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.
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
