Levels of Life (8 page)

A friend whose partner died of Aids after they had been together eight years said two things to me: ‘It’s just a question of getting through the night’ and ‘There’s only one good thing – you can do what you like.’ The first was not a problem for me – you just get the right pills in the right dosage; no, the problem was rather getting through the
day
. As for doing what I liked: for me, this usually meant doing things with her. Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards. Besides, what did I now want to do? I didn’t want to walk the length of the Canal du Midi. I wanted, very strongly and exactly, the opposite: to stay at home, in the spaces she had created and where she still, in my imagination, moved. As for pigging out on any and every major purchasable sporting fixture, I found that my needs were very particular. In those first months, I wanted to watch sport in which I had almost no emotional involvement at all. I would enjoy – though that verb is too strong to describe a kind of listless attending – football matches between, say, Middlesbrough and Slovan Bratislava (ideally the second leg of a tie whose first leg I had missed), in some low-level European tournament which mostly excited those in Middlesbrough and Bratislava. I wanted to watch sport to which I would normally be indifferent. Because now I could only be indifferent; I had no emotions left to lend.

I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely. This is my good luck, and also my bad luck. Early on, the words came into my head: I miss her in every action, and in every inaction. It was one of those phrases I repeated to myself as confirmation of where and what I was. Just as, driving home, I would prepare myself for my return by saying out loud: ‘I am going back neither with her nor to her.’ Just as, when something failed, was broken or mislaid, I would reassure myself with: ‘On the scale of loss, it is nothing.’ But such is the solipsism of grief that I barely thought about gradations and differences until a woman friend said that she envied me my grief. Why on earth, I asked. Because ‘If X [her husband] died, it would be more complicated for me.’ She did not elaborate; nor did she need to. And I thought: maybe, in a way, I’m having it easy.

The first time I was ever away from her for more than a day or two – I had gone down to the country to write – I discovered that, on top of (or, perhaps, beneath) all the predictable ways, I also missed her morally. This came as a surprise, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure. Whereas grief, love’s opposite, does not seem to occupy a moral space. The defensive, curled position it forces us into if we are to survive makes us more selfish. It is not a place of upper air; there are no views. You can no longer hear yourself living.

Before, when I read newspaper obituaries, I used to idly calculate my age against the dead person’s:
x
more years, I would think (or, already,
x
fewer). Now I read obituaries and check how long the subject was married. I envy those who had more time than I did. It rarely crosses my mind that they might have been living, with every extra year, some terrible extra boredom or servitude. I am not interested in that sort of marriage; I want to award them only happy years. But then I also calculate the length of widowhoods. Here, for instance, is Eugene Polley, 1915–2012, the inventor of the TV remote control. At the end of his obituary it says: ‘Polley’s wife, Blanche, to whom he was married for 34 years, died in 1976.’ And I think: married for longer than me, and still widowed for thirty-six years. Three and a half decades of relishing the pain?

Someone I had only met twice wrote to tell me that a few months previously he had ‘lost his wife to cancer’ (another phrase that jarred: compare ‘We lost our dog to gypsies’, or ‘He lost his wife to a commercial traveller’). He reassured me that one does survive the grief; moreover, one emerges a ‘stronger’, and in some ways a ‘better’, person. This struck me as outrageous and self-praising (as well as too quickly decided). How could I possibly be a better person without her than with her? Later, I thought: but he is just echoing Nietzsche’s line about what doesn’t kill us making us stronger. And as it happens, I have long considered this epigram particularly specious. There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Ask anyone who deals with victims of torture. Ask rape counsellors and those who handle domestic violence. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names? It also reconfigures space. You have entered a new geography, mapped by a new cartography. You seem to be taking your bearings from one of those seventeenth-century maps which feature the Desert of Loss, the (windless) Lake of Indifference, the (dried-up) River of Desolation, the Bog of Self-Pity, and the (subterranean) Caverns of Memory.

In this new-found-land there is no hierarchy, except that of feeling, of pain. Who has fallen from the greater height, who has spilt more organs on the ground? Except that it rarely seems as straightforward – straightforwardly sad – as this. There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd, like one of those dressed mannequins, surrounded by skulls, that Nadar photographed in the Catacombs. Or like that boa constrictor which took to swallowing sofa cushions and had to be shot dead.

I look at my key ring (which used to be hers): it holds only two keys, one to the front door of the house and one to the back gate of the cemetery. This is my life, I think. I notice strange continuities: I used to rub oil into her back because her skin dried easily; now I rub oil into the drying oak of her grave-marker. But what seems to have disappeared is a feel for the pattern of things. At the start of his life, Fred Burnaby jumped twenty feet off a piece of gymnastic equipment and broke his leg. Towards the end of her life, while playing La Tosca, Sarah Bernhardt jumped off the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo only to discover that the stagehands had forgotten to pile up mattresses to cushion her fall; she broke her leg. For that matter, Nadar broke his leg when
The Giant
crashed; and my wife broke her leg on our front steps. This might as well be a pattern, you think, whereas before it would have seemed a strange but trivial coincidence, just a question of height, of how far each of us falls in life. Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any pattern exists. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern. Writers believe in the patterns their words make, which they hope and trust add up to ideas, to stories, to truths. This is always their salvation, whether griefless or griefstruck.

First Nietzsche, then Nadar. God is dead, and no longer there to see us. So
we
must see us. And Nadar gave us the distance, the height, to do so. He gave us God’s distance, the God’s-eye view. And where it ended (for the moment) was with Earthrise and those photographs taken from lunar orbit, in which our planet looks more or less like any other planet (except to an astronomer): silent, revolving, beautiful, dead, irrelevant. Which may have been how God saw us, and why He absented himself. Of course I don’t believe in the Absenting God, but such a story makes a nice pattern.

When we killed – or exiled – God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren’t going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height – even if it was only the illusion of a view – wasn’t so bad.

We have lost God’s height, and gained Nadar’s; but we have also lost depth. Once, a long time ago, we could go down into the Underworld, where the dead still lived. Now, that metaphor is lost to us, and we can only go down literally: potholing, drilling for minerals, and so on. Instead of the Underworld, the Underground. Some of us will go down into the earth at the end of it all. Not very far, just six feet down; except that the scale of depth is lost as you stand there and throw flowers down on to a coffin lid, whose brass nameplate winks back at you. Then, it looks and feels a long way down, six feet.

Some people, as if to avoid such depth and regain a little height, have their ashes sent up into the sky in a rocket: as close to heaven as we can get. Sarah Bernhardt and her companions cheerfully loosed ballast on to the upturned faces of astonished groundlings – English tourists, a French wedding party. Perhaps someone, looking up at a sudden rocket in the sky, has already received a faceful of human ash not long from the crematorium. In the future, no doubt, the rich and famous will send their ashes up into Earth orbit, even Moon orbit.

There is the question of grief versus mourning. You can try to differentiate them by saying that grief is a state while mourning is a process; yet they inevitably overlap. Is the state diminishing? Is the process progressing? How to tell? Perhaps it’s easier to think of them metaphorically. Grief is vertical – and vertiginous – while mourning is horizontal. Grief makes your stomach turn, snatches the breath from you, cuts off the blood supply to the brain; mourning blows you in a new direction. But since you are now in enveloping cloud, it is impossible to tell if you are marooned or deceptively in motion. You do not have some useful little invention consisting of a tiny paper parachute attached to fifty yards of silk line. All you know is that you have small power to affect things. You are a first-time aeronaut, alone beneath the gasbag, equipped with a few kilos of ballast, and told that this item in your hand you’ve never seen before is the valve-line.

Initially, you continue doing what you used to do with her, out of familiarity, love, the need for a pattern. Soon, you realise the trap you are in: caught between repeating what you did with her, but without her, and so missing her; or doing new things, things you never did with her, and so missing her differently. You feel sharply the loss of shared vocabulary, of tropes, teases, short cuts, injokes, sillinesses, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes – all those obscure references rich in memory but valueless if explained to an outsider.

All couples, even the most bohemian, build up patterns in their lives together, and these patterns have an annual cycle. So Year One is like a negative image of the year you have been used to. Instead of being studded with events, it is now studded with non-events: Christmas, your birthday, her birthday, anniversary of the day you met, wedding anniversary. And these are overlaid with new anniversaries: of the day fear arrived, the day she first fell, the day she went into hospital, the day she came out of hospital, the day she died, the day she was buried.

You think that Year Two can’t be worse than Year One, and imagine yourself prepared for it. You think you have met all the different sorts of pain you will be asked to bear, and that after this there will only be repetition. But why should repetition mean less pain? Those first repetitions invite you to contemplate all the repetitions to come in future years. Grief is the negative image of love; and if there can be accumulation of love over the years, then why not of grief?

And there are still new, one-off pains for which you are quite unprepared, and unprotected against. Like sitting round a table with your seven-year-old great-niece while she amuses the company with her new game of Odd Man Out. So-and-so is the odd man/woman out because of blue eyes/brown jacket/goldfish ownership, and so on. Then, from nowhere, except from childlike logic: ‘Julian’s the odd one out because he’s the only person whose wife is dead.’

It took a while, but I remember the moment – or rather, the suddenly arriving argument – which made it less likely that I would kill myself. I realised that, insofar as she was alive at all, she was alive in my memory. Of course, she remained powerfully in other people’s minds as well; but I was her principal rememberer. If she was anywhere, she was within me, internalised. This was normal. And it was equally normal – and irrefutable – that I could not kill myself because then I would also be killing her. She would die a second time, my lustrous memories of her fading as the bathwater turned red. So it was, in the end (or, at least, for the time being), simply decided. As was the broader, but related question: how am I to live? I must live as she would have wanted me to.

After a few months, I began to brave public places and go out to a play, a concert, an opera. But I found that I had developed a terror of the foyer. Not of the space itself, but of what it contained: cheerful, expectant, normal people looking forward to enjoying themselves. I couldn’t bear the noise and the look of placid normality: just more busloads of people indifferent to my wife’s dying. Friends were obliged to meet me outside the theatre and conduct me, like a child, to my seat. Once there, I felt safe; and when the lights went down, safer.

The first play I was taken to was
Oedipus
; the first opera, Strauss’s
Elektra
. But as I sat through these harshest of tragedies, in which the gods inflict intolerable punishment for human offence, I didn’t feel myself transported to a distant, antique culture where terror and pity reigned. I felt instead that
Oedipus
and
Elektra
were coming to me, to my land, to the new geography I now inhabited. And, quite unexpectedly, I fell into a love of opera. For most of my life it had seemed one of the least comprehensible art forms. I didn’t really understand what was going on (despite the diligent reading of plot summaries); I was prejudiced against those dinner-jacketed picnickers who seemed to own the genre; but most of all, I couldn’t make the necessary imaginative leap. Operas felt like deeply implausible and badly constructed plays, with characters yelling in one another’s faces simultaneously. The initial problem – that of comprehension – was fixed by the introduction of surtitles. But now, in the darkness of an auditorium and the darkness of grief, the form’s implausibility suddenly dissolved. Now it seemed quite natural for people to stand onstage and sing at one another, because song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word – both higher and deeper. In Verdi’s
Don Carlo
the hero has scarcely met his French princess in the Forest of Fontainebleau before he is on his knees singing, ‘My name is Carlo and I love you.’
Yes
, I thought, that’s right, that’s how life is and should be, let’s concentrate on the essentials. Of course, opera has plot – and I was already anticipating all those unknown stories I was about to discover – but its main function is to deliver the characters as swiftly as possible to the point where they can sing of their deepest emotions. Opera cuts to the chase – as death does. So now, contented indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm; an art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart. Here was my new social realism.