Everyday Madness

I was a star Pollyanna: though I’m a terrible and impatient nurse, I seem to be able to see the bright lining of most clouds, even thunderous ones. That night, I couldn’t. It might have occurred to me then, or perhaps it was later, that no one at the hospital – in all respects a wonderful and pioneering institution – ever talked of death. They talked only of chances. We were gamblers in a high-tech casino, playing against unknown odds – unknown not only because of the newness of the treatment but because each body, let alone each mind and set of emotions, is so uncooperatively individual.

That evening, we had watched a DVD of some stand-ups and laughed uproariously. In the middle of the night, John fell over on his way to the bathroom some three metres from the bed. I was meant to take him to the clinic if that happened. Falling. It was a signal we had been warned of. He was in neutropenia – a pretty word used to describe a scary state of no immunity in which infections can rampage. It was four days after Day Zero – the apocalyptic name given to the day when the harvested stem cells had gone back into his chemically cleaned system. But the cells hadn’t yet started their rebooting activity.

John flatly refused to leave the hotel room. He said he was fine and we would go in the morning. He was a man of considerable authority and stubbornness. I gave in without much argument. He did seem sort of fine now that he was in bed again. Rousing an emergency nurse might be worse than just sleeping. Or so I told myself.

In the clinic the following morning, we learned that an internal infection had set in. The nurse chided. A move into the multi-storey University College Hospital would follow imminently – or, rather, when a bed came free in the haematology ward with its sealed quarters. That only happened in the evening. With John in a wheelchair we were led along a subterranean passage through a block and a half of London streets. As the corridor twisted and turned, I wondered whether we were skirting the morgue where my father had lain.

Just like a thriller, I tried to joke.

Only as I write this does the body count my attempted joke may have conjured up for him come to me.

I waited until he was settled and asleep, then went to that now foreign place called home.

The next day was a Sunday. I drove to the hospital: it made it easier to bring food and fresh books. So focused was I on John getting better that I conveyed a week’s worth. When I got to his room, he was asleep. Staff were busy elsewhere. There was no one of whom I could ask questions.

5

I AM SITTING on a plastic chair beside his bed. We are relatively high up, but the windows are murky and the light that comes in is grey and blemished. He is dozing, it seems peacefully. His lips are parched, and when he opens his eyes, I ask him if he’d like some water or some of the ice cream I’ve brought for him, thinking it might go down well. I’ve been inspired by the large number of lollies he was forced to eat while the harvested stem cells were introduced back into his blood with a drip.

He’s weak and I feed him – just a few mouthfuls. He dozes off again, and sometime in that doze, he murmurs, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’

I stroke his hand. Tears come to my eyes. In all these gruelling weeks he has never before said that to me.

A little later he wakes again. This time he is more troubled. When the nurse comes to check on him, he grunts and groans. She has nothing to say to my questions, so I leave her to him, making my way through the two sets of doors that barricade the room from invisible killers. I stretch my legs. I realize that the dark is setting in. I also realize I haven’t brought my specs with me and need them to drive in the dark. When I’m back with John, I explain I have to make a dash home. He tells me to take his pyjamas with me and wash them.

In the toilet the reek is overwhelming. I see a cascade of diarrhoea – in its midst sodden pyjama bottoms.

I come out and tell him there’s no point. I’ll bring fresh ones.

‘No, take them,’ he says. His eyes are two angry slits. ‘Take them.’ He raises his voice.

I know he loves these pyjamas above any others. They’re ancient, but his favourites.

I go back into the toilet, not allowing myself to breathe, and realize I simply can’t lift this squelch of body and other materials. I feel defiled. I will dissolve, liquefy into the stench. My body is turning to waste, mirroring his, yet I’m being called upon to be mother to this ageing toddler.

‘That’s all you’re good for,’ I hear him shouting. ‘Cleaning shit.’

That was the last sentence he uttered to me. It hit me with the force of a body blow and mired me. Engulfed.

6

IF I RECOUNT such febrile unpleasantness, ordinary enough, it’s because his words played themselves over and over in my ears and in my nose, night and day, after he died. When I was making coffee in the early hours of the morning, they clanged through my mind and filled the air. I would go to bed and they were there, waiting for me, with their attendant smell.

I was abased, worthless. A punished infant. Maybe it was the vertiginous throwback to helpless infancy that gave the words such power.

They set up one of the first refrains of my mourning state, punctuating my life for months of that year. Even when they had lost their stench, they seemed an ultimate judgement. The last words of the dying can be a terrible thing.

It’s what he really thought of me, my inner voices say over and over. That was his final estimate. After all those thirty-two years together, that was what I was good for. Cleaning shit.

Of course I also realized that the fever was making him delirious. Of course I knew that a few hours before he had expressed a kindness, though I had now begun to doubt he had recognized the addressee of those words. Of course I knew he wasn’t himself. But the cutting edge of the putdown, combined with the assault on the senses, reduced me to a cleaner of everyday detritus. The words seemed to have carved themselves into my flesh. Instead of Hester Prynne’s A for adultery in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, I wore an imaginary S.

Over the course of the next months, this judgement grew into the bottom line of our partnership and our afterthought of a marriage. In the scales of mourning, it weighed more heavily than our long years as lovers, partners, co-authors, intellectual sparring mates, devoted parents, friends. I was only good for cleaning shit.

As every novelist and reader knows, the end of a story colours everything that came before. I was shit-coloured.

Despite their far more evident delirium, I had half believed my father’s last words to me about my mother, or at least the underlying truth of his fantasy. I had been pleased that he had mistaken me for a sister and taken me into his confidence. I hadn’t considered for a moment what effect kindred words poured out to my mother might have had on her. Now I thought of her and her tearless state, her pleading voice as she addressed my father’s dead body. Perhaps she, too, wanted some sign that their long lives together – in their case lived through the scarring turbulence of war as well as mundane peace – had had some value.

John’s words took on the onus of his revenge on me for somehow staying alive, outliving him. They were my punishment, the sign of my guilt. They would toll in my ears every time anyone talked of him. They left me barely in control.

If a friend or an acquaintance sang his praises, spoke of his vast knowledge, his wit, his gentleness and kindness, I would instantly hear his last words and feel abased. I would want to fight back, fight out of this masochism and shout, ‘Yes, kind to everyone, except to me!’ I would have to struggle to thank friends and acquaintances offering warm condolences without somehow uttering a comment that put me in the frame as well, or drew attention to the fact that I might be valuable, too, that I was implicated in the good in his life.

I put a silencing lock on my lips, which were always in danger of betraying me. Never in front of the children, I repeated to myself, over and over, like a mantra. Honour, respect, admire, not this sullying narrative and the madness of my response.

But language was out of my control. I was out of control. It was impossible to do more than offer a smiling – or was it grimacing? – acknowledgement to reminiscences and consoling thoughts. Much as I might want to. Much as I appreciated the words and letters of friends and the person they almost conjured up, I couldn’t trust my own lips – myself. The self I thought I knew, or at least had more than a passing acquaintance with, had gone missing.

Trapped in too many contradictions, I was in a perpetual rage in those first weeks and months, perhaps year. Rage – that ancient cornerstone of madness, so much one of its constitutive parts that in American English ‘mad’ is a cognate of ‘angry’.

I couldn’t read, certainly not fiction. Characters’ names and doings would vanish as soon as my eyes had got to the end of a page, sometimes the end of a sentence. If I started a novel I wanted or needed to read, I could never get to the end. I just didn’t want endings. The pile of novels by the bedside spilled over on to his side of the bed.

I couldn’t trust my conversation with friends or children. I could just about watch television, though plot lines had preferably to be no more complex than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could dance to: often enough, while they were dancing, his words and the reassessment of our conjoined lives they brought in their wake would return, and with it the racing anger. Eventually I graduated to Colombo and The Good Wife.

I am not normally an angry person. Quite the contrary. I don’t hold resentments. I very rarely lose my temper. I occasionally shout at the news (more often in these recent years of alternative facts) but almost never, except during my children’s teenage years, at anyone else. But here I was, raging all the time. Had I been bottling it up through those last years of illness?

Too late. The object of my rage was dead. Too soon.

It did occur to me, with a rare glimmer of light, that maybe death itself was my object. My rage would undo it, like those cartoon characters who propel their tiny swords into the fiery mouth of the dragon.

The march of fury with its rhythm of endlessly repeated questions – why did you? How could you? – kept him alive. It seemed he could occupy at least two states simultaneously. He could be the unpardoning, immovable granite body of his deathbed, and the absent presence with whom I argued ceaselessly in the hope that he would one day answer my questions and assuage my fury.

7

THE ANGER PROPELLED ACTIVITY. Ceaseless doing was the only escape from the flagellations of death, even though I couldn’t altogether outrun them. I knew they would only stop if I succumbed to them utterly, lay down and allowed my own ‘too, too solid flesh’ to ‘melt,/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!’.

Only when you’re in the aftershock of death, do you realize quite how forensically Shakespeare charted that terrain. Hamlet is the great tragedy of states of mourning. Hamlet’s melancholy and partial madness, his ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw’, his sexualized rage, his suicidal self-abasement; Ophelia’s breakdown, her unhinged speech and suicide after Polonius’s murder; even Gertrude’s far too hasty leap into another bed, all spring from the lashings of death and the disturbances of grieving.

My body, which always seemed to know my wishes better than I did, had already opted for death at the end of John’s first lymphoma treatment back at the start of 2014. It could do so again, surely, I now thought. That time I had just lain down on our bed after a dental appointment and woken up in an ambulance where my name was being called over and over. Somehow I couldn’t reply.

All I recall of that cardiac arrest and briefly surfacing from some unknown depths is how wondrously pretty the paramedic was. I told her so, it seems, then passed out again to wake to the faces of my dear ones gathered round the hospital bed.

If he hadn’t been at home that day, I would have gone first. Evidently some part of me wanted to go. Couldn’t cope with the anxiety of his illness. Couldn’t bear him dying. Couldn’t bear the thought of an unanchored future in a land where, without him, I would once more feel intolerably foreign. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy my foreignness and the ethnographer’s distance it affords. But too much tosses me back to the vertiginous childhood condition of being a migrant, who can’t read the signs or tune into the language and with no place called home.

Better that I should have gone first, I now told myself over and over. I seemed to be in pain all the time in any case. My pills didn’t agree with me and I kept passing out, so low was my heart rate. My inflammatory system went into overdrive, as if I had sustained injuries I had failed to notice. Was I mirroring what he had felt without complaint? My back, my shoulders, my head, my fingers, my chest, all the area around my heart ached. My body seemed to be indicating it was doing my dying for me and I should stop haring about.

A friend later told me that I seemed to spend all my time leaning on any surface available – the countertops in the kitchen, the back of a chair, the table – as if there was an unbearable weight in my body, in my bones, that I could not carry alone: ‘like the heaviness that comes in dreams, that terrible inertia, that makes it impossible to run,’ she wrote. I had Lethe-wards sunk, as Keats has it in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

Some die of heartbreak, the medics know too well. The eighteen months following the death of a partner seem to be precarious, particularly for women. So John Bowlby’s study of mourning made clear back in the early 1960s.

The research shows that most women take a long time to get over the death of a husband and that, by whatever psychiatric standard they are judged, less than half are themselves again at the end of the first year. Almost always health suffers. Insomnia is near universal; headaches, anxiety, tension and fatigue are extremely common. In any mourner there is increased likelihood that one or more of a host of other symptoms will develop; even fatal illness is more common in the bereaved than it is in others of the same age and sex.

My mind might be absent, even as it chatted to friends who seemed to think I made sense, but it raced and sometimes my feet followed. The echoing family house, though it had been mine before he came into my life, was now rarely friendly. I kept walking from room to empty room, forgetting what I was looking for. I would rearrange flowers, plump up cushions, fold clothes for Oxfam, move books, papers, furniture. I think it was in those early days that I decided to shift the bed we had placed in the front room in case he was too weak to climb stairs when he got back from hospital. But that meant dislodging something else … and on it went. I was looking for an absence but that absence was also in myself. Neither of us could be found. Meanwhile there had to be the mutually contradictory acts of rearrangement and commemoration.

That I had been left to deal with bureaucracy, with the remains of too many days funnelled into an alien computer whose filing system made as much sense to me as a Rubik’s Cube, was fuel for more rage and more activity.

Not that I can easily recall the particularity of most of my doings. I think I was living in a state of rational delusion. My scrappy, all-but-unreadable diary of the time is crowded with instructions to myself, meetings with family and friends, and crossings out. Pick up forms from hospital. Write to department in Cambridge. Sort out obits. See funeral director. Invite guests. Order flowers. Order funeral food. Contact Highgate Cemetery. Choose site. Confer with children. Write to banks. Find will. Speak to lawyers. Confer with children. Cancel, cancel, cancel. Fill out forms, fill out forms, fill out more forms.

The bureaucracy of death seems to want to compete with death itself in the horror stakes. I began to think it was winning.

At night and at odd times of the day I would pass into a state of torpid exhaustion and sleep the sleep of the dead uncluttered by dreams, or any dreams I can remember. Dreams or, rather, nightmares were daytime activities – at least initially.

One morning, I think it was just before the funeral, I came downstairs shivering. It was a dank, chill November, yet the house felt colder than usual. I wandered into the kitchen, turned the radio on for the sound of human voices, put the kettle to boil. A gust of cold air made me wrap my robe more tightly round myself. I followed the draught. It took me a few moments to realize that a window in the front of the house was open. A chill wind blasted through the room. How had I managed to leave that window open? I chastised myself for yet another random act of forgetting. I couldn’t be trusted.

The stubborn window wouldn’t close. It was always stiff, I reminded myself. Growing angry at my dwindling strength, I tried to position myself more strategically behind the sofa to heave down on the window frame. It was then my slippered foot arched awkwardly over some unseen object. I looked down and found a screw on the floor and beside it some chips of wood. Only then did my addled mind register that I hadn’t been the one to leave the window open. It had been forced. I now saw a single broken lock on the floor, marks on the window frame where it had been jemmied up. An intruder. An attempted burglary. But he hadn’t got in. The higher locks had held, and only a wraith or an infant could have squeezed through that foot of open space.

I poured coffee. My hand was shaking. It was him. I knew it. He was trying to come back. To come in. To break in. He should have asked. I would have unlocked the door.

Superstition. I knew I was being superstitious. I was also convinced. It was a sign. A portent.

I rang my son. He lived further away than my daughter, but he wasn’t a reader of Wuthering Heights. He told me I had to call the police, at least to register the attempted break-in. And to call our builder, ever a friend in need, who would come and fix the lock. I did all that, but I was nonetheless convinced that John was trying to break in, to come home. Whether it was because he missed me or wanted to chastise me – or both simultaneously – was the quandary.

8

FRIENDS WERE WONDERFUL through those days. They brought warmth and food. The fridge was piled high with delectables. We talked. We hugged. We drank a little. I don’t know if they could see just how crazy I felt. I tried to smile. I was grateful to them. Grateful to my splendid children who came and sat, sometimes stayed, sometimes even had us all laughing at our ghosts.

Saturday, 5 December, the day of the funeral, dawned as grey and grim and cold as a funeral day proverbially must. The large chapel at Golders Green Crematorium was filled to capacity. I know who spoke. I had invited them. They were our nearest friends, John’s closest colleague in Cambridge, his two brothers, the children and their partners, one of whom read a text sent by a dear mutual friend at Harvard, who couldn’t be there. I know everyone spoke with eloquence and grace. They spoke with tenderness and, in the case of our daughter and son, with great courage. But I could concentrate on little that was said and remember next to nothing. Quite unlike the other occasions on which I have been in that chapel, when the well-chosen words of tributes resonated for weeks.

It was clear he was loved, admired, honoured. Whatever the noise in my head, I was pleased about that. Moved. I wanted to say a few brief words. Perhaps I wanted to say them in order to prove to him, to everyone, most of all to myself, that I was worth more than the lowly role to which I had been assigned.

The voice in my head, which had done much of the assigning, was punishing: it interpreted all this as a callow call for attention. A stupid self-aggrandizement.

Months later, I came across a passage from William James’s The Principles of Psychology that made some sense of my overarching need for what convention might dictate as an unwifely visibility. James writes:

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof … If every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.

For some reason, on that occasion, the usual invisibility that attends the ageing woman’s life felt akin to annihilation.

I talked for a brief moment about the John-shaped hole in my life and read a poem by Adam Zagajewski that evoked something of him, at least for me.

Don’t allow the lucid moment to dissolve.

Let the radiant thought last in stillness

though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers.

We haven’t risen yet to the level of ourselves.

I was facing him in the coffin as I read. I had the distinct feeling that if he didn’t like what I said he would sit up. I recall being worried about any revealing verbal slips I might make. I was frantic about the fact that he would soon be turned to ash. Was ash worse than the stony implacable effigy he had become in my mind? Or the phantom intruder? The night before the funeral I had worked out that the day on which he had uttered the words that had etched themselves into my mind, like a festering scar, was precisely thirty-two years after we had met.

Periodically, I would remind myself that his last words to me were simply an indication that, like so many wives, I had grown into my husband’s mother: it is mostly mothers after all who deal with babies’ smelly mess. Freud’s words in his essay on ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, an essay John liked to cite, often came to me: ‘But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.’

The human condition doesn’t really help all that much when one is being all too human. I had thought, once the funeral was over, I would be less crazy, less alert to the perpetual babble of those inner voices, less susceptible to rage, those racing, chattering demons in my mind, that were so hard to outrun. The Furies, the ancients called them.

I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have let the need for activity take me to his desk.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN a few days before the funeral. I needed to find his will so that all the formal matters of death and the state could be sent on their way. He had told me it was in his desk.

I had never particularly liked that desk, heavy and stolid and post-war, but he was attached to it. It had belonged to his father. In all our years together I had rarely looked inside it and then only under instruction about where and for what.

I started to rifle round. I realized I was nervous. I may have written the occasional thriller, but outside books, I have a deep sense of privacy. Or at least I do in the normal course of things. I never rifled through my children’s diaries, and though I once read some letters I had found in the back of a cupboard that turned out to have been from an early girlfriend to my son, I felt ashamed doing it, as if I had turned into my own mother, a constant rifler. Or maybe, much as I want to know, I’m simultaneously frightened of finding things out, as if a trap lies at the end of every dark, twisting corridor.