indifference of life merely continuing until it merely ends.
So the anger may be visited instead on friends. For their inability to say or do the right things, for their unwanted pressingness or seeming froideur . And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common. Some friends are as scared of grief as they are of death; they avoid you as if they fear infection. Some, without knowing it, half expect you to do their mourning for them. Others put on a bright practicality. ‘So,’ a voice on the phone asks, a week after I have buried my wife, ‘what are you up to? Are you going on walking holidays?’ I shout at the phone for a moment or two, then put it down. No: walking holidays were what we did together, when my life was on the level.
But strangely, in retrospect, this impertinent question wasn’t too far out. I had occasionally, over the years, imagined what I might do if ‘something bad’ happened in my life. I did not specify the ‘something bad’ to myself, but the possibilities were very limited. I decided in advance that I would do one trivial and one more serious thing. The first was that I would finally succumb to Rupert Murdoch and sign up for a panoply of sports channels. The second would be to walk, by myself, across France – or, if that seemed unfeasible, across a corner of it, specifically along the Canal du Midi, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, my rucksack containing a notebook in which I would record my attempts to deal with the ‘something bad’. But when it happened, I had no desire to pull on my boots. And ‘walking holiday’ would hardly be the name for such a grief-trudge.
Other distractions were proposed, other advice given. Some reacted as if the death of the loved one were merely an extreme form of divorce. I was advised to get a dog. I would reply sarcastically that this did not seem much of a substitute for a wife. I was warned by a widow to ‘try not to notice other couples’ – but most of my friends form couples. Someone suggested I rent a flat in Paris for six months, or, failing that, ‘a beach cabin in Guadeloupe’. She and her husband would look after my house while I was away. This would be convenient for them, and ‘we’d have a garden for Freddie’. The proposal came by email during the last day of my wife’s life. And Freddie was their dog.
Of course, the Silent Ones and the advice givers will be feeling grief of their own, and perhaps their own anger, which may be aimed at us – at me. They might be wanting to say: ‘Your grief is an embarrassment. We’re just waiting for it to pass. And, by the way, you’re less interesting without her.’ (This is true: I do feel less interesting without her. When, alone, I talk to her, I am worth listening to; when I talk to myself, not. ‘Oh, stop boring me,’ I say in voiced rebuke, as I repeat myself to myself.) Yes, if they thought that, I’d agree. An American friend told me straightforwardly, ‘I always thought she’d see you out.’ I quite understood: my survival had seemed the less likely possibility. But perhaps he also meant that he would have preferred her survival to mine. And I could hardly quarrel with that either.
Nor do you know how you appear to others. How you feel and how you look may or may not be the same. So how do you feel? As if you have dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body. That is what it feels like, and why should it look any different? No wonder some want to swerve away to a safer topic of conversation. And perhaps they are not avoiding death, and her; they are avoiding you.
I do not believe I shall ever see her again. Never see, hear, touch, embrace, listen to, laugh
So the anger may be visited instead on friends. For their inability to say or do the right things, for their unwanted pressingness or seeming froideur . And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common. Some friends are as scared of grief as they are of death; they avoid you as if they fear infection. Some, without knowing it, half expect you to do their mourning for them. Others put on a bright practicality. ‘So,’ a voice on the phone asks, a week after I have buried my wife, ‘what are you up to? Are you going on walking holidays?’ I shout at the phone for a moment or two, then put it down. No: walking holidays were what we did together, when my life was on the level.
But strangely, in retrospect, this impertinent question wasn’t too far out. I had occasionally, over the years, imagined what I might do if ‘something bad’ happened in my life. I did not specify the ‘something bad’ to myself, but the possibilities were very limited. I decided in advance that I would do one trivial and one more serious thing. The first was that I would finally succumb to Rupert Murdoch and sign up for a panoply of sports channels. The second would be to walk, by myself, across France – or, if that seemed unfeasible, across a corner of it, specifically along the Canal du Midi, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, my rucksack containing a notebook in which I would record my attempts to deal with the ‘something bad’. But when it happened, I had no desire to pull on my boots. And ‘walking holiday’ would hardly be the name for such a grief-trudge.
Other distractions were proposed, other advice given. Some reacted as if the death of the loved one were merely an extreme form of divorce. I was advised to get a dog. I would reply sarcastically that this did not seem much of a substitute for a wife. I was warned by a widow to ‘try not to notice other couples’ – but most of my friends form couples. Someone suggested I rent a flat in Paris for six months, or, failing that, ‘a beach cabin in Guadeloupe’. She and her husband would look after my house while I was away. This would be convenient for them, and ‘we’d have a garden for Freddie’. The proposal came by email during the last day of my wife’s life. And Freddie was their dog.
Of course, the Silent Ones and the advice givers will be feeling grief of their own, and perhaps their own anger, which may be aimed at us – at me. They might be wanting to say: ‘Your grief is an embarrassment. We’re just waiting for it to pass. And, by the way, you’re less interesting without her.’ (This is true: I do feel less interesting without her. When, alone, I talk to her, I am worth listening to; when I talk to myself, not. ‘Oh, stop boring me,’ I say in voiced rebuke, as I repeat myself to myself.) Yes, if they thought that, I’d agree. An American friend told me straightforwardly, ‘I always thought she’d see you out.’ I quite understood: my survival had seemed the less likely possibility. But perhaps he also meant that he would have preferred her survival to mine. And I could hardly quarrel with that either.
Nor do you know how you appear to others. How you feel and how you look may or may not be the same. So how do you feel? As if you have dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body. That is what it feels like, and why should it look any different? No wonder some want to swerve away to a safer topic of conversation. And perhaps they are not avoiding death, and her; they are avoiding you.
I do not believe I shall ever see her again. Never see, hear, touch, embrace, listen to, laugh
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