his roof, the metallic blows ringing out across the water, was no longer merciless, but a call for good, hard work, the kind that gets the blood flowing, and yes, I longed to dive in. But I missed him. That’s always what it comes down to, after all. I miss him, and sometimes it is bearable, and sometimes it is not.

  11

  Eventually it came time to tackle his ephemera. I sat at the family room table, sorting through résumés, letters, the articles he had published in architecture school; I flipped through his wine label collection, thirteen years’ worth of crinkled insignia paired with prices, dates, and comments (“Another excellent Barolo. I do like them, but seldom get the time to let them romp around in the atmosphere before finishing them off”). The onslaught was exhausting: I was about to go to bed when I saw my name, rendered in his blocky scrawl, on a sheet upon a pile of sheets. “Katharine,” I read, “who entertained us on a drive to Amalfi with stories of the sirens, who reputedly hung around the Li Galli islands just off Positano, was fascinated at a whirlpool which we saw from Ravello, some thousands of feet below in the sea off Minori. We concurred that it was probably some monstrous phenomenon of time immemorial, despite suspicions to the contrary.” My father’s Italian diary! I thought it had gone missing years before.

  I sucked down the words, some thirty pages of them; I heard his voice as clearly as if he were speaking from across the table:

  Did I write about tourism with a cricked (how do you spell it?) neck? I don’t know whether it was a papal curse, or simply the pillow of our Rome pensione. Anyway I can assure you that some 50% of the delights of a tourist in Italy are denied you if you have this complaint. At St. Peter’s Katharine was kind enough to invite me to relax, supine, to admire the interior of the cupola. The crack and groan as I resurrected would not have been acceptable when we were younger and the Church more uptight.

  This was a kind of alchemy, I thought, wide awake now and rejoicing at the life within the lines; as Lily declares, imagining Mr. Carmichael’s reaction to her searching questions, “That would have been his answer, presumably—how ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint.” Yes.

  We drove down the coast toward the airport, and as a last destination arrived at the Etruscan burial mounds at Cevetri, is it? More buses, more kids, but well worth the trip. […] Boy the Romans did a good job of wiping out Etruscan culture. If they can have had such pretty and interesting burial chambers, they must have had neat real settlements. While most of the chambers are empty and plain—though atmospheric—one was completely as found, sans skeletons, with delightful murals and all the bits and bobs of daily living, hanging from the walls or embedded in the friezes. Remarkable. All too much.

  It was a very successful holiday, particularly we hope from Katharine’s point of view. I remember how trying it was to travel as a 10 yr old, especially if you can’t even go swimming. Though, as we discovered, the Med in March is about the same temperature as the Gulf of Maine in August. In Fiumincino, Fiumicini (I have not a map, but know that it ends in a vowel), we spent our last night as the sole occupants of a pensione overlooking the port, vieux or nouvelle, whichever. It was good to be back by the sea again, and I was envious of a small yacht which had just sailed in from Malta. Its occupants were off to visit Rome. Maybe I’ll be able to return some day in the same style.

  12

  “Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.”

  In November I flew to England to visit my grandmother—nearly a year had passed since my father’s death. I landed at Heathrow in the evening, and later went wandering through the West End of London looking for something to eat. The city shone from recent rain, the street lamps reflected wetly on the pavement, and somehow I lost my way, ending up at Tottenham Court Road, and had to turn back, bearing left and left again. That was when I saw the Agra, its red-and-whi
te sign the only attraction in an otherwise empty street. I was startled and disoriented—on the night of my father’s memorial party, we had approached it from the other direction—and the entire city seemed to flip as I realized where I was.

  As I waited for the meal to come, I thought how good it was to be once more in London. There was a time when I had known the city well, and when knowing it well had seemed to matter—how important I had deemed it to recognize the streets; to get from A to B without a map. Even tonight, driving from the airport, I had forced myself to name each new landmark before it appeared: here was the V&A and here Hyde Park; here the Serpentine and next Marble Arch. It shocked me, remembering that I had gotten lost this evening, to think how much I had known and how little I knew now.

  Then the food arrived—tandoori lamb, still hissing in a cast-iron pan—and I took out my diary and a pen. I had asked my father, when he was dying, if he had written at all—I could imagine not keeping a diary, but I could not imagine dying and not keeping one. Perhaps, too, it was my roundabout way of asking him what I was too scared to ask him: What does a dying person think about? How does he bear it? “No,” he said. “I was never a writer.”

  “But you wrote in Italy,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I think I was just emulating you.” He paused, smiling. “I remember sitting at cafés with you,” he said. “In the Piazza Navona.” I remembered it too—the pigeons and the morning light.