Copyright

4th Estate

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First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

This 4th Estate paperback edition 2019

Copyright © Lisa Appignanesi 2018

Cover photography: Shutterstock

The right of Lisa Appignanesi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008300333

Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008300319

Version: 2019-08-02

Praise for Everyday Madness:

‘Everyday Madness offers a brilliant theory and definition of a modern malady, but what makes it so enticing is that it’s also a case study in the condition it describes. In other words, in identifying a previously undescribed territory, Lisa Appignanesi has wonderfully invented a previously unwritten form’

Adam Thirlwell

‘Keen-eyed, unflinching in her honesty, Lisa Appignanesi carries us down into the depths through an inner landscape of unappeasable turmoil, as she moves towards knowledge of love and the serenity it brings. With piercing insight and many moments of intense poignancy, she illuminates the complexity and costs of a remarkable and passionate journey’

Marina Warner

‘Wonderful, moving, extraordinary. It is sui generis. I feel enormously privileged to have read it – twice. Its structure is remarkable – an enacting of the last two years. Bravo, bravo’

Edmund de Waal

‘Thoughtful, challenging, illuminating, truthful and moving. We all bear losses. Lisa Appignanesi breaks the isolation and helps us endure them’

Susie Orbach

‘By deftly moving between the personal and the public, between childhood and adulthood, between the immediacy of feeling and the distance of reflection, Lisa Appignanesi constructs an anatomy of grief and its frequent but discomfiting attendant: rage. The private, the political, and the philosophical merge in a single story of a woman navigating the jolts, terrors, fury, and confusion that arrive after the death of her spouse’

Siri Hustvedt

Dedication

For John

and our first grandson,

Manny

Epigraph

Without the thought of death, it is impossible to make out anything in a human being. Its mystery hangs over everything.

SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH

The death of a loved one is actually also the death of a private, whole, personal and unique culture, with its own special language and its own secret, and it will never be again, nor will there be another like it.

DAVID GROSSMAN

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Everyday Madness

Dedication

Epigraph

Prelude

GRIEVING

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

LOSING

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

LOVING

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

CODA

Footnote

Notes

Acknowledgements

Credits

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PRELUDE

THIS IS A BOOK about the kinds of states that float somewhere between diagnosed madness and daily life. They are ordinary enough states and yet they are extraordinary. Without toppling us over into the register of specified mental illness, they can nonetheless hover close and scary. They are part of what make us individuals and not statistics, subjects for narrative, rather than objects for the sorts of studies that feed drug trials, corporations, advertising campaigns or state records. Humans are ample, often suffering beings. The machine model of cognition, of information processing, just isn’t adequate to our complexity.

I am the principal ‘case’ in what follows, though really only a woman whose husband has recently died. His death launches me on a journey. It’s not one that has an identifiable destination. Perhaps because of that the political and social atmosphere of the moment hover very close.

I have tried in the middle section of the book to investigate the ways in which our historical moment and the wider world could be understood as sharing a set of emotions with my own grieving state. Anger and loss are political, not simply personal feelings. They bleed into us collectively: the media and the social networks play their part. I have a hunch that the time we spend as and with ‘disembodied’ beings feeds into these dark feelings, too.

Sometimes they can be assuaged or at least counterbalanced by hope. Luckily that’s where I landed in the final part of this book.

I hope my children will forgive my exposure. I have tried to be circumspect. Their mother is a reliable enough person, but when it comes to writing, the writer steps in.

GRIEVING

What I’m talking about now is a very ancient part of human awareness. It may even be what defines the human – although it [was] largely forgotten in the second half of the twentieth century. The dead are not abandoned. They are kept near physically. They are a presence. What you think you’re looking at on that long road to the past is actually beside you where you stand.

JOHN BERGER

1

THE SMALL TRANSLUCENT bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.

I couldn’t bring myself to move it or use it.

When I finally picked it up, it was caked and slightly clammy to the touch, like perspiring, not quite healthy skin. I put my glasses on to make out the indistinct print on the front of the curve. For the first time I could see that, next to the stylized palm tree, vanishing letters spelled out Memory of Senses.

I put the bottle back on the shelf. Quickly.

Though I had rid the house of bagsful of clothes, unopened packs of tobacco, wires that belonged to defunct machines, and some of the other random leavings of life, I somehow couldn’t chuck that tiny bottle.

Superstition.

We all know the dead inhabit select objects. Even when we might also believe that they’ve gone to meet their maker or joined the elements in a field or river, or their everlasting souls have travelled up to Heaven to be judged by a supreme court at which angels bear witness to their deeds, good and bad, and eleven months of purgatory await.

Superstition: from the Latin ‘over + stand’. A presence stands over us, one whom we fear or who might just bring us luck. Or perhaps, as in surveillance, that presence compounds security and fear. Cicero, that hoary old philosopher who, according to one of my school teachers, had intoned something about diseases of the mind being more common and more pernicious than those of the body, had considered the word to be a derivation of superstitiosi – literally those who are left over, the survivors or descendants. It is they who must perform the funeral rites for their dead. It is they who need superstition.

One of my superstitions as a performer of funeral rites seems to lie in a miniature bottle of shampoo, latterly found to bear the name Memory of Senses.

Had I unwittingly taken in that name well before noticing it? None of my senses had been behaving particularly well in the fourteen months, and rising, since he had died. My sight and hearing had all but abandoned the world. They were overrun, smothered by the assault from within. Maybe I had something in common with that other addled mourner, Hamlet, whose father’s untimely death alongside his mother’s way of grieving – curtailed too swiftly and sexually from his perspective as a son – sets up a fury in him that some term mad. He feels surveilled – by the state, by his father’s ghost, and most of all by his own watchful, overwrought self.

2

DEATH HAD COME suddenly for John. It wasn’t expected. Not by any of us. Even though he was undergoing an extreme new treatment, the details of which I can’t seem to rehearse. Even though he had been in treatment for the first time just a little over two years before, then again in that last year. Twice. We had carried on laughing and arguing and walking and watching too many thrillers on the telly, and life didn’t feel as if it were ebbing in any more definitive a way than usual. There was plenty of black humour and blunt speaking about mortality, but somehow these were jokes and quite unrelated to the real. On top of it all, he looked fit. Like himself.

So when the real came, it was utterly unexpected. A shock – like a wall toppling, knocking you down into rubble. Things smelt strange there, rot and ash. When you raised your head, skewed hallucinative vistas opened.

Part of the shock resided in the sheer corporeality of death. Nothing virtual there. The body turned to unresponding stone, massive, unforgiving, as it lay there on the raised bed in the intensive care unit. That unmoving body was more intractable than mere absence. It was stubbornly indomitable. It couldn’t be wooed, or bargained with, or budged. Certainly not by me. Not over months of remembering. It was just there. A blunt fact. Somehow it was also a reprimand: how had we let him die?

We tend to think of dead bodies as abject in their lifelessness. I should have felt sorrow and pity. I had earlier while he was still breathing, but now – perhaps it was fear, or panic, or guilt, or all of them at once – his sheer stony immovability carried a visceral threat. Was it the latent violence of so much shiny steel and the high-tech tools that brought murder to my mind?

The evening before, I had had a loud panicking exchange with a bullying emergency-room doctor, who wanted to operate instantly: he just wouldn’t listen when I said anyone from the cancer clinic would tell him that, given John’s non-existent immune system, he couldn’t be operated on. I was quietened by another doctor, and in the end, when the detail on John’s file was read, no operation took place.

Had I been wrong? Was I complicit in the death? And did that mean, in the too many interpretations that accompany death, just as they accompany love, that I somehow wanted it?

He had lain there for a whole night before turning into stone. A night that stretched into infinity and gave way too soon, while the machines around him blipped and danced, with waves and reels of shining numbers. He still inhabited his body. He might not have been conscious, but we felt he was holding on beneath the closed eyes. Surely they would open again. His face wore a peaceful, benign expression, a counter-statement to the noise around him in that machine-crowded space.

When the children and their partners arrived, we all felt he could sense us, hear us. We stroked his forehead and, clustered round the bed, sang his favourites – Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, the Beatles, campfire songs. As if he were the fire. We talked to him one by one, too. I don’t know what I said. I know there were tears – from the boys in particular. They were men returned to childhood by the death of a father, for one, a mentor, for the other. We willed him awake and simultaneously wanted to ease whatever passage there might be, if there was to be one. We hugged each other and him. No one quite knew who was holding whom up.

Around eight in the morning, the nurses had their rota shift and urged us all out for breakfast. We went obediently, sipped cappuccinos or double espressos with the office crowd at a Tottenham Court Road café. We talked inconsequentially. Or maybe it wasn’t inconsequential. I don’t really know.

We got back to the hospital in no time at all. But the room was uncannily quiet. The dancing screens had gone dark. A nurse I didn’t recognize addressed me with a look that needed no words. He had used the opportunity. While we weren’t looking, he had slipped away, like a dying animal seeking the shelter of the woods. Or perhaps they had just unplugged the machines that were functioning as his kidneys and other organs. Switched off the life-support. No life can be lived without support.

Now there was corporeality alone. A cooling body inelastic to the touch. Stony smooth. Both smaller and bigger than life, and accruing a spectral charge the longer I looked at it and held our daughter – though she might well have been holding me.

After that, time imploded. It was impossible to mark the sequence of days, of sleep and waking. It wasn’t that, like W. H. Auden, I called out for the clocks to stop. They did so of their own volition. They stopped keeping time, moving the minutes and the hours, the days and eventually the months. Without their structure to cling to – a set of moorings so internalized we forget their existence – everything was cast adrift. There was no more continuity in my life, or rather in my self.¹

3

MY FATHER HAD DIED in the same University College Hospital thirty-four years and three days before. I say ‘the same’, though in fact the old Victorian red-brick hospital no longer houses wards. The morgue on the lower-ground floor where I went to see my dad is now a lecture theatre.

Death had come for my father in the dank November when he entered his sixty-eighth year, old to me back then, though only two years older than my partner of thirty-two years, who seemed far too young to follow him.

I push away the image of my father at the last, cold and small in the great vaulted chamber that, in my memory, dwarfs everything inside it, though the figures – the prostrate one of my father, my mother bent over him – glow as if someone had turned a stage spotlight on them.

My mother is talking. She is whispering to my father, wrapping him in endearments, speaking Polish and Yiddish and French, though not English. I don’t know why she is talking to him, since to us, her nearest family, it seemed he hadn’t heard her for years and certainly can’t now. Anyhow, I tell myself, she didn’t love him – at least, not any more. They were always battling. She’s not crying, I can see that. Where are her tears? Her keening? Her visible sorrow? Her words are empty and have no resonance.

I gaze at my father and know that just the evening before he had pleaded with me to get him out of there, out of the hospital. It was me, his daughter, he had asked – though in the delirium that took him back to the terror of the war years, I was his sister. He hadn’t asked my mother: in his hallucination she was off cavorting with the SS guards.

Without realizing it, and because I probably preferred it that way, I took on the mantle of my father’s wayward emotions. I didn’t yet understand that the fragility that accompanies extreme illness, with the inevitable sense of diminishment it puts into play, often induces persecutory fear. Nearest to him, my mother had appeared complicit in his illness, so for him I was the loyal one, she the traitor.

That’s why there are no tears in her wide blue eyes, I told myself, back then.

Through the lens of time, I recognize this as a daughter’s narrative, one that comes with a propelling mythological force and is often replicated in ordinary families. The father-daughter bond is strong. Even where there’s paternal jealousy of the line of suitors, the bond has none of the murderous or competitive charge of that between fathers and sons. Mothers are far more difficult for their daughters to come to inner terms with.

Athena, goddess of wisdom, never needed a mother at all and leaped fully formed from her father Zeus’s brow. In Euripides’ play, Electra urges her brother Orestes to murder their mother, Clytemnestra. She helps him push the sword down her throat, thereby avenging their mother’s murder of their father, who had himself brutally sacrificed their sister – a fact Electra chooses to forget, at least until the deed is done. Antigone, at the end, leads her blind, ailing father Oedipus to Colonus. Freud, who reinvigorated the Oedipus story for modern times, called his own daughter, Anna, his Antigone. She became his voice and companion in older age, never betraying him with another man, often deprecating her mother, not only where intellectual matters were concerned.

We grow into our families and our myths simultaneously, the latter often enough shaped by the former, but the shaping also happens the other way round.

The mother-daughter bond is both trickier and stickier than the paternal one: daughters love their mothers but they need to leave them as far behind as Persephone did Demeter, descending even to Hell, to wriggle or leap somehow into independence and sexual awakening.

In adolescence, and often far beyond, it is imperative not to become the clone of that irritating, delimiting figure. The mother’s ageing body – in Elena Ferrante’s resonant Neapolitan Quartet, Lena’s mother even has a telling limp – needs to be shed like a constricting skin and certainly barred from any associations with sex, even with Daddy. Yet we’re glued to our mothers with that formative, largely wordless bond, which is a set of embodied gestures and rarely visible habits. She keeps coming back, smiling through our lips, lifting a hand to our hair, chiding the child we no longer are, but who is now another.

Back then, when my father died, I distrusted my mother. I was suspicious: she had never been able to give me a full medical history of my dad’s ills (or hers, for that matter). I couldn’t bear the thought that she harassed him for smoking. I would point out that she was killing him by forbidding him his killing cigarettes, so that he had secretly to wander the streets in search of them, losing his bearings in the process.

The daughter I then was treated her mother none too well. I couldn’t fully embrace her. I questioned her judgement. I questioned the reality of her love for her husband of a lifetime. How was it that she could smile at a passing attendant, even while my father lay dead in front of her? Indeed, I colluded with my dying and delirious father’s view of her: as we stood over him in the morgue, both terrified by the inert body between us, one of my few thoughts – or, rather, fantasies – was that perhaps if I had led him out of the hospital the previous evening, he would still be alive. Some part of me believed or wanted to believe there were hidden truths in his diabetic delirium.

After the visit to the morgue, I took my mother home. Once my brother had flown in, I left her in his hands. I convinced myself she preferred them. After the funeral, just a few days later, I went off to make love to a man I barely knew – as if enlaced bodies could save us from death’s inertness.

Am I wiser, now that I have grown children of my own, about mothers and daughters, about the tug of unknown forces that lurches us into word or act or simply overwhelms and undoes us?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Whatever the case, my children will inevitably see my blind spots and limitations. I know this, just as I know that I treasure them and they hold me dear. But knowing, though it helps, often can’t save you from feeling, and the contradiction between the two, and everything it brings in train, can create a condition akin to madness.

I suspect we all experience it, just as we are all thrown into disarray by that other universal experience: death.

4

THIS IS NOT A ROMANTIC TALE. I would have liked it to be a story of adoring and honouring and tears of sadness over the great loss of a fine man. It is that, too, but it’s not that alone. Death, like desire, tears you out of your recognizable self. It tears you apart. The eyes and arms, the recognition that used to hold you together as you, are no longer there. That you was all mixed up with the other. And both of those have disappeared. The I who speaks, like the I who tells this story, is no longer altogether reliable. Though now that I can begin to shape a sentence with that pronoun in it, I feel a little more like my old, if altered, self.

A day before he died, the morning after he had been moved into the fortress-like high-care hospital room from the cancer clinic next door, John uttered the words that resonated through me for months. Words can be performative.

We had been living for two weeks on the top floor of a building overlooking London’s busy Tottenham Court Road, a three-minute walk from the shiny new clinic where the daily treatments took place. This was the hospital hotel. Each room had a patient and a partner or carer in it. There was a lounge and a breakfast-dining area. From one point of view, it was a tourist’s delight – modern, clean, functional, central – but it was also a hellhole of illness and suffering. Everyone smiled, pretended cheer.

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.

He must have known that, since I didn’t need to do much rummaging. The first thing my eyes fell on in the very top drawer was an envelope full of photographs. I love photos. I picked it up, looking forward to a break from the duty of locating a will. The anticipated baby pictures didn’t materialize. These images were of a woman in a variety of fetching poses and smiling to the camera or the person holding it in the way one smiles only to intimates. I knew that woman. I knew that photographer.

I sat back and tried to take a deep breath. It caught on something. Maybe it was fury. The kind you can’t swallow. The kind that doesn’t let you breathe. I now started to look in earnest, pushing things aside, prodding, hating what I found, hating myself, hating him. I opened his wardrobe and started to heave out his clothes.

Some nine years before, we had split up. He was in the midst of what can only be called a mid-life crisis and passionate about a young woman. He was also crazy, crazier than any adolescent in the grip of lust and jealousy. Undone by it. The part of me that writes understood. This was another form of everyday madness, more familiar than so many others. He was a man obsessed.

I would have been prepared to tolerate a short burst of passion, but not the palpably self-destructive process he was engaged in and the harm it occasioned all round. In any event, the last person he wanted near him was me, with my Cassandra-like predictions, my world-weary plaints that made his trajectory more mundane than mud. Or comical, like a door slammed in a farce.

The abandonment so late in our coupled lives undid me. A hot, jealous fury attended my days, shrivelling everything in its wake, like a mountain fire. The only way I could seem to deal with the tearing apart of my life and the detritus it left behind was to throw myself into more and other ways. I was already active in English PEN: I took on the presidency. I became chair of the Freud Museum. I got Mad, Bad and Sad ready for publication. I found myself devising and editing a new series on ‘Big Ideas’ for Profile Books. On and on it went.

The rage and the need for distraction from it that attended the first parting of our ways was close kin to my mourning state, a kind of trial run of the emotions. Now, after his death, one historical moment collapsed into another. That second dismantling echoed the first. Pain always leaves deeper traces in memory than pleasure – and I was plunged back into an old, intolerable pain. I hated him and hated myself. Bits of myself and my past had to be torn out, emptied of their destructive charge and somehow sewn back in so that I could walk and run and speak as a functioning person, let alone love and still have a history.

Within both states I felt as mad and sad to myself as some of the historical figures that had peopled my books on the subject. If I didn’t quite make it to the condition of the ‘bad’, it’s only because I wasn’t altogether certifiable. The racing thoughts, the compulsions, the sudden mental absences or holes in time when I would find myself walking on a street I hadn’t set out for, these were just everyday madness inflected by loss and by grief. As long as I could get up in the morning and make a semblance of working or arranging the flowers and objects in the house, as long as the children were there, as long as I had to put on a face to greet them and to meet the faces I met, I would manage, manage it, manage myself.

The difference between the terrors of the first abandonment and the second was that after the first I could rail with friends about men’s antics and a woman’s lot. Now, there was only one person I could even begin to talk to, and then only sporadically. Back then, after a little less than a year, John pleaded that he wanted to return to his life, our life together. After a month of persuasion, I agreed. Many of my friends disapproved of what looked like my moral laxity, my lack of feminist firmness. But I preferred to be coupled, preferred my children to have their father in place. I like the familiar. I liked to have someone there to discuss days and ways and news with, to feel grounded. It was hard to laugh on one’s own. I liked to laugh. I liked ordinary life.

Already back then, I had a deep sense of the ways in which that ordinariness is so readily traversed by madness. We may be rational creatures, deeply individual, but loss illuminates just how readily the ever-uncertain fortress of reason crumbles, and how fundamentally our individuality is made up of our attachments to others.

One of the differences in the separation that mourning constitutes, apart from the major one of irreversibility, was that I wasn’t sanctioned from the outside to hate, to be angry. Composure was required; so was admiration of the lost one. And I had others to care for. Impossible for me to take on the capacious mantle of the vibrant Wife of Bath, who had buried six husbands. Or become one of those widows of whom Wilde’s Lady Bracknell could say, ‘I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.’ Or the amorous Merry Widow who gave her name to various bits of saucy lingerie. After all, I didn’t only hate.

I was caught in ambivalence, perhaps a deeper plight than the now fashionable term ‘cognitive dissonance’, which highlights the trap of feuding ideas, but not that of warring emotions, the kind that probably have deep roots in a time when language wasn’t to hand to make sense of things.

I was terrified that the other woman, any other woman, would turn up at the funeral. I suddenly had an acute sense of why Greek rites incorporated professional mourners – those women who, like so many Maenads, tore at their hair, wailed and keened to the elements, their dirges abstract public rituals. Part of me would have wanted to join them, or wholly to give mourning over to others.

But there were too many parts of me.

9

AFTER I HAD FOUND that first set of photos, I would creep into John’s study regularly. Sometimes his phantom stood over me as I plundered his desk and possessions for more signs of betrayal. He hadn’t been true to his word – he had never been true. The jealous thoughts spiralled, took wing, raced through Heaven (his) and Hell (mine) and I grew smaller and smaller, a bit of rag and bone in the gleaming arcade of his life. I scoured his obtuse computer for tell-tale emails. His diaries, ranked in a desk drawer like so many tin soldiers awaiting amorous campaigns, refused to give up any more than the signs of daily institutional battles. I looked for code. When had he last seen her, or any of the others? He had always been far more attached to his lost and dead, his past, than his present. I knew that. I had neither left nor died. I found ample documents from that past, his past – photos, letters, huge hordes of them when we all went to begin to clear his Cambridge office. He kept everything.

The children thought I had just grown weak and grumpy from the dust, the monumental task of confronting his remains and the effort of removal. There was more. My mind was askew. It became clearer and clearer to me that I was the only one of whom there was no trace. I was nowhere in his life. Not in the life that he wanted to keep. To store against the forces of time. In our scores of family photos and holiday pics, there were so few of us together. There were fewer letters, not on paper. I didn’t exist either in the historical archive or in his imagination. I was just the daily help. Cleaner of excrement.

An analyst friend, underlining that this wasn’t very analytic but analysis wasn’t what I needed, advised me that as soon as I found my thoughts going off in this obsessive direction, I should think about something, anything else – groceries, the grandchildren, the garden, the tasks ahead, German verbs … A self-fashioned cognitive behaviour therapy or simply a form of diversion.

The founder of alienism, the great Philippe or Citizen Pinel, known as the liberator of the insane, leaped into my mind. He practised ‘distraction’ with patients who were perfectly lucid and reasonable except for idées fixes that had established themselves in one given area of their reasoning. Napoleon, for example, might be a trigger point. With people who suffered from oppressive passions – among which Pinel lists hatred, jealousy, remorse and, of course, grief – theatrical ruses might help, or stays away from home. Distraction, it seemed, was palliative; so were holidays.

But none of it helped quite enough. Only time would do that, and not yet, perhaps never completely. This wasn’t a bout of flu that could be got over and put behind one with minimal fuss.

Hard to admit, but my frenzy of searching, both physical and mental, had a distinct sexual charge. I no longer or only rarely saw John on his deathbed, or even as he had been through those long arduous years of treatment. He had grown younger. His hair had darkened and there was more of it. He had become the man I had first met more than three decades before.

It took a while, but I eventually realized that all my racing internal arguments with him – how could you? Why did you? Why aren’t you? Don’t you love me? Why did you bother coming back to our conjoined lives? Why? When? How? – all these howling questions, with their component of desire and jealousy, love and hate, were a vigorous attempt to bring him back. In the flesh.

If he were back, then I could scream and he could answer my questions. I could rant at his perfidy. I could unleash my resentment. I could kill him. And we could make up.

In Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, after Marcel’s lover Albertine has died, he writes:

My jealous curiosity as to what Albertine might have done was unbounded. I suborned any number of women from whom I learned nothing. If this curiosity was so tenacious, it was because people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

I preferred John to be travelling abroad, to remain in the realms of desire.

To be desired, my old friend John Berger writes, is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

I would have preferred to have John immortal and doubtless have a little of that immortality myself. Instead all I had was a half-empty shampoo bottle. Memory of Senses.

When I looked up the word ‘bereavement’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, it turned out to be etymologically linked to the old Germanic ‘reave’ – to plunder by force, to carry out raids in order to rob. I felt plundered. Be-Reft. My partner was gone. My lived past, which had been lived as a double act, had been ransacked, stolen. The story of my own life had to be rewritten. And I was guilty. Guilty of being a survivor. Literally. Before the late 1960s turned people like my parents – who had, against all the odds, made it through the war – into survivors, a survivor was simply someone who outlived another.

10

IN ONE OF HIS seminal insights, Freud linked the state of mourning to the condition of melancholia, which we would now call depression. The characteristics that mourning shared with depression include

a profoundly painful dejection, a cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment –

The singular difference is that in mourning ‘the lack of interest and turning away of activity’ common to depression has an exception when it comes to that connected with ‘thoughts of him’.

Both states are set in motion by loss.

In one of his understated asides, Freud notes, ‘It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude [in mourning] does not seem to us pathological.’ This is particularly the case if one considers that a clinging to the dead through the medium of a ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis’ can be part of mourning, too.

In his ‘Thoughts on War and Death’ written in 1915, very soon after Mourning and Melancholia, he elaborated the inevitable ambivalence that unwittingly characterizes all our loves:

These loved ones are on the one hand an inner possession, components of our own ego; but on the other hand they are partly strangers, even enemies. With the exception of only a very few situations, there adheres to the tenderest and most intimate of our love-relations a small portion of hostility.

This small portion of hostility can quite easily grow large in the dead partner with whom we in part identify, just as children identify with their parents, take them in, often enough later on only to spit them out. It is these very parts in the other that then turn back on us rampantly, like an avenging conscience, to persecute us into abjection once they have been lost. Have gone.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan talked about such cruel and vindictive self-persecution as the work of an ‘obscene super-ego’, the super-ego being in Freudian terms that internalized, endlessly repetitive, sadistic and rancorous conscience – initially shaped out of our parents’ prohibitions and cultural settlements on good and bad – that yaps away at us like a small-town bully, belittling us, turning us into a nether likeness of Hamlet, one without poetry. In a wonderful riff on self-criticism, the analyst Adam Phillips evokes a Hamlet whose dangerous desire for vengeful murder is converted into a form of character assassination – his own: ‘the character assassination of everyday life, whereby we continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character’.

The Hungarian-born Melanie Klein, so influential in understandings of psychoanalysis in Britain, thought of mourning as a reactivation of the inevitable early-childhood depression: the loss of the loved person, like the loss of internal ‘good objects’ in infancy, threatens a collapse. Mourning is thus a maddening process in which hatred, guilt and love oscillate until the ‘internal good objects’ can be reinstated and the dead person put to rest.

And all of this while we’re having a cup of coffee with a friend and talking about the weather. Stormy in these days of inner warming. Holding out hope, too, that those internal good objects come round.

Not that there’s a mother in sight anywhere.

11

THE WOMAN WHO is a simulacrum of me and not a dishevelled midnight gorgon, punished from all sides and punishing in turn, goes about her duties. She tries to be a good mother and grandmother; she deals with the bureaucracy of death and the lawyers who are its servants; she tries to concentrate on the minutiae of pensions and old share certificates more abstruse than incunabula. She writes bits – an artist’s catalogue preface, an essay for the BBC. She sits at a desk and finishes the book he hadn’t quite finished. She prepares the second for publication. She hunts for an archive for his work. She puts in train memorials and conferences. At these she manages more or less to utter a few lucid sequential sentences. Or at least she thinks she has for a moment, before going home to beat herself up.

The reality was that I could work on ‘thoughts connected to him’, as Freud called them, but not on much else for long spans consecutively. Not only had I been his first reader and editor for years, but the work allowed me to focus, more or less, on the public portions of him. The positive side effect was that I was able to concentrate on the parts of him I wasn’t so preoccupied with hating. This activity was, I imagine, an attempt to repair the destruction I had wrought on him and he on me.

Though I was still alive.

I wasn’t an altogether good enough mother, though. My daughter admonished me for being short-tempered with her and not sufficiently sensitive to her own grieving or, on one or two occasions, for erupting in negative asides about her beloved dad. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t always aware that I had. But I evidently had. All this made me think about my own mother all those years ago after my father had died. I really did need to consider the generational cascade of repetitions or hauntings that are an all but inevitable part of family life.

My mother’s own display of tears had been confined, as far as I witnessed, to the deathbed. After that she had smiled in her usual sunny way through thick and thin and stayed cool, while I tumbled as rapidly as I could into bed with a man, as if to confirm the eternal strife between death and life.

Given that I had read so many novels in which families fall asunder as soon as the patriarch dies, his departure igniting siblings and their children to war, let alone newer and older wives, I had little excuse for straying into the trap of bickering and conflict with my own brood. But my inner madness came in unpredictable waves and sometimes bubbled over and out. The smiling coolness my daughter sometimes wondered at was the mirror image of my mother’s; the harsh wartime survival stories she told, in which my father appeared diminished, were perhaps the equivalent of my negative asides.

As I had for my own mother, my daughter often thought she knew what was best for me. I, too, had known better than my mother about the ways of the contemporary world and, in my assumptions of knowing, had been even more emphatic than my wonderful daughter. But I balked when it came to me. Though I obediently trailed off to see doctors when ordered to, made sure there was food in the fridge, and invited friends over one at a time, I also sensed that, just as I had, my daughter needed me at important points to maintain my maternal authority. Then, too, I wasn’t altogether ready for a full King Lear reversal. Yet at times, for the first six months after her father’s death, I seriously considered it. Giving in and giving up seemed very seductive.

I knew my daughter was suffering at the loss of her beloved dad, who had adored her in turn. I also knew that the loss had come at a particularly difficult time for her. His advice and towering pride in her would have been important. My occasional irritability or inappropriate babble was in some instances the mask of control slipping. Early in that first year, though it might already have been summer, and after a difficult lunch, I emailed her:

I’m sorry if I haven’t been paying enough attention to the ups and downs of grieving.

I find the process utterly unpredictable, like a deep rumble inside one which sums up all the lacks there have ever been, and isn’t really assuageable. Sometimes it’s too loud to hear anything else. So I kick against it. At other times it’s just there, a dull throb, a backdrop that you don’t have to confront, and I race along in my deaf way. I will try to be more sensitive to you.

Needless to say, I don’t remember the precise situation that necessitated this apology.

I THOUGHT OF MY MOTHER a lot in those days and nights of an afterlife in which I was battling for some kind of clarity. Her husband had died in a country she barely knew. They had only recently retired and made a home here. She had few friends of her own, but she tried to make do. She flew to and from Canada, where my brother and his family lived. She was a little lost now in both countries. Her often irascible daughter (me) had recently split up with her husband, and had a small child with whom Granny had a deep bond. That, I now realize, is probably what in large part kept her coming here and led her to spend more time in London.

She took in a lodger who was a friend of mine. He happened to be black: she had no idea that neighbours’ lips would curl and malicious chatter would erupt among visiting friends from abroad. She rarely talked of my father. Perhaps she felt not unlike I have in the aftermath, but it wasn’t something she could talk about or perhaps accede to. The very thought of madness, even of the everyday kind, would for her have carried a stigma. And she was proud.

When she died, purportedly of a cold, twenty years later, after two final years of Alzheimer’s had robbed her of English, French, and all recognition of her nearest, I found a few of my father’s things still in her house. A silk robe, some cufflinks, an ancient prayer shawl, rarely worn, that might well have originated before the Second World War in Poland and made its way with them through their various migrations. She still wore her wedding band. Before that last long illness took a grip on her, when she talked of my father it was always of him as a younger man, even if that brought memories of terrible times. More often, as she grew older, her own father and brother captured her attention, earlier losses that had deeply affected her. It seems one loss reinvigorates all the prior ones. Death is most at home with other deaths.

It’s shaming to admit, but I didn’t mourn her death. Her mind had left her body behind several gruelling years back, and her ultimate passing felt like a relief to everyone. Only years later did I begin to dream about her and allow her to inhabit my life once more. She would often appear with a calm, youthful smile in the kind of rural landscape I didn’t consciously associate with her, as if some part of me wanted her to be returned to a girlish innocence.

12

WE BURIED JOHN’S ASHES on 19 February 2016. It was a bitterly cold grey day. We planted a rose bush for him that would eventually burst with dark pink buds for the length of the summer, and surrounded him with anemones and primroses. He loved flowers, he loved digging, was a keen gardener. We read – psalms, poems, Raymond Carver’s ‘Late Fragment’, which always brings tears to my eyes, even when I’m not crying. It formed part of my ongoing inner conversation with John. I had met Carver once and remembered him as a big gentle bear of a man, though I certainly knew he wasn’t only that.

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Putting John in the ground in a carefully chosen and beautiful spot at the top of a hill, not far from George Eliot, Karl Marx and Eric Hobsbawm, a friend who had also known John’s father, seemed not only crucial but an important marker. I selected the site with an eye to the fact that it was overseen by a stone angel. As importantly, we could push through brambles and stand on a ledge to see the grave from Waterlow Park, where long ago we used to take the children for walks. I thought once we had buried him on this familiar hill close to so many friends, my mind would be easier and his ghost calmer.

There was still a distance to travel, one full of potholes you could tumble into and never surface from again, without somehow acquiring a new, transformed shape.

One day, on my way home from a meeting in the Strand, I did literally tumble. It must have been April, by then. I was feeling just a little pleased with myself for having performed adequately, not fainted, managed sanity, or what passes for it, and even humour. Then, by some aberration, I decided to run for an approaching bus. I never take the bus. I hadn’t run for years. But I ran then along a crowded Aldwych, weaving between people, like some ancient rugby player toting a bright blue bag instead of a ball. The pavement wasn’t impressed. The ground under my feet rebelled. I fell flat on my face. A crowd gathered round. The pain, the shock, the humiliation were dreadful, but by some miracle, I hadn’t broken anything, not even, it turned out, my nose, though it felt distinctly out of joint. A nice young woman put me into a cab. By the time I got home my face had started to turn black and blue. The next morning, I looked like a victim of serious domestic abuse. The trouble was, I was my own domesticity.

And even then, in the midst of terrible pain, the tears didn’t come.

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.

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