The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  And then, I said, you developed epilepsy as a result of the stroke. ‘It was annoying,’ said Winston. ‘To be honest, the epilepsy was really annoying. I’ve had fits when I’m sleeping, fits when I’m awake. I don’t really care to count them. You just get on with it.’ Winston now wears a tag around his neck. For a while, he couldn’t work, but now he does. Does he really never feel sorry for himself? ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘It’s pointless. You’ve got a hand and that’s what you’ve got. You’ve got to go out and pick the aces.’

  I would love to be able to say that this was how I responded when I got lupus and cancer and when my skin was so ravaged by acne that you could hardly see it because of the weeping pustules and throbbing red lumps. It wasn’t. I was desperate. I was furious. I felt I could blast the surface off the earth with my rage. There were times when I thought it would be easier to die. Both times I got cancer, I thought about suicide. I couldn’t face what I had to go through. I thought if I lost my breast and hair, I would no longer feel like a woman. I thought men would see me as damaged goods. I thought I had never even managed to find a man to have regular sex with and now I never would.

  I didn’t actually want to die. I have never wanted to die. I have only ever wanted to avoid more pain. But both times I got cancer I soon learnt that I would do pretty much anything to hang on to my life.

  The first time, I got a second opinion, had a second operation and managed to keep my breast. I turned down chemotherapy. I was the new girl at work and I didn’t want people to know I had cancer and I knew they would if I was bald. I kept my job. I kept my hair. I had radiotherapy before work every day for five weeks. In a year of treatment, I had two and a half weeks off.

  The second time, I couldn’t avoid a mastectomy. I didn’t want to see myself without a breast and made sure that when I had it removed, I had something made to fill the gap. The plastic surgeon was like Michelangelo. He took a chunk of my stomach, and the blood vessels, and moved them to the place where the breast had been. For months after, I felt as if my body had been squeezed into someone else’s skin and muscles, skin and muscles that were far too tight. But you honestly wouldn’t know that my left breast isn’t real.

  I didn’t, in the end, have to have chemotherapy. I kept my hair. The drugs I took for several years afterwards didn’t make me fat or sick. And I now have a nice, flat stomach. Whatever I eat, I have a nice, flat stomach. My flat stomach is the silver lining in a big, black cloud that passed.

  The first time I got cancer, I went to a ‘holistic’ cancer centre in Bristol. A doctor there told me not to have radiotherapy. Someone else told me to do meditation. Someone else told me to eat a lot of carrots. I nearly bought a book with what I still think is the saddest title in the world. It was called Vegan Cooking for One.

  You do this if you want to. I think cancer is not for dilettantes. Slice it out. Blast it out. Stuff me with drugs. Just get the damn thing gone.

  But I do think there are plenty of other illnesses that need a different approach.

  If I hadn’t seen a psychotherapist when I was twenty-six, I think I would probably be in a wheelchair now. I don’t know why I got ill. We can never really know why we get ill. I don’t think it helped to have a sister who had a serious illness and to feel guilty for being well. But I do know that medicine doesn’t always work, and when it doesn’t it can help to see a counsellor or shrink. It’s not necessarily the talking that helps. It’s what the talking unlocks.

  In his book Why Do People Get Ill?, the psychoanalyst Darian Leader says that ‘between 25 and 50 per cent of GP visits are for medically inexplicable complaints’. Physical symptoms, he says, ‘are frequently signs that something is being communicated’. The challenge, I have found in all my years of illness, is to work out what the hell that message is.

  This doesn’t mean that ill health is all in the mind. A lot of it, I’ve discovered, is in the gut. When I first saw Yana, and told her about my symptoms, she told me she thought I had a condition called ‘leaky gut’. What it meant, she explained, was that the gut wall sometimes becomes more porous and allows some undigested food particles into the bloodstream and that this can trigger an immune response. I thought it sounded disgusting and unlikely, but when I got home I looked it up. Some of the things that often go with leaky gut, Google told me, were acne, insomnia, migraines, Raynaud’s syndrome, vitiligo, lupus and cancer. Everything, in fact, that I’ve had.

  I recently read a bestselling book by a German scientist, Giulia Enders, called Gut. It’s funny and clever and makes the argument that the gut is as important to human function as the brain and heart. I am not, of course, a scientist, so I don’t know if she’s right. All I know is that when my pain comes back, I go and see Yana and she tells me to keep off the booze, and gluten and sugar and yeast, for a while, and she sticks needles in me, once a week for a while, and I get better.

  I don’t like fussy eating. I live in a part of London where everybody seems to be allergic to gluten and I feel like telling them to get a grip and get a life. But sometimes I’m the one peering at labels and paying a fiver for a loaf of what isn’t really bread. I can’t say that my body is a temple, but I have learnt that you can’t treat it as a cesspit and expect it all to work just fine.

  I still drink, because although the studies say it isn’t good for your health, I think it’s very good for your mood. I know some medics call it a ‘depressant’. Maybe it is for them, but that happiness professor Julia interviewed says that having two or three glasses of wine a day makes people happy. I think the studies assume that you’re drinking them with other people, and that’s usually true for me. When I read this, I felt quite proud. I felt as if I’d discovered the secret of happiness on my own.

  Positive thinking does not get rid of illness. We all get ill and we all die. But I’ve learnt that the best way to keep healthy is to be happy, and active, and curious, and to be grateful for the incredible machine we all live in, on the face of this incredible earth.

  Because I could not stop for Death

  It’s fourteen years since my sister died. On the anniversary of her death, my mother always goes to visit her grave. She and my father are in the same grave. One day, my mother will be in it, too. I can’t think of anything in life that I dread more.

  My mother believes in ritual. She goes to light a candle and bring flowers. I think she’s right to do these things. Rituals, according to all the anthropologists, are one of the things that help us deal with death. My approach to bereavement has been more British. Not just keep calm and carry on, but try to push it right out of your head.

  When my sister died I felt as if I was suddenly on a different planet and trying to behave like the natives of that planet, but finding it very hard because the planet and its natives all seemed to be part of a ridiculous game. One night, I dreamt that Caroline and I were walking on a giant causeway made of clouds. There were flamingos on either side of the causeway. All around us, the sky was pink. My sister and I were holding hands. When I woke up, I was crying. I don’t believe in life after death, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that after all her struggles she was finally at peace.

  With my father, it was different. He had had colon cancer for two years. They were terrible years. In the end, it went to his brain. In the end, he could hardly talk. When the news came that he had finally died, it was almost a relief.

  Before I drove down to Guildford, I took ten minutes to wash the car. When I’d told my father that I was thinking of buying a Mazda MX-5, he said he thought it was important to ‘cut a bit of a dash’. He, by the way, had never had anything smarter than a Morris Marina. The first time I washed my Mazda, I used a scourer. You don’t really know the meaning of the word embarrassment until you’ve sat in the waiting area of a garage and someone yells out ‘woman who washed the car with a scourer!’ My father, my beloved father, offered to pay for it to be resprayed. I thought, in one of the mad flashes you get when everything has changed, that he would be ple
ased that I had stopped to wash my car.

  My sister died seven months after I took over as director of the Poetry Society. My father died two years later. I had to rush back from the funeral preparations to give a speech at a leaving party for someone who had worked there for thirteen years. I cried in the car all the way back to London, then went to Pret a Manger to get a grip and wipe my face. Work kept me going. Work has always kept me going. There has to be something to keep us keeping on.

  Morag and Mike were two of the people who kept my mother going, after Caroline, and then Dad, died. They have, as I have explained, had plenty of practice at grief. They never wanted to be experts, but they are.

  ‘We supported each other through the ups and downs,’ said Morag, that afternoon I met them at my mother’s for tea. ‘It’s funny how we took it in turns,’ she said. ‘One would wake up in a terrible state, and the other one would make cups of tea and so on, or vice versa, you know. Every so often, it just hits you.’

  She picked up her list, the list she had prepared that said, at the top of the page in large print, ‘Living with and overcoming the grief of losing a loved one’. Number one on the list, she said, was ‘a happy marriage’. It ‘gives one’, she read, ‘the strength to carry on’. Number two was her ‘caring parents’, aunt, uncle and many friends. ‘One friend,’ she said, ‘phoned me up every Monday morning after Mike went back to work, for a year. That’s the sort of thing. It’s a small thing. I’ve never forgotten her for that.’

  Number three on her list was their six-year-old daughter, Emma. ‘We were having a cup of tea,’ she said, ‘and Emma said, “Oh well, Grandpa, you’ll be the next one to die, then Granny, then Mummy, then Daddy.” Children accept death in such a matter-of-fact way. I suppose it helps you, in a way.’

  Number four on her list was ‘our own new baby boy’, the boy Morag describes as their ‘miracle baby’. The boy who, thirty-two years later, climbed into a car after a party and never made it home. ‘Our second loss,’ she had written on the next page, ‘was much harder and has left us with a lasting sadness. We are lucky to have so many memories of happy times together, which never fade. Time,’ she added, ‘helps.’

  Mike’s list was more like a short essay. ‘In surviving this,’ he wrote, ‘people were all-important to us: the in-laws who came to stay to support us, friends who invited us to stay. Contrary to what some of our friends thought, we did not want to be left on our own.’ Mike looked up from his piece of paper and then carried on reading. ‘The only way to get through this period,’ he said, ‘was to stick together to support each other, but I felt it was vital as far as possible to be as positive as possible in the circumstances, otherwise this tragedy was going to finish us off.’

  It was, said Mike, important to keep ‘frantically busy’ by trying to keep family life going for Emma. ‘When Anthony died,’ he read, ‘the awfulness of a double tragedy hit us hard. The feelings were just as severe, even if we could not feel the guilt that we did with Patrick.’ What helped, he said, was talking about Anthony, both to each other and to Anthony’s friends. For some years they would all get together on Anthony’s birthday.

  ‘If you’re understanding this,’ he said, ‘you’d really have to think about the dark period that one goes through and that’s really the only way to describe it. I think it takes about three years for that to lessen. And that’s what people are contending with.’

  He and Morag still talk a lot about Anthony. ‘We still have a laugh,’ said Morag, ‘about things Anthony said. Memories we’ve got of him now. We talk about him still, but Mike doesn’t like talking about their deaths. Moving house helped. Since we moved, we’ve got over that terrible waking up in the morning. But our house is full of photographs of Anthony just as yours is of dear Caroline.’ We both looked around the room. All the bookshelves have family photographs on top of them. Between two armchairs is a little table with photographs of my father and Caroline. It has a vase Caroline loved and a candle. It is, to be honest, a kind of shrine.

  ‘The best thing I’ve heard about grief,’ said Angela, ‘is that there are waves and you can be on a beach, and it can be very, very gentle, but it’s always lapping at your feet.’ We were at the Troubadour, a coffee house and bar in Earls Court where Bob Dylan has played, and Paul Simon, and Jimi Hendrix, and Elton John. That night Maura was reading, with her brothers Tim and Terence Dooley, who are also both poets. Yes, three siblings who are all poets. They all have curly hair, and we joked that they should also all be wearing tight satin suits.

  ‘Grief,’ Angela continued, ‘is always lapping about your feet. But there’s always the possibility a very big wave will come over you. It is,’ she said, in her usual wry way, ‘very unexpected. Most peculiar timing.’

  So what, I asked, helped her ride out those waves, when her husband John died and she was left a widow with two young sons at the age of forty-two? Angela speared her fishcake. ‘I didn’t find many people I could go and talk to,’ she said, ‘but peculiarly enough, even though I was brought up a Catholic, I went to see our local rector at a C of E church. He was a great believer in diversions, and so am I.’

  She told him that she was exhausted, after two years of watching John get ill and die, and wanted to go on a retreat. ‘He said, “No, that’s the last thing you want to do.”’ He told her to do things she liked instead. ‘Going to see a play,’ she said, ‘or a film and losing yourself. I always recommend this to people. Give yourself time out. I know exactly what it’s like to howl, and I think it’s very good to go and do something and for two hours you’re caught up in someone else’s life. That gradually builds up.’

  So when, I asked, did she start to feel better? Angela sighed. ‘That’s hard to answer, because obviously I had two sons and we had to. I want to say it was a very, very long time. For ages, it was hard for me to win through, but I did.’

  One day, when she went to see the rector for a pot of tea and one of their chats, she saw that the daffodils were coming out. ‘I said, “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”, and he said, “Oh good, you can see it.” That, to me, was the thing. Some days you can’t even see it’s a beautiful day. If I think about my husband, I think about him laughing. For some reason, he used to find Mr Bean incredibly funny. He was a very thin tall man and he would just be like a shaking thin tall man with tears running down his face.’ She smiled at the memory, and there was a faraway look in her eyes.

  And did she, I asked, write off the thought of meeting someone else? Did her heart close? ‘It must have,’ she said, ‘because for a long time I never did. I remember this Indian lady saying, “You must want a man,” and, do you know, no English person has ever said this to me. It stopped me, because she was right. I knew that people were putting me in a box of “oh well, that’s it then, for her”. I get a lot of comments: “But you’ve got your boys.”’

  Her social circle, she said, was entirely made up of ‘suburban couples’ and suddenly she was shut out of it. ‘I’d been a part-time teacher, whose husband had a very good career and had fallen into all of the traps. There’s a certain kind of script and it all changes, and you haven’t been given many lines it.’ Or, she said, with a dry laugh, ‘you’ve been written out of it completely!’

  When divorced men started to approach her, she just felt irritated. ‘There was,’ she said, ‘an idea of “you’re on your own, you must be interested”.’ So when, I asked, did she start feeling open to the possibility of romance? ‘I think,’ she said, ‘somebody asked me out and I did go, four or five years after John died. I had two relationships with men, neither of whom were that suitable.’ How long did they last? Angela laughed. ‘Quite a few years, actually, which is surprising, but I think I’m a “quite a few years” sort of person. I thought, “This is as good as it can get.”’

  It turns out it wasn’t. Angela gave up her part-time teaching job, where she was treated like ‘pond life’, moved to London and started a PhD in politics. One New Year’s Day her yo
unger son suggested she try internet dating. The first man she met was ‘perfectly nice’ and gave her lots of advice about internet dating. The second man she met was even nicer and also a very handsome lawyer. I know because I’ve met him. Angela has now been with him for four years. ‘I’ve been very lucky. It’s very weird that I was so fortunate. I think when you meet someone, you find what you need if you’re lucky. It will not be everything you would have wanted, but it is what you need. I think what I have found,’ she said calmly, ‘is more than I need.’

  ‘I lost,’ said Frieda Hughes, ‘my father, my mother, my brother and my half-sister. Two of my grandparents went at an early age – and, of course, they’re all dead now. Last year I lost the last of my father’s siblings; my aunt and uncle. They went within months of each other. I’ve lost various best friends. I lost two of my dearest friends in Australia within two years of each other, both from brain tumours, which was a bit odd, not to mention all the animals. We can’t love something without having loss at some point.’ Would I, she added, like more coffee?

  You can see why she’s matter-of-fact about it. If Sylvia Plath was patron saint of depression and suicide, it would be easy to cast Frieda into the role of patron saint of grief. It’s so much loss. It’s too much loss. But here she is, smiling, glowing, almost exploding with energy. She has, she told me, just finished a project that involved doing a painting a day for more than a year. She had, in fact, done more than four hundred. She showed me some of them. They are like jewels. I cannot begin to imagine how she managed to do it.