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
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
