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.
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
