Читать книгу Everyday Madness - Lisa Appignanesi - Страница 16

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.