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.
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
