The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  When I walked into the studio, I could feel my cheeks burn. I had to talk about the next day’s front pages, but I just wanted to tell Matthew that he was wrong. It was all very well for him, I wanted to say. He still had his nice fat Times contract. He still had his column. He wasn’t the one who was having to get used to hearing himself described as ‘former’ or ‘ex’. Anger, I wanted to tell him, was an energy. I wouldn’t have managed to do half the things I had managed to do since leaving the paper if I hadn’t been fuelled by that energy. And how the hell was I meant to ‘let go’ of my anger when the people who had wronged me weren’t even sorry? Look at all the things, I wanted to say, that have been achieved through anger! Slavery was abolished because of anger! Children weren’t chimney sweeps because of anger! Don’t fucking tell me not to be angry!

  We didn’t talk about slavery, or chimney sweeps, or even how humiliated I felt when I walked in front of those TV cameras and sat down on that sofa. I hardly ever watch myself on TV, so I don’t know if any of this was caught on my face, but I think it probably was. A friend once saw me reviewing the papers with a man who had gone silent on me after several dates. She said he looked as if he was waiting for the guillotine. That, I told her, was a really good idea.

  A few months ago, I was asked to take part in a TV discussion on forgiveness. There was an archbishop, a pastor of a Pentecostal church, a columnist who used to be a colleague, and me. The archbishop said forgiveness is what enables you to let go. The pastor said that he had learnt to forgive many people who had done him harm. The columnist, who is Muslim, said she thought forgiveness was a beautiful part of the Christian faith, but that it wasn’t part of hers. I said I thought forgiveness was irrelevant. I said that ‘to forgive’, according to the dictionary, was to ‘stop feeling angry or resentful’, but that if you were feeling angry you couldn’t just pretend you weren’t. I said that when people ask you for forgiveness, they usually just want you to make them feel better. Why, I said, would you want to forgive them when they hadn’t even asked you to? When, in fact, they might never even have thought that they had done anything wrong?

  As I told my friends about that evening at Sky, I suddenly had the answer. You forgive people who have wronged you to make yourself feel better. It doesn’t matter whether or not they think they have done anything wrong. Resentment, I finally realized, and as Carrie Fisher once said, ‘is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die’.

  I once went on a ‘positivity’ course. It was after my sister had died, my father had died and I’d had cancer and I was trying to get over a broken heart. In a central London hotel, with cream walls and a blue carpet, and tables with pump-top coffee flasks of sour filter coffee, the hypnotist Paul McKenna tried his best. He had learnt, he told us, to ‘turbo-charge’ his brain with ‘the Power of a Positive Perspective’. Now it was up to us to learn how to do the same.

  He told us to make pictures in our mind. He told us to laugh when he gave us the sign. He tried to teach us how to ‘Master Your Emotions and Run Your Own Brain’. I sat through the weekend, and drank the coffee, and ate the biscuits. I even bought the CDs. It didn’t make any difference. When I thought of my sister, and my father, and the man I loved and couldn’t be with, I just felt sad.

  It was a relief to stop trying, just as it had been when I had told friends the results of my biopsy and they had looked me in the eye and told me it was bloody awful. That was so much better than the people who told me not to worry because it would be fine. I wanted to ask them if they had suddenly discovered they were psychic. Or if, perhaps, they had gone away and secretly trained as oncologists. Or if, perhaps, they were just trying to cheer themselves up.

  There’s a lot to be said for negative thinking. ‘Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts,’ says Professor Joe Forgas in Australian Science magazine, ‘negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.’ People ‘in negative mood’, he concludes, can cope with more demanding situations than their sunny neighbours and are ‘less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages’.

  Well, I could have told him that! Who started the Iraq War? A man who told Vanity Fair, after he first took office, that he was ‘not really the type to . . . go through deep wrestling with my soul’, a man who picked the rug in the Oval Office to reflect his ‘optimism’. Who decided to hold the referendum on whether or not to stay in the EU? A man who was sure he could win it, and who told his first party conference that he wanted to ‘let sunshine win the day’. Who was the key player in making sure he lost it? A man who promised the British people that they could ‘have their cake and eat it’, because he always had.

  And who caused the global economic crisis? Men and women (but mostly men) who sold mortgages to people with no credit rating, or savings, or sometimes even income, and then wrapped those debts up and sold them on, and thought it would all be fine. David Hare wrote a play about them, which ran at the National Theatre. It was called The Power of Yes.

  The trouble with positive thinking is that it confuses the world with your head. It puts you back in the mind of a baby who has only to cry to summon a breast. It tells you that if you think like a baby, you can will your way to health, wealth and success. You can try it, until something goes wrong.

  I am not against optimism. That would be like being against the sky. I’m with Gramsci. Not politically, because in the places Marxism has been tried and tested it doesn’t seem to have gone all that well. But I’m with Antonio Gramsci, from beautiful Sardinia, in his belief in ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. Pessimism of the intellect means that you see the world as it is, not as it would be if you were king of it. You understand that the laws of gravity, economics and cancer reproduction are not subject to your whims.

  Optimism of the will means that you have the courage to do difficult things, because you can probably do more than you think. It means that when your world has fallen apart you get out of bed anyway.

  If people want to know about courage, I could tell them about my sister. As a child, I had no idea of the demons that haunted her. I had no idea, when I was nine and she was fourteen, why she was suddenly sent away or why, when she came out of hospital, she looked so hunted and hunched. More than anything else, she wanted to be ordinary. She didn’t manage it. She didn’t have an ordinary life or manage to keep a job. She did manage to be a great friend and to find pleasure in many small things. My sister was not ordinary. She was the bravest person I knew.

  I could tell them about my father, who fell in love for the second time when he saw the baby with a full head of hair the same colour as his. Caroline was his firstborn. When she was sent to what we all called ‘the unit’, he did a three-hour round trip every night to visit her. As soon as the psychiatrists would let him, he got up at five every morning to drive her to the hospital before he started his long commute to work, so she could spend the nights at home. For the rest of her life, he took her for long walks. I think they both saw those walks as a kind of prayer.

  I could tell them about my mother, my beautiful, brilliant mother, who wrote a letter to her mother-in-law just after Caroline was born. ‘Caroline is the best thing that has ever happened to me,’ she wrote, but as she watched her daughter’s struggles over the next forty-one years there must have been times when she was tempted to change her mind. In all this time, and in the years since then, my mother has continued to lavish her children with love.

  And I could tell them about some of my friends. I could tell them about Louise, who buried one of her twins, and has spent the last fourteen years looking after a child who can’t speak or lift her head. I could tell them about Mimi, whose son has schizophrenia and whose daughter is probably going blind. I could tell them about Winston, who has broken his back three times, had a st
roke and now has epilepsy, but says he hasn’t ‘got a reason to moan’. I could tell them that I picked them as my friends because of their courage. But that would be a lie. I picked them as my friends because I love their company and they make me laugh.

  I believe in laughter. I believe in friends. I believe in wine. I believe in crisps. I believe in coffee. I believe in beauty. I believe in art. I believe in grace. I believe in kindness. I believe in wit. I believe in doubt. I believe in cake. I believe in moving your body, since it’s the only one you get. I believe in hard work. I believe in lie-ins. I believe in candles, and canapés, and champagne. I believe that the world works an awful lot better if people are nice. I believe there are usually some reasons to be cheerful, but sometimes it would be weird not to feel sad. I believe in learning. I believe in curiosity. Oh my God, I believe in curiosity. I believe it’s the best way to remind ourselves that we’re tiny specks in a big world. And I believe in anger. Yes, I do believe in anger, but the kind of anger that gives you the energy to fight back.

  Abraham Lincoln said, or is said to have said, that ‘most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be’. If I’d read that when I was younger, I’d have wanted to smash a glass in his face. Now I think he’s right. Not if you have depression. Depression is not the same as misery and you can’t just will it away. But I have learnt, through my bouts of misery, that happiness is largely a choice. ‘I believe,’ said Frieda Hughes, who has lost every member of her family and lived her whole life in the shadow of suicide, ‘that happiness has to be worked at. I believe it has to be earned. It’s like a marriage or a friendship, or any kind of relationship. We can try and we can fail. We do not,’ she added, and her smile was dazzling, but also fierce, ‘always succeed.’

  No, we don’t. And anyway, what is success? A marriage that lasts for life? Healthy, employed children? A career that glides gently upwards towards a peak? If so, I’ve failed. If so, many of us have failed.

  I do not think that we have failed. We are here. We are fighting. We are learning. We are laughing. We are getting up in the morning and trying to earn a living and trying to learn how to be better daughters, sons, partners, lovers, colleagues, neighbours and friends.

  On the way home from my birthday dinner, I thought about Yana. The shrink I saw for a while, the one she saw for a while, told me that he had ‘never managed to cure her of her optimism’. I laughed. When I told her, she laughed too. I don’t mind Yana’s optimism. Unflagging optimism often irritates me, but hers, for some reason, does not.

  Once, when I was lying on her couch covered in needles, she told me of the time she met a Holocaust survivor. She told me carefully, because she knows what I think of Viktor Frankl. The woman she met was called Alice Herz-Sommer. She was 104. ‘I was fazed by her optimism,’ Yana said. ‘I couldn’t believe it! I said to her, “Alice, the sun will die,” and do you know what she said?’ I shook my head, in as far as you can when you’re lying on your front and feeling like a porcupine. ‘She said,’ Yana told me, and I could hear the smile in her voice, ‘“Then we will find another sun.”’

  Epilogue

  I don’t like books that end in clichés, but it seems churlish not to mention that I found love. Two years after losing my job, at the age of fifty-one I found love.

  I’d just started to dip a toe back into the shark pool of internet dating and had had a couple of nips that had left me nursing wounds. One guy had cooked me a very nice Sunday lunch at his house in Sussex and invited me to a Rembrandt private view at the National Gallery the next day. He had, in fact, asked to see me three times in one week and then travelled all the way to Stoke Newington to have Sunday lunch at my flat. Perhaps it was my cooking, but when he left he said he hadn’t had the ‘coup de foudre’. I did not tell him to fuck off and die, but kept my promise to drive him to Finsbury Park.

  My lovely bloke popped up a few months later. I don’t want to tempt fate by saying too much about him, but I will say this: he’s everything all those narcissistic charmers aren’t. He’s modest. He’s quiet. He’s reliable. If he says he’ll do something, he’ll do it. He doesn’t make grand promises. He just gets on with things. If something’s broken, he’ll mend it. He’ll go online and order a spare part and – hey presto! – I’ll have windows in my car that actually go up and down. He prefers to make things happen than be in the limelight. He is a gentleman. He is a gentle man. He is polite. He is thoughtful. He is kind.

  And he’s romantic. I didn’t think it would be possible to meet anyone so romantic. He brings me flowers and chocolates and delicious wine and also, of course, delicious crisps.

  We have been to the Cotswolds. We have been to Norfolk and Cambridge and Oxford and Devon. We have had pub lunches in the sunshine. We have walked in the rain. We have been to Italy. We have been there in the spring sunshine and the summer heat and the sparkling frost of Christmas Day. Now I can wake up in my lover’s arms and open the shutters and look out at the fig tree in the garden and drink coffee with him in bed as we gaze out at the bright, beautiful day.

  My love has taught me that love is something that has to be renewed every day. He has taught me that love really is like a garden. You can’t just plant the seeds and hope they’ll grow. You have to water them. You have to cherish them. You have to make sure they get some sunshine. You have to treat them well.

  On our second date, which was the day after our first date, I had a strong feeling that I would never again meet a man who was capable of loving me as much. I still think this is true. I don’t know if we’ll ever live together. I don’t know if I want to live with anyone. If you ask me, it’s just too many damn meals. And I don’t know if it will last. We can’t know if anything in life will last. I’ll be grateful for whatever time I have with him, but I have also learnt that I am actually pretty happy on my own.

  You can probably imagine what my mother thought. I think she had got to the point where any male with a pulse would have done just fine. When she met him, she looked so happy that I honestly thought she might clap her hands. We had tea in the garden. We sat near what used to be the Wendy house, where Monique and I once set our Halloween decorations on fire. My mother had laid the table for tea, with a tablecloth and nice china and the home-made cakes she had bought. As always, she took tiny bites of her cakes. As always, I took big bites of mine. Between the bites, her smile was like the sun.

  My mother was very excited when I told her that my lovely bloke was helping me make some changes to my flat. In recent years, it had got dark. The trees had grown so much they were blocking out the light. He had come up with a plan to turn the main windows in my sitting room into French windows, opening out into the communal garden, and to create an extra bull’s eye window to let more light in from the south. He’s an architect. He’s an award-winning architect, in fact, and he knows how to make changes to old buildings that don’t interfere with the original design. We got planning permission from Hackney Council. My friend Arifa told me about her brilliant builders. I made plans to empty my so-called savings account of what was left of my redundancy pay. I couldn’t think of a better thing to do with the financial fruits of all that pain than turn it into light.

  I couldn’t wait to show my mother the finished work and arranged to have the grand unveiling on her birthday. Unfortunately, one of the bolts for the French windows didn’t arrive in time, so the giant hole in my sitting room wall was still covered in plywood when the date loomed. The bolt, as it happens, was from a Swedish manufacturer, not all that far from where my mother was born. But phone calls to Gothenburg couldn’t summon it, and so the birthday lunch was postponed.

  Two days before her birthday, my mother tripped on the stairs. She lay on the hall floor for several hours before she managed to reach the phone. In the hospital, they told her she had broken her hip. She spent the morning of her eighty-second birthday having it replaced. When I walked on to the ward, I didn’t, at first, recognize the frail woman with wild white hair.


  For the next five weeks, either Tom or I visited her every day. Sometimes the drive from London would take three and a half hours. Often the parking machines at the hospital didn’t work. One Sunday morning, when I had planned to spend a day at home in London, Tom called to say that she was in a bad way. When I finally got to the hospital, the parking machines swallowed all my coins. I queued up at the parking office and tried to work out how much parking you had to pay for when it looked as if your mother might die.

  When I arrived at her bed, her eyes were half open, and you could only see the whites of her eyes. Tom was there already. The curtains round her bed were closed. I clutched my mother’s hand. I told her that I loved her and that having her as my mother had been the biggest blessing of my life. I asked her what had given her the most pleasure in hers. Suddenly, she opened her eyes. For the first time in days, she smiled. ‘My children,’ she said.

  When she first went into hospital, I thought that if my mother died, it would be the end of the world. But when the nurses began to talk about her needing twenty-four-hour care, I began to wonder if I was wrong. One day, my mother told me that she had had enough. ‘You know what to pray for,’ she said as I kissed her goodbye. A few days later, I was running round my local park. Even though I don’t believe in God, I was mouthing a kind of prayer. ‘OK, Mum, you can go now,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to go, but if you want to go, then I want you to go. Please God,’ I added, ‘let her go.’ Ten minutes later, I got a call from the hospital. ‘Your mum,’ said the ward sister, ‘is very, very sick.’