irrational tears, that I decided I must see my doctor as soon as I got home. High blood pressure, he said: very much too high. This was both alarming and a relief: alarming because I had a secret dread of having a stroke, a relief because there was a real reason for feeling lousy, it was not just my imagination. The doctor said it was not surprising that I was suffering from stress and that I must take a proper holiday, and I added a scold to myself about my weight, which I hadnât bothered to check for months: it had gone up to twelve and a half stone! So my sister kindly came over from Zimbabwe for five weeks to be with my mother, and I stayed in my own dear bed for a week, then went for a week to a luxurious health clinic to start the process of weight-loss (successfully continued onmy own). Once my blood pressure was back to normal and I was feeling well again â better than I had felt for years â I decided that I would not go on with the unbroken four/three plan, but would keep every third weekend to myself in London. This made sense, but it renewed guilt. In London I was able to shrug off anxiety and think about my own concerns (even enjoy them more than I used to because of having had to turn my back on them), but the night-time worries when I was staying with my mother were sharper than ever.
âI am not afraid of death.â My mother said this, and showed that she really was less afraid than many people by the calm way she discussed what would happen once she was gone. I believe the same is true of myself â but there are words which follow that statement so often that they have become a cliché: âItâs dying that Iâm afraid of.â When dying is actually in sight, those words become shockingly true. My mother was not afraid of being dead, but when an attack of angina made her unable to breathe she was very frightened indeed. I was not afraid of her being dead, but I was terrified of the process of her dying.
I had seen only one dead person â and what a ridiculous state of affairs that was: that a woman in her seventies should have seen only one cadaver! Surely there has never been a taboo more senseless than our modern one on death. My only dead person was André Deutschâs ninety-two-year-old mother, who was found dead by her home help when André happened to be abroad. After the police had her body carried off to the coronerâs mortuary they tracked down Andréâs secretary and me and asked if one of us would identify the body. We decided to do it together.
On the way to the mortuary I recalled various reassuring descriptions of dead bodies: how they seemed empty and nothing to do with the person who had left them, and how beautiful faces become in the austere serenity of death. I wanted reassurance because I expected us to be in the same room as the body and to stand beside it while an attendant turned back a sheet covering its face, but that was not how it was done. We were taken into a narrow room with a large plate-glass window curtained with cheap sage-green damask. The curtain was drawn back and there was the body on the other side of the glass, lying in a box and covered up to the neck with a kind of bedspread of purple velour.
The words I spoke involuntarily were: âOh poor little Maria!â It did not look as though it had nothing to do with her, nor was it austerely serene. What was lying there was poor little Maria with her hair in a mess and her face grubby, looking as though she were in a state of great bewilderment and dejection because something too unkind for words had been done to her. It was a comfort to remember that she was dead, and therefore couldnât possibly be feeling how she looked. But it was not a comfort to be shown so clearly that my favourite image of floating out to sea at night was nonsense. What Mariaâs body demonstrated was that even a quick dying can be very nasty .
In other ways the coronerâs
âI am not afraid of death.â My mother said this, and showed that she really was less afraid than many people by the calm way she discussed what would happen once she was gone. I believe the same is true of myself â but there are words which follow that statement so often that they have become a cliché: âItâs dying that Iâm afraid of.â When dying is actually in sight, those words become shockingly true. My mother was not afraid of being dead, but when an attack of angina made her unable to breathe she was very frightened indeed. I was not afraid of her being dead, but I was terrified of the process of her dying.
I had seen only one dead person â and what a ridiculous state of affairs that was: that a woman in her seventies should have seen only one cadaver! Surely there has never been a taboo more senseless than our modern one on death. My only dead person was André Deutschâs ninety-two-year-old mother, who was found dead by her home help when André happened to be abroad. After the police had her body carried off to the coronerâs mortuary they tracked down Andréâs secretary and me and asked if one of us would identify the body. We decided to do it together.
On the way to the mortuary I recalled various reassuring descriptions of dead bodies: how they seemed empty and nothing to do with the person who had left them, and how beautiful faces become in the austere serenity of death. I wanted reassurance because I expected us to be in the same room as the body and to stand beside it while an attendant turned back a sheet covering its face, but that was not how it was done. We were taken into a narrow room with a large plate-glass window curtained with cheap sage-green damask. The curtain was drawn back and there was the body on the other side of the glass, lying in a box and covered up to the neck with a kind of bedspread of purple velour.
The words I spoke involuntarily were: âOh poor little Maria!â It did not look as though it had nothing to do with her, nor was it austerely serene. What was lying there was poor little Maria with her hair in a mess and her face grubby, looking as though she were in a state of great bewilderment and dejection because something too unkind for words had been done to her. It was a comfort to remember that she was dead, and therefore couldnât possibly be feeling how she looked. But it was not a comfort to be shown so clearly that my favourite image of floating out to sea at night was nonsense. What Mariaâs body demonstrated was that even a quick dying can be very nasty .
In other ways the coronerâs
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