A rose called ‘At Peace’
ON MOURNING
‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it …’
Joan Didion
Joan Didion’s response to the grief of losing her husband of forty years The Year of Magical Thinking is the one book from my birthday library I have now read all the way through. The privileged and often rarefied life which Didion and her husband John Dunne enjoyed, which she chronicles with such elegance, can make it a complex and sometimes difficult read. It is so easy to compare our lives with others and find ourselves wanting. Yet there is something so compelling about the precision with which she shares the details of John’s death, wondering constantly whether anything the medics, the doctors or she herself did in response to his heart attack could have produced different outcomes, it is impossible not to be affected by the rawness of her grief. Nor to recognise the painful longing she has for some form of control. When she shares the detailed autopsy report which she receives almost a year late, having hurriedly written down an old address at the hospital, it is as if it is only in its irrevocability that she can finally find a sense of solace. John is gone and there is nothing she could have done to prevent it. ‘When something happens to me …’ as he had often said.
I read her account of resisting reality, of not being able to accept someone has gone from our lives with an aching sense of familiarity. Wanting to believe it might somehow all be reversible if we hold off acceptance for long enough. The boundless attempts at magical thinking. The unceasing wondering if there were ways we might have prevented it. If only I had done this … or said that. If only I had been afraid enough for him, remembered to rehearse all the things that could possibly go wrong that has always been part of me as a mother. If only I had warned him of the dangers of swimming in the sea as well as needing to be careful travelling around Mexico City. If only …
But life, is brutal. And, as Didion so frequently reminds us, it changes fast. In ‘the ordinary instant’.
A phone-call in the middle of the night. A silent scream.
Mother Courage Loses a Son.
Like Didion I constantly find myself needing to go ‘to the literature’ at those moments when I can find nothing to say. In moments of darkness that so often means turning to Brecht. I am not seeking out medical knowledge or clinical understanding of what happened as she is. There is no objective explanation for an accident of nature, or for the savage toll the sea can still demand of us. Instead I am driven by a longing to find that writer, or writers, who will have captured everything I am feeling but express it more eloquently, more poetically. A wordsmith who will speak of those emotions I no longer have the capacity to frame. A crafter of words who will help me make sense of myself and the grief beyond grief that enshrouds you when you lose a child. Even now I recognise that my impulse to share Didion’s thoughts and words, including the definition of writing that I have adapted for the title of this blog, is prompted by that need to find someone who has given voice to that which still feels unspeakable.
But The Year of Magical Thinking is not about the death of Didion’s child, Quintana. Although her illness and dramatic stays in ICUs beat their way through the book, like the syncopation in a piece of music, Quintana did not die until almost two years later. And that is another book. For me The Year of Magical Thinking has become as much about a marriage as it is about bereavement. When Didion speaks about that grief that ‘has no distance’ but ‘comes in waves’ she is not only speaking of the loss of the man who has been her partner in life for over forty years but of the unfathomable impact it has had on her. It is for this almost savage honesty that I find myself reading sections of it over and over again. As if, in describing her fear of indulging in what others might see as self pity or her loss of resilience, she is describing exactly those fears that colour the anticipatory grief and loss I have come to know over the past few years. Not, like Didion, as a response to a death that has become a reality in ‘an instant’ but instead to the slow, terrifying shifting of the ground beneath my feet that I have learned losing someone to a degenerative brain disease involves. Each day reminding me, with increasing resonance, of her explanation that as we mourn the loss of the person that was, we are also learning to grieve ‘for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer.’
‘What is your Job?’ was the question on Improbable’s Devoted and Disgruntled equality and diversity monitoring form that prompted me to begin this blog. My decision to answer ‘writer, activist, carer,’ and qualify it with ‘not necessarily in that order’ was, I now realise, a first fumbling attempt to place my grief for the person that I was in the public sphere. I was probably as surprised as anyone to find myself standing up and drawing on it to make a passionate call for a session on the final ‘Day of Action’. The applause and the boundless generosity with which my suggestion that we might want to think how we could ‘Make More Radical Work with Old People’ which I prefaced with a description of my own situation, touched me more than I can say.
I am on a very different journey in my later years than I had ever imagined. I am having to accept that the person I was is ‘no longer’. The commitment we make in the marriage vows, as Didion reminds us, is to accept each other ‘for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health …’. I have become to realise this involves accepting ourselves in the same way. For better or for worse, we have to learn to grieve for the people we were, mourn the selves we are no longer and learn to care for the selves we are becoming. However tough that might prove to be.
