One of the things she felt when Michael died was a ‘feeling of relief’ that she didn’t have to look after him any more. And one of the things that hit her, as the weeks and months passed, was how deep, in spite of all the irritations, their love had been. ‘I think the book was really a sort of journey for me,’ she told me, ‘from that feeling of having been set free from quite a burden, in some ways, to actually realizing how much we loved each other, and how much I missed that.’
Maddy met Michael when she was twenty-five and he was twenty-nine. ‘I never really was an adult for any length of time without a partner,’ she said. ‘We had completely separate social worlds, so it was a real shock to me how incredibly dependent on him I was. Some of this is to do with how you are regarded. Society regards you, particularly as a woman on your own, as a bit odd and lacking in something. I felt like “who’s out there to know what’s going on with me?” It’s simple things like: you go to Sainsbury’s and they’re not selling the cheese you like any more and you want to tell somebody, but you can’t ring up a friend and say they haven’t got the cheese any more! I remember when I was ill at some point and saying something to a friend and he said, “Well, that’s what being single is.”’
Yes, I wanted to say. That’s what being single is. In all my years of illness as an adult, I have nearly always been on my own. After a big operation a few years ago, I had to go and stay with my seventy-five-year-old mum. I have never been in a supermarket and thought: I must tell someone about that cheese. But then I have never put up with the compromises of a long-term relationship. If you don’t put in the hours, I suppose, you don’t get the Lemsips, or the chats about cheese.
‘What I missed from Michael,’ Maddy said with a sad smile, ‘was that emotional shield that I hadn’t really been aware of until it wasn’t there. Someone who loved you. And he was an incredibly accepting person, too. I never forget ringing him up and telling him I’d crashed the car and he said, “Are you all right?”, while I’d be saying, “What do you mean, you’ve crashed the car?”’
For all her sometimes shocking honesty, the love is clear. ‘Grief,’ she said, and now she was looking wistful, ‘is a whole other landscape. You start trying to limit it to emotions we’re already familiar with. Yes, you feel anger, yes, you feel bargaining or whatever, you think “if only I’d done that”. Sometimes you feel acceptance, but it all happens in a kind of tumble. It’s not a smooth progression at all. It makes you feel like you’re going mad.’
I met Angela at my friend Maura’s. She is tiny and delicate-looking and made me think of a china doll. I knew that she had been widowed and asked if I could talk to her about her experience of grief because I liked her air of quizzical calm.
Angela was forty when her husband got ill. ‘He developed this cough and had flu symptoms,’ she told me when we met for coffee at the Southbank Centre. ‘He was a very thin man, but his waist was getting bigger and we thought it was middle-aged spread. It turned out his spleen was enormous. The GP referred him to the hospital and he was told he had lymphoma. The word was, if you’re going to get cancer, this was a good one to get.’
Like Maddy, she had been with her husband, John, for twenty-one years. They met at university, just before finals. ‘There was a party,’ she said. ‘John came and started dropping in. He had the most beautiful voice.’ Angela is generally matter-of-fact. She tends towards understatement, which is why I felt even more upset when tears sprang into her eyes. ‘I’m all right,’ she said, ‘when I’m not tired. Anyway, tears are normal. I would hear him,’ she continued, ‘in the next-door room. I thought he was coming to see my flatmate. It turns out he was coming to see me! We just sort of went bananas for each other. We fell in love and that was it.’
After university, she went back to live with her family. Her father was a school caretaker. Her mother was the school cleaner. There were six children and, she said, ‘absolutely no money at all’. Having grown up in a school, she didn’t want to be a teacher, and got the first job she could get. Later, when she had her first son, and when her husband was studying for his bar exams, she felt she had no choice but to go into teaching. She didn’t particularly enjoy it, but her focus was on her family.
Their eldest son was thirteen when John was diagnosed. Their youngest was ten. They both tried to keep things as normal for the boys as they could. They also tried every treatment they could find. ‘I embarked on boiling herbs,’ she said. ‘I had this wonderful friend, Maria, who was also on the wheel of cancer, who never gave up. She was sort of sending me things. You can get this, you can do that.’
At one point, they thought he was getting better. ‘We were going to go to Paris on Eurostar. We were making it the story we wanted it to be, which was that he had got better. Before we went, we went to the hospital for some blood tests. The blood tests had been awful, and all of a sudden, that was it, it all kind of went into a great whirl. We went into a little room and they said, “We can’t do any more for John.”’
For the last month, Angela looked after him at home. ‘Part of you accepts it,’ she said, ‘part of you thinks “right, he’s going to die at home”, because he hated hospital. By then, there was nothing worse. I still can’t see a wrapped-up sandwich if I’m in the right mood without feeling dreadful.’ John had, she said, never talked about dying. ‘Out of the blue, he said to me, “I want to be buried at St Hugh’s,” and – this is the funny thing about operating on different levels – I said, “Well, I don’t think you can just be buried where you want. You have to sign up. Like schools! You’ve got to be in the catchment area!” So we started going to the church.’
He died just before their twentieth wedding anniversary. ‘I can remember a palliative care doctor saying to me, “It’s so much harder for you, because you never thought he was going to die.” And I thought: “I don’t believe he’s dead now! How am I going to grasp that someone is going to die? Can you tell me what it means?” And of course we were marvellous patients, we were wonderful because, my God, I had my make-up on every day.
‘Immediately after he died,’ she said, ‘and for a long time since, I have thought about the gap between hope and despair and how you’re such a good person when you’re being strong. “My goodness, aren’t they marvellous, you know, they just carry on.” Everyone loves that story. I notice that when it became a bad story, people fell away. We want life to be about overcoming. We want it to be about how we make our own stories. We fucking don’t make our own stories.’ She almost slammed down her coffee cup and I felt like slamming down mine. ‘I’m so annoyed,’ she said, ‘when I hear people say that.’
*
My mother’s friends Mike and Morag have had every reason to despair. Two months before my sister died, a police car turned up at their house. ‘We were coming down to get our breakfast, still in our pyjamas,’ Morag told me, ‘and Mike said, “Who on earth is that police car for?”’
Mike sighed, and it was one of the longest sighs I’ve ever heard. ‘You can’t quite take it in,’ he said. ‘They’re not talking to me, are they? They can’t be talking to me. It’s as if you want to get rid of them, but you can’t. So really you’re absolutely stunned.’ They were even more stunned when they took in what the policeman had said. Their son Anthony had been on his way back from a party with a friend when the car veered off the road and into a tree. The friend, who had been driving, was severely injured. By the time the emergency services turned up, Anthony was dead.
I have known Morag and Mike since I was about twelve. My mother met Morag at a sociology evening class, invited them both round for dinner and they have all been friends ever since. Morag and Mike are cheerful, good company and they are incredibly kind. And they laugh a lot. This couple, who lost their eldest son in terrible circumstances, still laugh a lot. And the thing is, he wasn’t the first son they have lost.
I wasn’t sure if my mother would approve when I asked them if they would talk to me about their loss. Everyone thinks my mothe
r is very open, but she is actually very private and she assumes other people prefer to be private, too. But Morag and Mike agreed to talk to me, perhaps because they are so kind.
They had, Morag told me, met a couple on holiday, with a daughter the same age as theirs. When they got back to England, she invited them to a picnic near the swimming pool on the local common. ‘Unfortunately,’ said Morag, ‘this woman forgot the armbands of her little girl.’ Mike took the armbands off their three-year-old son, Patrick, and gave them to the girl. He then took Patrick off to play on the swings. Somehow, Patrick disappeared. ‘We all went to look at the cars,’ said Morag, ‘because he loved looking at cars. We never even thought of the pool. Of course he was at the stage when he loved jumping in. And of course he didn’t have his water wings. He was pulled out and they couldn’t do anything.’
I knew that Patrick had drowned, but I never knew about the water wings. I had never thought about how a simple act of kindness could wipe out a life. ‘When these things happen,’ said Mike, who is very English and speaks about personal things in a slightly clipped tone, ‘the actual awfulness of it doesn’t give you time to grieve. There is,’ he said, in such a low voice that I had to strain to hear it, ‘always that guilt thing.’
So what, I asked, were the worst times? ‘Well,’ said Mike, ‘just the immediate aftermath was terrible, really.’ There was such a long pause I thought he might not speak again. And did he, I asked, ever feel so desperate that he didn’t know how he would carry on? Mike took a sip of the tea my mother had brought us. We were in the sitting room in the house that has been my family home all my life. ‘I never felt that, really,’ he said. ‘I tried to be positive. I thought “if you don’t get hold of this, it will destroy everything”. You’ve got two alternatives, really. You let the thing wipe you out or you try to face up to it.’
Morag and Mike did not let it ‘destroy everything’. They did everything they could to get on with their lives. They had to keep going for their daughter, Emma. And then, nine months to the day after Patrick died, Morag had Anthony. ‘It was a miracle,’ said Morag. ‘Our friends called him the miracle baby.’
Her face softened at the memory of the ‘miracle baby’ she adored. ‘As he grew up,’ she said, ‘people used to say “don’t you worry that something might happen?” I never did. I thought,’ she said, and it made me want to wrap her in my arms, ‘it can’t happen to me twice.’
When Morag and Mike turned up at my mother’s house, they were each holding a brown envelope. Inside it were notes they had typed in preparation for the interview. It’s the only time in my life when my interviewees have done more preparation than me. ‘Mike was quite worried about coming to talk,’ said Morag. ‘You’ll see, he probably dealt with this quite differently. I haven’t read his and he hasn’t read mine.’
Both lists talk about the things that got them through. I had told them that I was writing about ‘the art of not falling apart’ and Mike’s first paragraph, which he read aloud, made me gasp. ‘There is no such thing as “art” when it comes to surviving the death of a loved one,’ he read, ‘only struggling along a craggy path without a guide.
‘Grief,’ he continued, ‘in my experience, comes in many forms. For example, the death of one’s parents, however sad, is a grief that one can come to terms with normally in a reasonable time, with resignation, as part of the order of things.
‘When you lose a young child, the world collapses around you. A dreadful darkness pervades everything. The feeling of guilt and horror of the actual circumstances fill every minute of the day, almost taking over the actual grieving. Sleep is purgatory, because you will wake to this different world where everything is dark and hopeless.’
I looked at this couple I’ve known so long and like so much. When I think of them, I always think of their laughter. I think of their laughter and Morag’s hugs. I know my mother does, too. ‘I can remember sitting in this room,’ said Morag, ‘when Mum lost Caroline and I felt it was a terrific bond between us, because we both shared that. I knew what she was feeling.’
And did she, I asked, still miss Anthony? For a moment, Morag’s smile disappeared. ‘Every day,’ she said. ‘Every day. I often just feel he’s there. Strange, isn’t it?’ and now there were tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘I’ve learnt to live with it now.’
I can’t think of anything worse than losing a child. Losing the partner you love long before their time must come a pretty close second. But at Uncle Maurice’s funeral, there was laughter as well as tears. The vicar told the congregation that he was the only person he had ever sacked for doing a good deed. My uncle had always ‘kept an eye’ on the vicar’s chickens while he was away, but when the vicar heard that, well into his eighties, Maurice was climbing over the wall and spending hours every day anxiously counting them, he knew it was time for him to stop. My cousin Michael said that the last time he went to visit his father, his face lit up. ‘Ah, Jackie Milburn!’ my uncle said to his eldest son. From a lifelong Newcastle FC fan, there could be no higher praise.
After the service, at the local church, there was a buffet lunch at Auntie Bell’s. She now lives in a bungalow at the other end of the village from the house Uncle Maurice had built, the house we used to stay in every Whitsun half-term. The house had its own big field. The boys all played football in the field. Once, my uncle kept some sheep in it. The sheep escaped early one morning, and Maurice chased them round the village in his pyjamas.
I walked back from the church with Maurice’s niece, Diana. Because my knees were still bad, I was hobbling in the special old-lady shoes I’d had to buy to wear when I wasn’t wearing trainers. Diana told me she was sorry to hear about my job. ‘I used to love your column in The Independent,’ she said. I should have just smiled, because people said this all the time. Instead, I burst into tears. I felt even worse that at the funeral of my beloved uncle, some of my tears were for me.
Stuck
It had just started to rain. I’d been hanging around in cafés for six and a half hours, but it was still two hours before I was due to be picked up. The last two I’d spent in the library, flicking through newspapers and magazines. The man sitting next to me was asleep. The man sitting opposite me was rocking and humming. The man on the other side was holding a newspaper the wrong way up. All I wanted was to crawl into my bed, which was just a ten-minute walk down the road. The trouble was that for the next ten days my bed belonged to someone else.
I wandered across the road and into a church. When I saw the candles flickering in that dark place, I felt a sob rising like a spasm running through me. I thought if I didn’t clamp my jaws together, then the noise that came out of me would echo round the church. A man came in with his children and lit some candles. I hoped he wouldn’t ask me if I was OK. I didn’t know how I’d explain that after months of sending emails that often weren’t answered, and doing bits and pieces of freelance work at a fraction of my former rate, I was so tired I could hardly keep awake. And that I couldn’t just go and lie down in my bed because my bed now seemed to be better at earning money than me.
It was a friend who told me about Airbnb. She could see that I was exhausted and said that perhaps I could rent out my flat and take a break. I put it on the website and booked two weeks at a writing retreat in Spain. While I was there, I got a request for the week when I was due back. I asked my mother if I could stay with her for a week, and then said yes.
When you rent out your flat to strangers, they assume that you’re staying with your boyfriend, or that you just happen to have another flat down the road. They don’t assume that you are camping out in cafés, sleeping in friends’ spare rooms or travelling down to your childhood home to sleep in your childhood bed. But for a while it seemed easier to rent out my home than to keep trying to tout around my brain.
After months of effort, I felt stuck. I had been trying so hard to get some projects off the ground, but they kept getting knocked off course. I had managed to persuade a think ta
nk to work with me on a big research project, but then the director of the think tank had been fired. I had been promised a retainer to do some work with a healthcare company, but then they looked at their budgets and changed their mind. I had been asked to apply for a couple of non-executive roles, and then failed even to get interviews. I was working nearly all the time, but after all my efforts, I was barely scraping a living as a jobbing hack.
For a while, in my thirties, I felt stuck in a job. I once told my boss that I was ‘bored out of my fucking mind’. I now want to shake that girl who got a regular pay cheque for doing something perfectly pleasant and tell her to grow up. But you can’t tell anyone how to feel. If you feel stuck, you feel stuck. And there aren’t all that many species on this planet that are at their best when they feel trapped.
*
My friend Jonathan had been ‘swimming around for a role’ when he was headhunted for a job as a lawyer for an international company. ‘I knew it would be a roller coaster,’ he told me as I gazed at the works of art in his beautiful sitting room, ‘and I thought: I’m ready for that, I’m up for it.’ There was no London office, so he knew he would have to work from home. Which, by the way, isn’t quite as much fun as you think it will be unless you’ve always dreamt of being a Trappist monk.
‘The working from home was fine for a while,’ said Jonathan, ‘and then it got busier. There was a lot of shit to shovel, basically, that just got more and more intense, so I started to give things up. I didn’t entertain as much, I didn’t see my friends as much.’ It was Jonathan’s first job as a consultant and he wanted it to go well. Soon, he was working every night till the early hours. ‘It was dark and I was isolated up in my study,’ he said. ‘I really felt as though that was my world, that box.’
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 11
