Three years before my wife died, an old friend of mine, the poet Christopher Reid, was also widowed. He wrote about his wife’s dying and its aftermath. In one poem he described the denial by the living of those who have died:
but I too have met the tribal will to impose
taboos and codes, and have behaved rudely,
invoking my dead wife in dinner-table conversation.
A beat of silence, of shared fear and sick shock, falls.
When I first read these lines, I thought: what strange friends you must have. I also thought: you didn’t really believe you were behaving rudely, did you? Later, when my own turn came, I understood. I took the early decision (or, more likely, given the turmoil of my brain, the decision took me) to speak of my wife whenever I wanted or needed to: invoking her would be a normal part of any normal exchange – even though ‘normality’ was long fled. I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear lightweight. The young do better than the middle-aged; women better than men. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does. After all, you might expect those closest to you in age and sex and marital status to understand best. What a naivety. I remember a ‘dinner-table conversation’ in a restaurant with three married friends of roughly my age. Each had known her for many years – perhaps eighty or ninety in total – and each would have said, if asked, that they loved her. I mentioned her name; no one picked it up. I did it again, and again nothing. Perhaps the third time I was deliberately trying to provoke, being pissed off at what struck me not as good manners but cowardice. Afraid to touch her name, they denied her thrice, and I thought the worse of them for it.
There is the question of anger. Some are angry with the person who has died, who has abandoned them, betrayed them by losing life. What could be more irrational than that? Few die willingly, not even most suicides. Some of the griefstruck are angry with God, but if He doesn’t exist, that too is irrational. Some are angry with the universe for letting it happen, for this being the inevitable, irreversible case. I didn’t exactly feel this, but through that autumn of 2008 I read the papers and followed events on television with an overpowering indifference. ‘The News’ seemed just a larger, more insulting version of those busfuls of unheeding passengers, the fuel of their transport solipsism and ignorance. For some reason I cared a lot about Obama getting elected, but very little about anything else in the world. They said that the whole financial system might be about to crash and burn, but this didn’t bother me. Money could not have saved her, so what good was money, and what was the point in saving its neck? They said the world’s climate was reaching a point of no return, but it could go to that point and beyond for all it mattered to me. I would drive home from the hospital and at a certain stretch of road, just before a railway bridge, the words would come into my head, and I would repeat them aloud: ‘It’s just the universe doing its stuff.’ That was ‘all’ that ‘it’ – this enormous, tremendous ‘it’ – was. The words didn’t hold any consolation; perhaps they were a way of resisting alternative, false consolations. But if the universe was just doing its stuff, it could do its stuff to itself as well, and to hell with it. What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn’t, wouldn’t, save her?
A friend whose husband died almost instantly of a stroke in his mid-fifties told me of her anger not at him, but at the fact that he didn’t know . Didn’t know he was going to die, didn’t have time to prepare, to say farewells to her and their children. This is a form of being angry with the universe. An anger at indifference – the
but I too have met the tribal will to impose
taboos and codes, and have behaved rudely,
invoking my dead wife in dinner-table conversation.
A beat of silence, of shared fear and sick shock, falls.
When I first read these lines, I thought: what strange friends you must have. I also thought: you didn’t really believe you were behaving rudely, did you? Later, when my own turn came, I understood. I took the early decision (or, more likely, given the turmoil of my brain, the decision took me) to speak of my wife whenever I wanted or needed to: invoking her would be a normal part of any normal exchange – even though ‘normality’ was long fled. I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear lightweight. The young do better than the middle-aged; women better than men. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does. After all, you might expect those closest to you in age and sex and marital status to understand best. What a naivety. I remember a ‘dinner-table conversation’ in a restaurant with three married friends of roughly my age. Each had known her for many years – perhaps eighty or ninety in total – and each would have said, if asked, that they loved her. I mentioned her name; no one picked it up. I did it again, and again nothing. Perhaps the third time I was deliberately trying to provoke, being pissed off at what struck me not as good manners but cowardice. Afraid to touch her name, they denied her thrice, and I thought the worse of them for it.
There is the question of anger. Some are angry with the person who has died, who has abandoned them, betrayed them by losing life. What could be more irrational than that? Few die willingly, not even most suicides. Some of the griefstruck are angry with God, but if He doesn’t exist, that too is irrational. Some are angry with the universe for letting it happen, for this being the inevitable, irreversible case. I didn’t exactly feel this, but through that autumn of 2008 I read the papers and followed events on television with an overpowering indifference. ‘The News’ seemed just a larger, more insulting version of those busfuls of unheeding passengers, the fuel of their transport solipsism and ignorance. For some reason I cared a lot about Obama getting elected, but very little about anything else in the world. They said that the whole financial system might be about to crash and burn, but this didn’t bother me. Money could not have saved her, so what good was money, and what was the point in saving its neck? They said the world’s climate was reaching a point of no return, but it could go to that point and beyond for all it mattered to me. I would drive home from the hospital and at a certain stretch of road, just before a railway bridge, the words would come into my head, and I would repeat them aloud: ‘It’s just the universe doing its stuff.’ That was ‘all’ that ‘it’ – this enormous, tremendous ‘it’ – was. The words didn’t hold any consolation; perhaps they were a way of resisting alternative, false consolations. But if the universe was just doing its stuff, it could do its stuff to itself as well, and to hell with it. What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn’t, wouldn’t, save her?
A friend whose husband died almost instantly of a stroke in his mid-fifties told me of her anger not at him, but at the fact that he didn’t know . Didn’t know he was going to die, didn’t have time to prepare, to say farewells to her and their children. This is a form of being angry with the universe. An anger at indifference – the
Similar Books
