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.
Nearly thirty years ago, in a novel, I tried to imagine what it would be like for a man in his sixties to be widowed. I wrote:
When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.
Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological – vertigo in a shelving canyon – but it’s not like that; it’s just misery as regular as a job … [People say] you’ll come out of it … And you do come out of it, that’s true. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.
I read this passage at her funeral, October snow on the ground, my left hand touching her coffin, my right hand holding open the book (which was dedicated to her). My fictional widower had a different life – and love – from mine, and quite a different widowing. But I had to suppress just a few words in one sentence, and was surprised at what I took to be my accuracy. Only later did novelist’s self-doubt set in: perhaps, rather than inventing the correct grief for my fictional character, I had merely been predicting my own probable feelings – an easier job.
For three years and more I continued to dream about her in the same way, according to the same narrative. Then I had a kind of meta-dream, one which seemed to propose an end to this line of night-work. And, as with all good endings, I didn’t see it coming. In my dream we were together, doing things together, in some open space, being happy – all in the way I had become accustomed to – when suddenly she realised that this could not be true, and it all must be a dream, because she now knew that she was dead.
Should I be pleased with this dream? For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both? The ability to hold the lost love powerfully in mind, remembering without distorting? The
‘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.
Nearly thirty years ago, in a novel, I tried to imagine what it would be like for a man in his sixties to be widowed. I wrote:
When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.
Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological – vertigo in a shelving canyon – but it’s not like that; it’s just misery as regular as a job … [People say] you’ll come out of it … And you do come out of it, that’s true. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.
I read this passage at her funeral, October snow on the ground, my left hand touching her coffin, my right hand holding open the book (which was dedicated to her). My fictional widower had a different life – and love – from mine, and quite a different widowing. But I had to suppress just a few words in one sentence, and was surprised at what I took to be my accuracy. Only later did novelist’s self-doubt set in: perhaps, rather than inventing the correct grief for my fictional character, I had merely been predicting my own probable feelings – an easier job.
For three years and more I continued to dream about her in the same way, according to the same narrative. Then I had a kind of meta-dream, one which seemed to propose an end to this line of night-work. And, as with all good endings, I didn’t see it coming. In my dream we were together, doing things together, in some open space, being happy – all in the way I had become accustomed to – when suddenly she realised that this could not be true, and it all must be a dream, because she now knew that she was dead.
Should I be pleased with this dream? For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both? The ability to hold the lost love powerfully in mind, remembering without distorting? The
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