Gift within Loss

take their time coming

On Saturday I was at a small gathering of people who, like me, had known Mary Walker, who died on 29th November, aged 96. I was given this photo that we identified as having been taken over 16 years ago at her 80th birthday.

I can think of Mary in private, and while with her friends. Here I am remembering other losses, many of which I wrote about a long time ago in a memoir group, where memories tumbled around in my mind and in others’ stories. I am thinking of how writing rewrites those stories and those histories, and then gifts emerge from the plethora of the half-forgotten tales. Not least, the “I’m still here” and able still to write. Rather more to the point, gifts lie in every relationship, especially those called “friendship”, something Mary and I often spoke about, considering the many facets that word friend can hold.

In the memoir, I wrote of Jean, a friend from University days in the 60s, with whom I shared a flat, became friends, stayed friends. In 1977 Jean became ill. Jean had taken a Masters in Library Studies after her First Class Honours English at Queens and was now not an ordinary librarian, but a classifier, part of the back-room team that catalogued each and every book published, as was, and still is, one of the things the British Library does. We often talked about her fascination with her work, and about mine. Jean had an eidetic memory, could picture a happening or the page of a book, and say what was on it. One evening with friends, the 1960s film “The Magnificent Seven” came into the conversation, and then Jean enacted the complete sound track and scenes where James Coburn is recruited, at least five minutes of knife flicking and silences. I could still laugh helplessly remembering how much fun we had. Laughter belongs in friendships. There is not enough of it around.

Jean’s illness when finally diagnosed was an “auto-immune systemic reaction” which means that the body has made a dreadful mistake, and its immune system is attacking parts of itself, as if the part were foreign, an invader to be destroyed. Jean and I had many walks together, then she became too unwell to walk, we continued with talk, sitting out in good weather, or in, when not so good. Much of this conversation became discussions about loss and death, which I remember as an incredibly rich experience, the griefs leavened by Jean’s humour. She talked of the deaths of her father and her brother. We read John Bowlby’s “Attachment Separation and Loss”. We envied those we knew who knew Bowlby personally as he worked at the Tavistock Clinic where they were training. Cicely Saunders had begun the hospice movement in 1967, Elizabeth Kubler Ross published “On Death and Dying in 1969 and Jean discovered a book A Way to Die, written by grieving parents, Rosemary and Victor Zorza, about their daughter’s illness and untimely death.

Those talks, and those books, are some of the gifts that came unsought within those years of loss. Jean wanted to return to Ireland, specifically to Magilligan Strand the 7 miles of wild and glorious golden sand along the north coast of Derry, swept by the Atlantic. We imagined our walk there, saw the shells we would find and bring back as souvenirs. She was never able to do that as she was unable to travel far from the dialysis and hospital system. When one time after her death I went to Magilligan, I was glad she had not, as the Troubles of Northern Ireland had led to the opening of Magilligan Prison in 1972, first temporarily as ugly Nissen huts, made more permanent with the addition of the concrete H- blocks. It seemed a loss too far, but then, the beauty of the strand is still there when one looks in the other direction.

Jean, died 1982
poetry and joy in life
picking shells by Magilligan water
I miss my friend.

With Jean, I learned to revisit other deaths and came to I realise that much of my younger self was kept in a closed off unable to talk culture by the far too prevalent custom of “not in front of the children”. This applied paticularly to death even when we knew deaths had happened, there was somehow no talking. We might be better at it now, but still tend to ignore that there are always deaths, all around us, not just when we are old ourselves and, like Mary, die after many of her friends have already passed on. I learned differently with Jean that I too kept silence. From her I learned that death, and vulnerability of many kinds, is positive. At the time I was studying the words of Michael Faraday, scientific discoverer of the 19th century. He said “know your internal want” using the older meaning of want: inadequacy or deficiency in some degree. It is in our vulnerabilities, not our strengths, that we share our humanness, learn together, and make new discoveries about the world and about living in it.

I also learned that there is a huge and categoric difference between a silence that is simply rest, until someone wants to know, and a silence intended to avoid or cover. The first brings that modern word ‘transparency’ and like a land lying fallow, the ability to be productive again happens as we work through the ‘want’, whatever it is. The second sort of silence is secrecy, where deficiency is feared and denied. It brings lies and dishonesty, hiding “want”. Although the intention might be to protect or shield from grief, it does not protect. On the contrary trying to keep a lid on something difficult makes it more virulent and it becomes like whack-a-mole, for every problem hidden, another fear pops up. It seems to me that this applies to our politics and economics, but that’s a big story for another post.

Just as Faraday had said, ‘mental education applies in every department of daily life’ much of this learning about loss has application everywhere. The books Jean and I read were very much influenced by John Bowlby’s observations on the processes of attachment, separation and loss. His book of that name was not specifically about death, but about growth and development and how ordinary life held separations and losses, and how they contribute to each person’s feeling secure. One of the most important messages from Bowlby about separation and loss is that to have what he called the secure base, one also has to be ambivalent, in other words, be OK with contradictions rather than rush to find answers or more comfortable feelings.

This is the gift.

We are limited. Each of us in our own minds-with-bodies is unique and limited. The whole is greater than the parts, we can hold on to not-knowing that we are in a whole, a soul making wonderful world that we could not encompass alone no matter how long we tried. Sci-fi makes much of hive-mind as if it was a threat, playing on an atavistic fear of ants, scorpions, even bees. But we are learning that these are benevolent creatures even as we seem to be losing them hive by hive.

So look for the gift that lies inside the limits, seeing death in life, together. This muddle of inchoate and often contradictory thoughts cheers me up when I’m miserable. Ambivalence rules!

I can allow myself to wait for the gift that emerges. (Though I’m not very happy waiting for its emergence while my sister fails to recover from her stroke, and I watch this now very disabled person sadly.)

Once upon a time, a mere blink ago. I’m the younger one, casting eyes to the ceiling.

What, I wonder, will come? (There will be love in it.)