Everyday Madness

Nor would the ground quite hold John. A furry new revenant, a bear-like charcoal cat, silky to the touch, with a round face and intent yellow eyes, appeared. We had seen it here and there on the street for several years. I think he was a British shorthair. John had a fondness for him. Now the cat decided he really needed to move in with me. No sooner was the front door open than he would streak past and disappear into the house. I would look diligently in every room and under sofas. Invariably I would find him upstairs, curled up in pride of place on a plush red velvet armchair in John’s study, right next to his desk. I began to think he looked a little like the chair’s last incumbent. Had John been transformed into this unreadable familiar? I would carry Puss out, not wanting to leave him in the house alone. But I felt as guilty as if I were putting John, himself, out.

IN MAY, almost exactly six months after John had died, we held a memorial in Cambridge. A great deal of planning had gone into the event, not only by myself: his departmental administrator was key.

I had been looking forward to this ritual moment. Surely this would shift things, I told myself. The obsessive inner monologue would abate, the rage, the superstitions. I would no longer be quite so susceptible to the waves of grieving madness.

But I feared the event simultaneously. Universities are rarely altogether hospitable to those outsiders called partners. Close friends of ours had gathered from abroad, from America and Germany and France. His department, History and Philosophy of Science, of which he had been head for years, convened a day for students, former students and colleagues. A public memorial in the beautiful Great Hall at his college, King’s, followed, and finally drinks at the Whipple Museum of Science, which the department houses.

One-time students, colleagues and friends evoked a person I must also have known, since I had known John well, known his dedication, the breadth of his knowledge, his humour. Yet my mind kept wandering as soon as anything personal was mentioned, as if the only plot I could follow was the purely intellectual one. Everyone gave the impression of intimacy.

Neither did I always recognize the man evoked – had I so remade his image in myself that he could no longer be remembered, reassembled, reconstituted as other, outside myself? I struggled to recall half of the incidents at which I was purportedly present. I struggled to thank people graciously, even though I was so very grateful to them. I simply struggled. Remembering, putting the body and mind parts together again, seemed once more, and despite the passage of time, to reinvigorate shock and hostility. Only the Bach at the end of the proceedings, played by the talented Kryszia Osostowicz – the Sarabande in D from Partita No. 2, followed by the Largo in F Major from Sonata No. 3 – seemed to knit together ragged threads and provide peace. And the embrace of friends.