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 even difficult read. Yet there is something so compelling about the precision with which she shares the details of John’s death, wondering constantly 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. Or 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 its irrevocability that offers her a final sense of solace. He is gone and there is nothing she could have done to prevent it. ‘When something happens to me…’ as John, like so many of us, had said.

I recognise, with an aching sense of familiarity, the feelings she shares of not being able to accept someone has gone from our lives. Of wanting to believe it might somehow all be reversible if we hold off our acceptance for long enough. The endless attempts at magical thinking. If only I had done this … 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 part of me as a mother, warned him of the dangers of swimming in the sea as well as needing to be careful travelling around Mexico City. If only …

Instead life, as Didion reminds us, changes in ‘the instant’ – in the fastest and most cruel of ways. A phone-call in the middle of the night. A silent scream. Mother Courage Loses a Son.

Like Didion I find myself needing to go ‘to the literature’. Not for the medical knowledge or clinical understanding she is so often seeking. 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 shared 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 my title for the blog, taken from her definition of writing as a way of finding out what she is thinking, is prompted by the need to find someone who might have given voice to this unfathomable loss.

But The Year of Magical Thinking is not about the death of Didion’s child, Quintana. Although her illness and dramatic stays in ICUs thread 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. When I went to pick up Blue Nights at the bookshop where I had ordered it, the young man behind the counter remarked with a grim smile, ‘Looks like you’re in for a gruelling read.’ Snapping back at him, ‘She lost a child and I did too!’, I bitterly regretted it later. Anger. Guilt. Shame. Usually in that order. None of them so very far from the surface these days.

In many important ways for me though The Year of Magical Thinking is as much a book about a marriage as it is about a bereavement. When Didion speaks about that grief that ‘has no distance’ but ‘comes in waves’ I sense 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 impact it has had on her sense of self. And it is for this reason that I have found myself reading sections of it over and over again because it is 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 two years. Not, like Didion, as a response to a death that has become a reality in ‘an instant’ but instead to the slow, scary shifting of the land 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 mourn ‘for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer.’

‘What is your Job?’ was the question on the Improbable Theatre equality and diversity monitoring form that prompted this blog. By answering ‘writer, activist, carer,’ but qualifying it with ‘not necessarily in that order’ I sense I wanted to hold on to something.

But as the marriage vows Didion is quoting tell us, the commitment we make to the other is, ‘for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health …’ – which sometimes means letting go. Even if that means accepting the selves we were are no longer and learning to care for the selves we are becoming.

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 77. 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 a Devoted and Disgruntled gathering for theatre workers. 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. Even 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 the jobs they had.

Waiting for a check-up at the breast clinic the next day, and being reminded often how our physical health – in my case former mastectomy patient – always overrides the personal in these contexts, I found myself thinking again about self, the nature of identity and who or what defines us. Inevitably I found myself turning, as I often do when faced by questions like this, to Stuart Hall, and revisiting a quote 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 began to wonder whether Hall was right. Is our identity, our sense of self, something that is always in a state of fluctuation and change? Is it 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 belong to? Do those roots which connect us back to the parts of us that remain essentially the same across time have no part to play? Do those things that still feel so deeply part of me like 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 50 years simply clinging 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 relationships to dominant powers and our sense of where we belong in the hierachy. What I think he is reminding us is that none of this is fixed. Otherwise why would we engage in the struggle to bring about social justice and a less unequal and repressive world?

Probably more than ever in the past few years I have realised how much our sense of identity transforms in response to our shifting identifications and in particular to the groups we currently find ourselves belonging to. 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 unexpected and 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 had to be radically re-wrought in the past few years.

Re-visiting and reframing my website has partly 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 almost certainly reflects more of my desire for legacy and the possibility to make sense of all that has happened. The Blog is therefore deliberately no longer about what ‘Job I do’ but more about the thinking about life I find myself doing these days.

Maybe the portends for turning 77 were right and this is a time for personal transformation. And for finding ways to welcome ‘the never-completed process of becoming’ who I now 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 firm feminist riposte to mansplaining and a shared grappling with ideas about the art on 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 thought I could take that.