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Authors: Julian Barnes
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like.’ The first was not a problem for me – you just get the right pills in the right dosage; no, the problem was rather getting through the day . As for doing what I liked: for me, this usually meant doing things with her. Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards. Besides, what did I now want to do? I didn’t want to walk the length of the Canal du Midi. I wanted, very strongly and exactly, the opposite: to stay at home, in the spaces she had created and where she still, in my imagination, moved. As for pigging out on any and every major purchasable sporting fixture, I found that my needs were very particular. In those first months, I wanted to watch sport in which I had almost no emotional involvement at all. I would enjoy – though that verb is too strong to describe a kind of listless attending – football matches between, say, Middlesbrough and Slovan Bratislava (ideally the second leg of a tie whose first leg I had missed), in some low-level European tournament which mostly excited those in Middlesbrough and Bratislava. I wanted to watch sport to which I would normally be indifferent. Because now I could only be indifferent; I had no emotions left to lend.
I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely. This is my good luck, and also my bad luck. Early on, the words came into my head: I miss her in every action, and in every inaction. It was one of those phrases I repeated to myself as confirmation of where and what I was. Just as, driving home, I would prepare myself for my return by saying out loud: ‘I am going back neither with her nor to her.’ Just as, when something failed, was broken or mislaid, I would reassure myself with: ‘On the scale of loss, it is nothing.’ But such is the solipsism of grief that I barely thought about gradations and differences until a woman friend said that she envied me my grief. Why on earth, I asked. Because ‘If X [her husband] died, it would be more complicated for me.’ She did not elaborate; nor did she need to. And I thought: maybe, in a way, I’m having it easy.
The first time I was ever away from her for more than a day or two – I had gone down to the country to write – I discovered that, on top of (or, perhaps, beneath) all the predictable ways, I also missed her morally. This came as a surprise, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure. Whereas grief, love’s opposite, does not seem to occupy a moral space. The defensive, curled position it forces us into if we are to survive makes us more selfish. It is not a place of upper air; there are no views. You can no longer hear yourself living.
Before, when I read newspaper obituaries, I used to idly calculate my age against the dead person’s: x more years, I would think (or, already, x fewer). Now I read obituaries and check how long the subject was married. I envy those who had more time than I did. It rarely crosses my mind that they might have been living, with every extra year, some terrible extra boredom or servitude. I am not interested in that sort of marriage; I want to award them only happy years. But then I also calculate the length of widowhoods. Here, for instance, is Eugene Polley, 1915–2012, the inventor of the TV remote control. At the end of his obituary it says: ‘Polley’s wife, Blanche, to whom he was married for 34 years, died in 1976.’ And I think: married for longer than me, and still widowed for thirty-six years. Three and a half decades of relishing the pain?
Someone I had only met twice wrote to tell me that a few months previously he had ‘lost his wife to cancer’ (another phrase that jarred: compare ‘We lost our dog to gypsies’, or ‘He lost his wife to a commercial
I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely. This is my good luck, and also my bad luck. Early on, the words came into my head: I miss her in every action, and in every inaction. It was one of those phrases I repeated to myself as confirmation of where and what I was. Just as, driving home, I would prepare myself for my return by saying out loud: ‘I am going back neither with her nor to her.’ Just as, when something failed, was broken or mislaid, I would reassure myself with: ‘On the scale of loss, it is nothing.’ But such is the solipsism of grief that I barely thought about gradations and differences until a woman friend said that she envied me my grief. Why on earth, I asked. Because ‘If X [her husband] died, it would be more complicated for me.’ She did not elaborate; nor did she need to. And I thought: maybe, in a way, I’m having it easy.
The first time I was ever away from her for more than a day or two – I had gone down to the country to write – I discovered that, on top of (or, perhaps, beneath) all the predictable ways, I also missed her morally. This came as a surprise, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure. Whereas grief, love’s opposite, does not seem to occupy a moral space. The defensive, curled position it forces us into if we are to survive makes us more selfish. It is not a place of upper air; there are no views. You can no longer hear yourself living.
Before, when I read newspaper obituaries, I used to idly calculate my age against the dead person’s: x more years, I would think (or, already, x fewer). Now I read obituaries and check how long the subject was married. I envy those who had more time than I did. It rarely crosses my mind that they might have been living, with every extra year, some terrible extra boredom or servitude. I am not interested in that sort of marriage; I want to award them only happy years. But then I also calculate the length of widowhoods. Here, for instance, is Eugene Polley, 1915–2012, the inventor of the TV remote control. At the end of his obituary it says: ‘Polley’s wife, Blanche, to whom he was married for 34 years, died in 1976.’ And I think: married for longer than me, and still widowed for thirty-six years. Three and a half decades of relishing the pain?
Someone I had only met twice wrote to tell me that a few months previously he had ‘lost his wife to cancer’ (another phrase that jarred: compare ‘We lost our dog to gypsies’, or ‘He lost his wife to a commercial
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