by Maggie Gee
‘You’re my rock,’ she said, not long before she died. But she had to say goodbye to me.
Neither of us thought this was possible. We had loved each other dearly, deeply, always. When she was in her seventies, and I in my forties, we would walk along the village road hand in hand. She had put up with all my adolescent hatred, my tangled love life, my absurdities. She knew me through and through, and loved me, though she half-pitied Nick, I think, for marrying me, because she knew I could be difficult. Yet we were the women in the family. We were the deepest and most intimate friends. We looked into each other’s eyes and saw everything, always. How could death part us? ‘I’ll wait for you,’ she said to me. ‘You’ll come, won’t you, before too long.’ ‘Not yet …’ I drew back a little, afraid.
And then she said the thing that still haunts me with mingled grief and happiness. ‘If I get there, I’ll let you know. If I get there, I’ll wait for you.’
Is she waiting, somewhere? Where do they go?
How long will it be before the call comes?
The stars leave the stage, one by one. The aunts, the uncles, the fixed points of childhood.
Mum was right, of course. There’s not long to wait between the deaths of child and parent, not long sub specie aeternitatis. Logically, the length of a generation. You can work it out, a macabre kind of maths. If I die at the age my mother was, I have to add on her age when I was born—thirty-three—to the date of her death. Which would see me joining her, or setting off to find her, in 2025, fifteen years hence. It doesn’t seem very far away. I hope for more, am afraid of less.
I missed my mother, and grieved for her, for all the things she had dreamed of doing. I do them partly for her, now. I think how pleased she’d be to see me travelling, and fly with her flight bag, unglamorous but practical, an indestructible black-and-red ‘Samsonite’ shoulder bag that makes me feel she’s coming with me. She’s come with me to Africa, Australasia.
1992 was the year I grew up, if grief is what makes you grow up. Both my parents died in the same year. I was forty-three for one, forty-four for the other: old enough to bear it, at least. Children have to lose their parents, it’s natural, though it feels like a violation, at the time. The other way round is even harder. I had a miscarriage that year, as well.
Where do they go? Unborn children. They are wanted and expected, but never come.
And those who have lived solidly here on earth, who were part of our lives, who should always be there—Peg, Gwynneth, Aileen. Vic and Tennant. Aunty Eve and Aunty Bertha. Lloyd and Hilda and the grandparents. My brilliant young commissioning editor from the 1990s, Jonathan Warner, who tried too hard to make everything perfect. Dear Christine Casley, with her dreamily amused, husky voice and blue eyes and elegant, youthful bob, my editor for The Ice People and The White Family and The Flood, who I stupidly expected to be there for ever, like a sharpened reflection of my consciousness as, deeply attuned, she shaped and sifted; with her youthful gift of pleasure in everything—flowers, pictures, the lunches we shared; but she died in months of a brain tumour. And Beverly Hayne, my almost-cousin, so funny and stroppy and sharp and bright, and fine-grained, melancholy Kitty Mrosovsky, who died because she had the wrong boyfriend, and Nina, after a long struggle with lupus started by a random shard of glass on a beach. Four beautiful, distinctive voices I can hear still, plaiting together as they stretch away from me into nothingness, almost gone, and I strain after them, missing them. The living who die, and the never-arrived. The mystery is, where do they go?
Where have they gone, who were so alive? Ubi sunt. The lament of generations, the poets grieving for us all.
What is a soul? When my mother died, around 5.30 in the morning, just before the first light leaked into the ward, there was an absolute sense that someone had gone. Wherever she was heading, she had quietly set off, leaving nothing on the bed but a pile of clothes. Her breathing had gradually grown quieter. It was a far gentler death than my father’s. I kissed her cold face, I kissed her hand, but of her it was the merest simulacrum. As the long night ended, she slipped from the stage, and I began the decades of my life without parents.
My animal luck (viii)
We are each other—
‘we are each other’s parents’1
It was because of Nick that I did not feel an orphan, though I missed my mother painfully. He was there in the tiny cubicle room that the hospital provided for relatives, and as I slipped into the single bed we were sharing, at 6 am, as morning began, there was the wonder of his warm, tender body, and I cried against him, my tears on his skin, and we made love, and I fell asleep exhausted, but when I woke up, the worst horror had gone. When my mother-in-law died, his lovely, lively, unconventional mother Peg, we were still relatively recently married, and her death made me realise how much I loved him as he trusted me with his grief, and we shared it.
In a way I had always missed my mother, ever since childhood when I took her for granted. So many times in my adult life she could not be there, because of Dad’s rules, because they always had to come as a pair, and as a pair, they made me anxious. When I gave birth, when I got married, I loved my mother, I missed my mother.
I shan’t write very much about my marriage, because it is dangerous to write about the living. I have asked my daughter, and got her permission for ‘anything between birth and adolescence’: I tell my two brothers I will love them and leave them out, because their stories are theirs, not mine. My husband has given me carte blanche, but how can you write about a twenty-six-year marriage? It is a space where we are safe to love. I love having it, and fear losing it, or Nick losing me, leaving him alone.
I say that as an offering to the universe, conceding that happiness is always perilous, and I am grateful for what we have. Yes, quarrels, explosions, days of stormy temper, days when I can’t imagine why I married this man, and he can’t imagine why he married me. And yet, such animal happiness, such fun and permission, such infinite freedom. The joys of insults, and friendly abuse. The times when we are like jostling siblings, and the times when lots of incest is nicest. Long sunlit mornings in the marital bed. The constant pleasure of talking, listening, sifting the beaches of each day’s meaning. That he is me, and I am him.
When I was little, I used to wish my bed was a boat, rounded off to a prow that would float through the night, bob over the waves, rock me awake in the morning. My boat was male, my boat was female, it blended adventure and the arms of my mother, holding me tenderly whatever happens. Though Nick is a very masculine man, in some ways he is both my father and mother, a better father than my father was, as good a mother as my mother was.
I cradle him. He cradles me. Our marriage is a boat where we bob together. We have passed many rocks, many bleak landscapes.
Reader, I meant to leave it at that. But my mother’s dying left a long shadow. I had been too close; death breathed too hard. As I write about it, I long for life.
Reader, come with me, out of the dark. The blazing heat of full summer.
August 6, 1983. The sun shone down; we were touched by the gods. I took a train from London and met Nick in Cambridge. We had both dressed like cultists, without prior discussion, me in a long white satin antique nightdress, the only white thing I possessed, Nick in a loose white Indian overshirt and cheesecloth trousers, gathered at the ankles: to the casual observer, we were both in our pyjamas, but I was gilded at hand and foot, with a small gold bag, gold bangles, gold sandals. Like everything else, we did it by instinct. We had two witnesses, John Waite and Barbara Goodwin: he a youthful best man, she a mauve-and-silver bridesmaid.
The props were all in place for us. We needed flowers, had forgotten them, but a stall appeared by the side of the road we were tearing along to the registry office; our best man stopped his yellow car and I saw the gold chrysanthemums, great heavy-headed things on proud straight stems. I bought half a dozen, they were meant for me. They matched my hair, my gold haloes of bangles.
Our animal selves w
ere jostling with the angels. My chaste white nightdress clung to my breasts. My yellow hair reached down my back, and Nick’s was thick and deep brownish-black, long for a man, and he was bearded. He is very handsome, the camera shows, but what surges up still from the photographs is our hunger, our yearning; the love is palpable, a summer heat that shimmers off the skin of the image. We are drugged, drowning, drenched in each other. In one photo he is kissing me and I am pressed back, we are arched together, a bow of longing pointing to the future.
We were tender, frightened, serious as we stood side by side and made our vows. Utterly possessed by the day and each other, although the meaning of what we had done was still mysterious to us. Oh animal life! Oh human ritual, striving to point our passions upwards. But it had a point, for we were also two souls, asking for a sign from the universe.
Barbara made the perfect photo as we half-ran, laughing, from the registry office. She asked John to throw a shower of confetti; it floated like blossom past the ugly brick, it stays there for ever in the eye of the camera, a canopy of stars over our frail bodies.
From the square modern building we fled back to nature. Our ‘reception’ (for four) was at a wooden picnic table in the summer-green Botanical Gardens. There must have been other people passing by, but they were pale silhouettes, invisible, silent. In the photographs, we four are alone. Nick and I have left the table and wander through the trees, or stand gazing at each other, amazed, a tiny couple in a lost savannah of sunlit grass and big sheltering trees. We are deaf and dumb; we are the first humans; life stretches all round us and will go on for ever.
Our wedding day
1 From a poem by Christopher Reid.
What is a soul?
each living instance
Rosa was only five when they died, Grandpa and Grandma, in the same year. 1992 cast a little shadow across her life that is perhaps still there today; the ghost of a shadow, the knowledge of death. In the ‘Autobiography’ her secondary school encouraged her to write, aged thirteen, she wrote a chapter called ‘The Year of Tragedies’.
Of course you have to say goodbye to the past. But that year, we also said goodbye to the future.
The year began with a lost child. No funeral, no body, just a burying of dreams. I miscarried on my father’s birthday, February 14, a Saturday, at nine or ten weeks. Not my last miscarriage, my second. I was almost used to it, knew it from before, a gathering dread that things weren’t going right—the sickness lessening (for sickness is a good sign), the dull return of normality, my breasts no longer throbbing: the failure to transform. Another D and C. Forcing the anaesthetist to acknowledge my grief, for he had been laughing with me (in kindness) on the way to the ward, as the needle slipped into a vein on my wrist I said to him clearly and urgently, feeling it must be recorded or whoever had been precariously alive would twice die, ‘I want you to know that I wanted this baby.’
The first time it happened is the clearest in my mind. Long hoped for, already much loved; the silver and black ghostliness of the scan we thought would be routine, but which showed no life, nothing, no heartbeat, no more hope. 1989. Poor Nick, who was late after parking the car, or else they sent me in early, knocking harder and harder on the door of the ultrasound room at the hospital to get in; that was worse than the pain for myself, having to tell him, strangled with tears, ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘so sorry.’ Knowing how blindly and deeply it would hurt him.
It hurt Rosa too. She was only three; people said, ‘too young to understand’, but they were wrong. She both understood, and misunderstood in ways that might have poisoned our whole relationship insidiously had she not had the genius to enact what was in her mind.
At first she felt, or showed, only sorrow, and pity for me. I still have the thing she made to console me. Unbelievably, she drew a baby on kitchen paper, about the size a newborn baby would be, but with short arms that made the whole thing like a cross with a heavy head, came through and laid it in my arms as I lay in bed in our bedroom with its windows opening over the grass, the greenness, the pointless blank and the blue: ‘Here’s a baby for you, Mummy.’ And then as the days went on she became strange and evasive and did not want to be near me. When Nick went out she ran after him, clinging and crying. It was almost as if she was afraid of me, but that could not be so. Could it?
Then she showed me what was tormenting her by taking her toys, one after another, and hanging them from her upper bunk with scarves. I took them down and asked her why she was doing it. ‘I just wanted to see what it was like,’ she said, but she still wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘What was it like?’
She thought I was killing the babies who died. Oddly, art helped, or symbolism did, at this bleakest of junctures, where nothing, you would think, could help. By a kindness of fate, or the pity of God, for surely only God could have such perfect pity—or because my longing was so deep and raw that it called forth what was needed from the universe, in which case the universe itself is God, which is what I mostly, most deeply, believe—the book opened, that evening, at bedtime, at a story we had never read, ‘What Happened to the Unicorn?’ by Jenny Koralek. I read it to Rosa, not knowing where it would take us, in much the same way as the child in the story, who has lost something and needs solace, wanders into a green wood. I cannot remember the details now, but I do remember there was a unicorn among the trees—that the child talked to it, and loved it—but the unicorn, magical as it was, was only here on a visit, could not stay. I think Rosa and I both knew, without words for the thing we knew, that the unicorn was a soul. The soul we longed for which had slipped away. The soul, the well-spring of loss and sorrow. And we were both crying as the story ended, tears which mended things; because Rosa was learning afresh that I mourned what might have been. I think from then on she was no longer afraid.
For us, someone living had died, though in each case the babies were less than three months. I support women’s right to abortion as a very poor second to contraception, but I cannot accept that no one is killed. I don’t buy the claim that the child in the womb is any less alive than the child outside. It would simply be more convenient for us if we didn’t have to think of what we kill as living.
I have friends, atheist scientist friends, who stop still and physically stiffen if I inadvertently, in their presence, say something about the soul or the spirit. There’s a war on, at present, between science and religion, only partly because of the advance of creationists. My generation took it for granted that the theory of evolution was true: who could really believe that, as the Bible says, the earth was made in only six days?
Yet can’t scientists make a distinction between private and public kinds of knowledge? Do they feel, when someone near to them dies, that only something material is lost? Is one beloved dog the same as another?
I don’t find it easy to define a soul, which is why I have left it till nearly last. In a way my own formal beliefs are not useful, because they exist in a different space. I was confirmed into the Church of England. What do I cling on to, of those beliefs? I think Jesus Christ is a perfect model: of kindness, empathy, lack of pride. His parables speak to the artist in me, as do the beauty of the hymns and the psalms. My father’s love for ‘Morning has broken/Like the first morning,’ is everyone’s love of, and longing for, renewal; his desire for a new self is my own. I am moved by Matthew Fox’s version of the faith, where the anawim, the humble and excluded, are always at the core of it. The first shall be last. Be as little children. A mirror reversal of the world we know, quietly radical, the gentlest miracle. An image, an otherworld that hangs there, beckoning, beyond the hills of hurt and worry. I take communion, though rarely; I kneel with others to say we are linked, this is the face of the faith I grew up in. I sit, grateful to be welcomed.
Catching the light
But since I was sixteen, and ‘lost my faith’, I cannot literally believe in a paradise with God and Jesus and the saints: where would it be? is my problem. Where am I to imagine them? It falls a
part, it turns to cardboard. More seriously, for this means that most Christians might see me as inimical, I cannot believe that there is only one God who happens to focus on our planet, our species, one species among so many species, one tiny planet in this vast universe of galaxies and stars and countless planets which surely, certainly harbour other life-forms. Why would that wide glory of light, space, matter, have a God centred on our little earth? Our Christian God looks suspiciously like us. If God exists, he must have many faces, so everyone can find their own face. Besides, as I learn about other faiths, I see they have aspects of the same beauty, speak to the same needs and longings. It isn’t only Christians who value compassion, love, forgiveness, charity. Who speak to the best in us, and face the worst.
I think of the Thai pendant I wore on the night when I felt I was saved by an answer to prayer, when the conscript threatened to rape and kill me. At the time, I had no idea what it meant, whose image it was. I bought it as fashion. Only writing this book have I realised that I wore on my breast that fateful night the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion, Kuan Yin, who is described as ‘an incarnation of Mary’, whose person embodies loving kindness. Kuan Yin hears the cries of the suffering; her name means ‘she who hears the sounds of the world’. She is said to have refused to enter heaven when the cries of the living came to her ears. Which compassion saved me? Kuan Yin’s, or Jesus’s? I would say, compassion in the universe; though in another universe, perhaps I was killed, in the universe I live in now, I was saved. But behind that larger claim there are real, small facts: compassion from the French boys who worried about me, who came and interrupted what was happening; my own compassion for myself, which made me hold on and hold off my attacker; even some buried restraint or pity in him which stopped him raping me straightaway. (But think also of those who are not saved, who are cruelly killed, tortured, murdered, who suffer for years, with no remission, who pray in terror and are not answered.)
