Levels of Life (10 page)

Though she always answers when I talk to her, there are limits to my ventriloquism. I can remember – or imagine – what she will say about something that has happened before, or is being closely repeated. But I cannot voice her reaction to new events. Near the start of Year Five, the son of close friends, a gentle, brilliant boy, who grew into a gentle, troubled man, killed himself. Though grounded in grief, I found myself bewildered, unable for several days to react fully to this terrible death. Then I understood why: because I was unable to talk to her, hear her replies, revive and compare our shared memories. Among all the other categories of companion I had lost in her, here was another: my co-griever.

A friend gave me Antonio Tabucchi’s
Pereira Maintains
, a novel set in Lisbon in 1938 and much concerned with death and memory. Its main character is an uxorious journalist whose wife has died some years before of consumption. Pereira, now overweight and unhealthy, checks into a thalassotherapy clinic run by Dr Crodoso, the brusque and secular ‘wise man’ of the story, who advises his patient that he must slough off the past and learn to live in the present. ‘If you go on this way,’ Crodoso warns, ‘you’ll end up talking to your wife’s photograph.’ Pereira replies that he always has, and still does: ‘I tell it everything that happens to me and it’s as if the picture answered me.’ Crodoso is dismissive: ‘These are fantasies dictated by the superego.’ Pereira’s problem, the over-certain doctor insists, is that he ‘has not yet done his grief-work’.

Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera). And you have never done this kind of work before. It is unpaid, and yet not voluntary; it is rigorous, yet there is no overseer; it is skilled, yet there is no apprenticeship. And it is hard to tell whether you are making progress; or what would help you do so. Theme song for youth (sung by the Supremes): ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Theme song for age (arranged for any instrument): ‘You Can’t Hurry Grief’.

The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you. For many years we had a Congolese postman, Jean-Pierre, to whom I would often chat. A year or two before she died, he was switched to a new delivery route. I ran into him again at some point in Year Three. We exchanged politenesses, and then he asked, ‘
Et comment va Madame?
’ ‘
Madame est morte
,’ I found myself saying, and as I explained, and dealt with his shock, I was thinking, even as I was speaking: now I’m having to do it all again
in French
. A completely new pain. And such moments of being sideswiped continue. Towards the end of Year Four, I was coming home in a taxi late one evening, some time after eleven. I always miss her on such occasions – no companionable debriefing, no silent sleepy presence, no hand in mine. As we neared home, the cabbie began chatting. All was pleasant, and banal, until the cheerful enquiry, ‘Your wife, be asleep, will she?’ After a silent choke, I gave the only reply I could find. ‘I hope so.’

Not everyone values uxoriousness, of course. Some view it as timidity, others as possessiveness. And for the Ancients, Orpheus was far from the exemplar we have turned him into. They thought that if he missed his wife so much, he should have hurried up and joined her in the Underworld by the quick, conventional method of suicide. Plato dismissed him as a wimpy minstrel too cowardly to die for the sake of love: rightly did the gods have him torn to pieces by the maenads.

You need to establish where you are and how lies the ground beneath; but surveying from a balloon never did prove possible. Others helpfully – and hopefully – log your position for you. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘you’re looking better.’ Even, ‘Much better.’ The language of illness, inevitably; and the diagnosis is simple – always the same. But the prognosis? You are not ill in any normal manner. At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist. ‘Throw off your grief,’ such doubters imply, ‘and we can all go back to pretending that death doesn’t exist, or at least is comfortably far away.’ A journalist friend was once found weeping at her desk by her section editor. She explained what was already known – that her father had died six weeks previously. The editor replied, ‘I thought you’d be over it by now.’

When might you expect to be ‘over it’? The griefstruck themselves can hardly tell, since time is now so less measurable than it used to be. Four years on, some say to me, ‘You look happier’ – making the advance on ‘better’. The bolder then add, ‘Have you found someone?’ As if that were obviously and necessarily the solution. For some outsiders it is; for others not. Some kindly want to ‘solve’ you; others remain attached to that couple which no longer exists, and for them ‘finding someone’ would be almost offensive. ‘It would be like your dad getting married again,’ said a younger friend of mine. By contrast, a long-time American friend of my wife’s told me, within weeks of her death, that, statistically, those who have been happy in marriage remarry much sooner than those who have not: often within six months. She meant it encouragingly, but this fact, if it was one (perhaps it only applies in the States, where emotional optimism is a constitutional duty), shocked me. It seemed at the same time perfectly logical and perfectly illogical.

The same friend, four years later, said, ‘I resent the fact that she’s become part of the past.’ If this isn’t yet true for me, the grammar, like everything else, has begun to shift: she exists not really in the present, not wholly in the past, but in some intermediate tense, the past-present. Perhaps this is why I relish hearing even the slightest new thing about her: a previously unreported memory, a piece of advice she gave years ago, a flashback of her in ordinary animation. I take surrogate pleasure in her appearances in other people’s dreams – how she behaves and is dressed, what she eats, how close she is now to how she was then; also, whether I am there with her. Such fugitive moments excite me, because they briefly re-anchor her in the present, rescue her from the past-present, and delay a little longer that inevitable slippage into the past historic.

Dr Johnson well understood the ‘tormenting and harassing want’ of grief; and he warned against isolationism and withdrawal. ‘An attempt to preserve life in a state of neutrality and indifference is unreasonable and vain. If by excluding joy we could shut out grief, the scheme would deserve very serious attention.’ But it doesn’t. Nor do extreme measures, like the attempt to ‘drag [the heart] by force into scenes of merriment’; or its opposite, the attempt ‘to soothe it into tranquillity by making it acquainted with miseries more dreadful and afflictive’. For Johnson, only work and time mitigate grief. ‘Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away.’

Grief-workers are self-employed. I wonder if those who are actually self-employed do better at it than those who go to an office or a factory. Perhaps there are statistics for this too. But I think that grief is the place where statistics run out. ‘What instruments we have agree,’ wrote Auden on the death of Yeats, ‘the day of his death was a cold dark day.’ Instruments can tell us this much on the day itself. But afterwards, beyond? The needle goes off the dial; the thermometer fails to register; barometers burst. Life’s sonar is broken and you can no longer tell how far below the seabed lies.

We go down in dreams, and we go down in memory. And yes, it is true, the memory of earlier times does return, but in the meanwhile we have been made fearful, and I am not sure it is the same memory that returns. How could it be, because it can no longer be corroborated by the one who was there at the time. What we did, where we went, whom we met, how we felt. How we were together. All that. ‘We’ are now watered down to ‘I’. Binocular memory has become monocular. There is no longer the possibility of assembling from two uncertain memories of the same event a surer, single one, by triangulation, by aerial surveying. And so that memory, now in the first person-singular, changes. Less the memory of an event than the memory of a photograph of the event. And nowadays – having lost height, precision, focus – we are no longer sure we trust photography as we once did. Those old familiar snaps of happier times have come to seem less primal, less like photographs of life itself, more like photographs of photographs.

Or, to put it another way, your memory of your life – your previous life – resembles that ordinary miracle witnessed by Fred Burnaby, Captain Colvile and Mr Lucy somewhere near the Thames estuary. They were above the cloud, beneath the sun, and Burnaby had just been emboldened to take off his coat and sit complacently in his shirtsleeves. One of the three saw the phenomenon first and drew it to the attention of the others. The sun was projecting on to the bank of fleecy cloud below the image of their craft: the gasbag, the cradle and, clearly outlined, silhouettes of the three aeronauts. Burnaby compared it to a ‘colossal photograph’. And so it is with our life: so clear, so sure, until, for one reason or another – the balloon moves, the cloud disperses, the sun changes angle – the image is lost for ever, available only to memory, turned into anecdote.

There is a man in Venice I remember as clearly as if I had photographed him; or, perhaps, more clearly because I didn’t. It was some years ago, one late autumn or early winter. She and I were wandering in an untouristy part of the city, and she had gone ahead of me. I was starting to cross a small, banal bridge when I saw a man coming towards me. He was probably in his sixties, and dressed very correctly. I remember a smart black overcoat, black scarf, black shoes, perhaps a small moustache, and probably a hat – a black homburg. He might have been a Venetian
avvocato
, and he certainly wasn’t giving tourists a glance. But I gave him one, because at the bridge’s low zenith he took out a white handkerchief and wiped his eyes: not idly, not practically – it wasn’t, I’m sure, the cold – but in a slow, concentrated, familiar fashion. I found myself then, and later, trying to imagine his story; at times, I was half planning to write it. Now, I no longer need to, because I have assimilated his story to mine; he fits into my pattern.

There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. I remember my first visit to Paris in 1964; I was eighteen. Each day I did my cultural duty – galleries, museums, churches; I even bought the cheapest seat available at the Opéra Comique (and remember the impossible heat up there, the impossible sightlines, and the impossible-to-comprehend opera). I was lonely in the Métro, on the streets, and in the public parks where I would sit on a bench by myself reading a Sartre novel, which was probably about existential isolation. I was lonely even among those who befriended me. Remembering those weeks now, I realise that I never went upwards – the Eiffel Tower seemed an absurd, and absurdly popular, structure – but I did go down. I went down exactly as Nadar and his camera had done a hundred years previously. I too visited the Paris sewers, entering from somewhere near the Pont de l’Alma for a guided boat tour; and from the Place Denfert-Rochereau I descended into the Catacombs, my candle lighting up the neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls.

There is a German word,
Sehnsucht
, which has no English equivalent; it means ‘the longing for something’. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C. S. Lewis defined it as the ‘inconsolable longing’ in the human heart for ‘we know not what’. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something – or, in our case, for someone.
Sehnsucht
describes the first kind of loneliness. But the second kind comes from the opposite condition: the absence of a very specific someone. Not so much loneliness as her-lessness. It is this specificity which incites consoling plans with the warm bath and the Japanese carving knife. And though I am now equipped with a firm argument against suicide, the temptation remains: if I cannot hack it without her, I will hack at myself instead. But now, at least, I am more aware of wise voices to call on. ‘The cure for loneliness is solitude,’ Marianne Moore advises. While Peter Grimes (if not in all respects a role model) sings: ‘I live alone. The habit grows.’ There is a balance to such words, a comforting harmony.

‘It hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think.’ The second part of that sentence was what I stubbed my foot against: it struck me as unnecessarily masochistic. Now I know that it contains truth. And if the pain is not exactly relished, it no longer seems futile. Pain shows that you have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavour of memory; pain is a proof of love. ‘If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.’

But there are many traps and dangers in grief, and time does not diminish them. Self-pity, isolationism, world-scorn, an egotistical exceptionalism: all aspects of vanity. Look how much I suffer, how much others fail to understand: does this not prove how much I loved? Maybe, maybe not. I have seen people ‘doing grief’ at funerals, and there is no emptier sight. Mourning can also become competitive: look how much I loved her/him and with these my tears I prove it (and win the trophy). There is the temptation to feel, if not to say: I fell from a greater height than you – examine my ruptured organs. The griefstruck demand sympathy, yet, irked by any challenge to their primacy, underestimate the pain others are suffering over the same loss.