ON RADICAL HONESTY
‘We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E.M. Forster

It was with a heightened sense of inevitability that I realised I would not be able to follow Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking with anything other than Blue Nights. When I go to pick it up at the bookshop where I have ordered it, the young man behind the counter remarks with a grim smile, ‘Looks like you’re in for a gruelling read.’ I find myself snapping back at him, ‘She lost a child and I did too!’. Seconds later I bitterly regret my response as he confusedly mumbles something about finding solace. Anger. Guilt. Shame. Usually in that order. None of them so very far from the surface these days.

As I open its pages and begin to read, it is almost as if I was destined never to have really known Didion’s work until this point. I am and have always been a voracious reader of women’s writing. How, I wonder, did her books slip off my reading lists? Was it to do with her class, her politics, the disturbing visual elision I have created between her and Vogue editor Anna Wintour? Or simply an aversion to texts that appeared so full of stories of people whose names we mostly know through gossip columns in the popular press that it felt as if she was teasingly offering us a seductive, but transient, insight into worlds from which we knew we were permanently excluded?

Perhaps it was all of these. Yet somehow here we are. Joan and me (We even share a name). And it is almost as if we are sitting in each other’s company. Me learning, as the book unfolds, how our lives have crossed in the strangest and darkest of ways. Losing a child. Losing a husband. Losing our sense of who we are within all this. I find myself exclaiming out loud, as she writes of the sudden tragic death of her young friend, Natasha Richardson, that I had forgotten that shocking moment when Corin Redgrave, her uncle, had shared that news with us. And how unimaginable and unspeakably cruel it had felt that such a loss could happen to anyone had seemed at that time. ‘This was never supposed to have happened to her‘ Didion notes, repeating the words she uses of her own daughters’ death four years earlier, like a Greek chorus.,‘This was never supposed to have happened to her’. This was never supposed to have happened to any of our children. It was never supposed to happen to any parent. Those blue summer nights were intended to last forever.

But this did happen. It does happen. The nights darken. Joan, Vanessa and I are not alone. Quintana is gone. Natasha is gone. Jamie is gone. Endless children are gone in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan – killed in conflicts for which we, as humanity, must take some responsibility. Endless mothers, and fathers thinking ‘this was never supposed to happen’. Endless excuses being created by mainstream politicians and media for the barbarous loss of humanity that makes the targeted killing of children and the unbearable suffering of their parents acceptable. Those of us who have known that loss filled with endless guilt and shame that we were unable to save them. Anger. Guilt. Shame. Usually in that order. Never far from the surface these days.

But Blue Nights is not only about loss.. It is also about the complex and contradictory ways in which we find ourselves facing that loss. What my one-sided conversations with Didion and her books have taught me (I note how briefly I felt able to call her Joan) is how important writing can be as a way of facing the unfaceable. From defining the impact of that cruel instant in which death changes everything to confronting the equally relentless and complicated fears that follow, Didion is ruthlessly and radically open and transparent. Not only in sharing her dread of memories fading away like the blue nights as her child disappears into the ‘nothingness’ she has always feared, but also the curtailing of the possible and foreshortening of the horizon that age and such losses bring. Her confession that she is terrified that turning seventy-five might be some form of cut-off point, despite discovering the ever youthful Sophia Loren is the same age, her acknowledgement that she cares about the physical impacts of ageing more than she might have anticipated, is increasingly afraid of falling and terrified of not remembering feels palpably brave. Our own mortality is, as she suggests inextricably caught up with the fears we have for our children from the moment they are born. Faced with their loss it as if those fears turn in on ourselves, forcing us to face our own vulnerability and frailty.

It was five years before Didion felt able to write about the death of Quintana. ‘Time’, as Didion notes ‘passes‘. While Quintana’s presence, whether hurrying off to school in her plaid school uniform, wearing leis and red soled Christian Louboutin shoes at her wedding, or wrapped in ICU hospital gowns flits through the pages with the luminosity of a firefly it is still difficult to have a complete sense of her. It is as if in accepting the chaotic and fragmented way that memories arrive Didion has had to let go of the precision, control and musical accuracy that characterises so much of her writing. She allows herself to voice her doubts that she might still have the capacity to write, while seeking possibilities to prove to herself she is wrong.

It is the messy hotchpotch that is our memories, along with her unadorned sharing of the questioning, doubts and fears that assail her after Quintana’s death, that I will take away from Blue Nights. And the need to remind myself of the mantra she creates to protect herself from self pity, unnervingly evocative of the credo by which my mother, toughened by her own hardships, encouraged us to live our lives:

‘Do not whine … Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.’

Postscript.

On the night of Jamie’s cremation in Mexico I asked family and friends to light a candle to see him on his journey. The other day I finally put the photographs people shared with us on my thakla blog. The one above is from his sister-in-law Masya and her boyfriend.

Two weeks after his death we held a memorial service in a beautiful Wren church. We read Maya Angelou’s When Great Trees Fall, a young cellist friend played St Saëns The Swan, one of Steve’s young opera singers sang One Fine Day from Madame Butterfly and each of us in turn placed white flowers on the altar. A flower seller by London Bridge asked if something special was happening because so many people had asked for white flowers that morning. Friends of his and ours we hadn’t seen for years suddenly appeared on boats and trains from Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and beyond. Later we shared stories, drank prosecco and, as so often seems to happen at funerals and memorials, laughed a lot.

Three months later I took the viva for my PhD. I asked that they didn’t tell the external examiner what had happened. I was afraid she might pass me out of pity. I unexpectedly loved our conversation, feeling suddenly present, alive and listened to in the most perfect of ways. Afterwards, as I waited in a soulless university room for the verdict, I wept. One of my examiners gave me a pin I had admired that said Free Palestine in Irish. Both gave me a hug.

Since then I find myself so often wanting to care for the person I am speaking to and to follow Didion’s mantra that I resist the tears. I cried out once while waiting for a plane the first time we went back to Berlin, where Jamie lived. Everyone, apart for a woman who was a nurse who came and instinctively held me, was terrified. Later the staff took me to one side before we boarded to ask if they should allow me on the plane as they were worried for their other customers. I promised myself I would do my best to stay silent.

Post postscript.
This week the 11th edition of Record magazine, an annual publication, came out. because it had not been published for two years, it had the final interview Jamie ever did. Discovering there was a magazine shop that stocked it locally I took a walk to buy a copy. Reading through the pages, of which I had seen an earlier version, I realised they had decided to leave all the little conversational fillers like the use of ‘like’ in and wanting to change that. I remembered then how often Jamie had sent me things he had written for the vinyl label or press releases to check whether it said what he wanted to say and if there were any mistakes. I also remembered Didion finding an old journal of Quintana’s after her death and being appalled by the fact she found herself mentally correcting the sentences.

Afterwards, sitting in a nearby Japanese café, a young woman came up to me to ask if I’d just bought the magazine because she worked in the shop. I explained why I wanted a copy and found myself telling her everything about Jamie and his life. She thought he sounded so similar to her own partner in the way he tried to realise his passions for music and art and wine and good food in his work. I told her about wanting to take out all the ‘like’s and we laughed about it being the kind of thing mothers never get out of the habit of doing. She promised to read the interview and I promised to revisit what had turned out to be an amazing store. We exchanged names before we left. It felt quietly significant that she was called Emilia. On the way home Blanche Dubois’ final line came into my mind.
‘Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’

‘We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.‘

Small steps. After all it took Joan five years. Small steps …

A rose called ‘At Peace’ that I grew in memory of Jamie

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 …

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 be prove to be.

The purpose of art is washing the daily dust off our souls.  Pablo Picasso

ON IDENTITY …
‘Identity is a never completed process of becoming…’
Stuart Hall

On April 4^th this year I turned seventy seven. Discovering that the number 77 is one of the ‘angel numbers’, a coming together of the 7s that signifies spiritual awakening, inner wisdom and a time for personal transformation I decided it should be something to celebrate. Which I did.

A few weeks after my birthday I found myself being asked to complete a diversity monitoring chart at an Improbable Theatre Devoted and Disgruntled gathering. Confidently putting my sticker at the top of the age chart (no-one superseded me over the three days) I noticed how much more hesitant I became when I arrived at the question ‘What is your Job?’

In the end I plumped for ‘writer, activist and carer’. After all these are the roles that take up most of my days these days. If not necessarily in that order.

Later in the day, a young woman in a group I’d joined about art and illness questioned whether she could still identify herself as an actor when her present disability meant she was no longer offered any roles. We told her she should absolutely go on describing herself as an actor if that was how she still saw herself. And that that was what mattered.

On my way home, I began to wonder whether we’d been too encouraging. Despite all our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the arts we still persist in identifying people by the paid work they do or who their parents were or the jobs they had.

Waiting for a check-up at the breast clinic the next day and being reminded how our physical conditions – in my case former mastectomy patient – overrides anything personal in these contexts, I found myself thinking again about the young actor’s concerns.  One of the forms I had to complete before seeing the consultant asked me to put down how many children I had.  I paused anxiously before I wrote down ‘two’.  Was that the right answer?  Did I need to qualify it by stating that one of my sons was dead?  Am I still a mother of two?  If our lives are changed irreparably by illness or loss are we still the same self?  Who or what defines that self ? I found myself returning to the definition of identity Stuart Hall offers us that I had referenced in my PhD: 

‘I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming – a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.’‘

I wondered whether Hall was right. Is our identity, our sense of self, something that will always be in a state of flux? Is it in fact a constant process of repositioning ourselves, shifting our identifications in response to the people around us, the groups we find ourselves belonging to – or no longer belonging to? Do those roots which connect us back to the parts of us that remain essentially the same across time have any part to play? Do those things that still feel so deeply part of me such as  coming from two working-class, migrant families, one Irish, the other Polish/Lithuanian, growing up on a council estate in Leeds in the 50s, being educated as a Catholic or becoming a teenager in the ’60s count for nothing? Are the experiences that resulted from those specifics, such as encountering feminism, discovering the pill, getting engaged with the anti-war movement not integral to who I am? Is the fact that I still see myself as a working-class Yorkshire woman even though I’ve lived in London for over fifty years simply a defiant need to cling on to something that no longer matters?

I know Hall is not suggesting that. No one is clearer than he is about the intersecting ways in which our class, gender, ethnicity, dis/ability impact our understanding of where we belong in the hierachy. What I think he is reminding us is that none of this need be fixed. Otherwise why engage in the struggle to bring about social justice and a less unequal and repressive world?

In the past years I have learned through necessity how my own sense of identity has shifted and transformed. Some of those re-positionings have been inevitable, like accepting the impacts of ageing, including the ensuing invisibility as a woman, and the resulting changes in physical abilities. Others have been unexpectedly cruel. Finding myself belonging to the group ‘mothers who have lost a child’ – Arabic is the only language that has a word for it, thakla, ثكلى – and then becoming a carer for a partner with a rare degenerative brain disease have ensured my sense of who I am has be radically re-wrought in the past few years.

Re-visiting and reframing my website has been a response to all this. While my work-self remains, I retain a certain amount of pride in what I’ve done and still do, it reflects my recognition that it is now intended as some form of legacy, and a space to share my thoughts and my writing. This Blog is therefore deliberately no longer about any jobs I do but an attempt to see what I’m looking at, face what I fear and find myself in the life I am living.

Of course it’s scary. But maybe the portends for turning seventy-seven were right? This is a time for personal transformation. And for finding ways to welcome, or at least come to some understanding with,  ‘the never-completed process of becoming’ that is offering me a new sense of who I am.

Postscript

As I looked through the small pile that had accumulated on the coffee table I asked myself what their choices might tell people about others’ perceptions of me. And to consider what I might learn about myself from them. The books were – Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Jill Burke’s How to be a Renaissance Woman’, Kristin Hannah’s The Women, Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me and a collection of conversations between John Berger and Susan Sontag To Tell a Story. Stories about a long marriage and loss, female creativity, resilience and enduring friendship, a robust feminist riposte to mansplaining and a shared grappling with ideas about the art of writing from two of the best. I decided I quite liked the ‘me’ they reflected.

Since then I’ve found myself dipping in and out of these very different books. How to be a Renaissance Woman has become my bedside table reading, constantly awed by the mirror it holds up to our own society’s view of how women should look and behave. And if Berger and Sontag have become my daunting go tos each time I think I might write something, Solnit is there to remind me how effective the patriarchal culture can be in making women lose faith in our own capacity. In the same way she feels each book she has published has given her more faith in holding her space and being listened to I recognise the difference having Dr. in front of my name has made to the way I am listened to. Not that I am writing or saying anything very different to what I have always written or said but somehow the words seem to land with more weight. A young friend proudly texted me the other day to tell me she had been at a graduation ceremony at a London University college when she suddenly heard Dr Chrissie Tiller being quoted. She said she couldn’t quite recall the exact words shared but was certain collaboration, collectivity and diversity were among them. I decided I would take that.