Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  I went to a doctor and got some sleeping pills. I began to visit a counsellor, who listened sympathetically to my story and did not dismiss my version of events in the hospital as just a ‘stage of grief’ – denial, or anger. I continued to visit her for six months and the sessions became a crucial part of my survival during that time.

  I developed a strategy, although develop is hardly the mot propre, to ‘get through’. Grief is a rusting of the soul, which only work and the passage of time will scour away, Dr Johnson said, or words to that effect. He also said that grief will pass, but the suspense – the waiting – is terrible. I delved into all the grief literature I could find. Some of it helped. Most of it offered some word of useful advice. One writer gave hope, another wisdom, yet another simply the comfort of empathy: understanding that other people went through this too – half the world, in fact – for some reason provided consolation, although I don’t really know why. Misery likes bedfellows? Or perhaps knowing that they experienced this trauma but survived to write about it suggested that it was possible to ‘get through it’ and come out the other side, if not ‘healed’, at least less of a total wreck than one feels in the first months. C.S. Lewis writes that you emerge like a person who has lost a leg. The wound heals and you learn to manage without it. In my raw state, to paraphrase Julian Barnes, I felt as if I had been thrown out of an aeroplane so that seemed realistic, even optimistic. I think it was simply the company of the bereaved that one experiences in these good books which was in itself a comfort – the knowledge, in their accounts of the last days of their loved ones and the days, early and late, of their grieving, that somebody understood what losing your spouse is like. They ‘get it’: these writers who have done us the service of describing their own loss and sorrow. As did my many neighbours and friends who had been widowed themselves, who ‘belonged to the club nobody wants to be a member of’, as Dermot Bolger, a writer who lost his wife a few years back, put it in his letter of condolence. The main comfort of those books was in their richness of insight and understanding: Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story, Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Henning Mankell’s collection of essays, Kvicksand – several of which deal not with bereavement but with his reaction to his cancer diagnosis – I found particularly uplifting. There is plenty of rubbish among the self-help books, many of which I bought – you see quickly which work is good and which superficial. I found research-based studies of grief by psychologists and psychiatrists useful. In particular, Colin Murray Parkes’s study of grief in widows was comforting – Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (1972). This is a scientific study of the process of grief, but it’s written in accessible prose. Conclusions, such as that after eighteen months 70 per cent of widows reported significant improvement in their feelings, offered more hope than statements such as ‘everyone’s grief is different’, or ‘it comes in waves’ – true as these observations are. Eighteen months seemed like a long time to suffer the sorrow and sense of loss I was experiencing, as I realised more and more that Bo and I were soulmates, and that there is nobody in the world who shares my particular interests and perspective on life as he did. But at least the statistics suggested that recovery was possible, that people are resilient.

  Ordinary proverbial wisdom, folk wisdom, also suggested that recovery was likely, of course. On a dark day in January, soon after the beginning of the spring term, I bumped into Bo’s old friend and colleague Séamas Ó Catháin on the campus in Belfield. He was about to give a lecture to the Folklore of Ireland Society. I burst into tears, as I was doing repeatedly at this time whenever anyone said a sympathetic word or even gave me a kind look.

  ‘I know it’s a cliché,’ Séamas said, ‘but time will make it easier.’

  ‘It’s a cliché, but it is a true cliché,’ my friend Luz Mar Gonzales Arias wrote, in one of her many comforting emails. ‘Time heals.’

  And a neighbour I met while walking in Shankill put some sort of time limit on it. She, who had been widowed when she was a young mother of three children, said, ‘It takes a few years to get over it.’ This was when I had been widowed for a few weeks. A few years sounded like a death sentence. But I held on to her words. I could believe her, because she was in the club nobody wants to belong to. She had gone through it and survived.

  I was advised by others, including my counsellor, not to set time limits. In fact, the counsellor in particular had an aversion to time limits, and hinted that I was too obsessed with that idea. But clinging to the belief that it will get better in time is a comfort. We need hope and the only hope for someone who is shattered by the death of their partner is that there is light at the end of the tunnel, that time will heal. One hears different time limits.

  ‘Four years’ – said my friend Helena, who had watched her mother recover from the untimely death of her father – ‘after four years you could sense a lightening, a change’.

  Of course it is true that the waves of grief return, even over two years later, and a pang of longing can ambush you when you least expect it. But the most terrible waves do not return as often as in the first year, and when they do they are easier to deal with.

  For instance, after about a year I stopped reliving the last horrific days of Bo’s life; perhaps until then I had been going over every moment of that nightmare of a week, in some vain expectation of correcting the mistakes, doing things differently, and arriving at a different result: life rather than death. It was what Joan Didion calls ‘magical thinking’; you relive the past in order to change it. But you can’t change the past. We know that but the subconscious, the body, doesn’t get the message. It took about a year for the lesson to sink in. It was a year before I stopped obsessively going over the most horrible week of my life. After two or three years, I stopped thinking about Bo all the time. After three years, I was able to think about him without sadness – I can simply remember him; I consult him for advice, and, although this can obviously be self-deceptive, I feel fairly confident in almost all instances of what his advice to me would be. I had in any case been in the habit of talking to my mother, who died in 2007, in this way: as far as both she and Bo are concerned, I can guess what their counsel would be, and in both instances I know they are always on my side.

  Of course, talking to a memory or a ghost is not the same as talking to a living person. A good imagination is a gift, but it can be overrated. As Keats wrote, imagination is no substitute for the real thing. ‘The fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.’ You get used to it, walking with one leg. There is no compensation for the loss. With Bo, I shared a great deal: a love of nature, walking, holidays, exploring, books, various modern and medieval languages, folklore, history, literature, our garden, our house, our children. Certain television programmes. There is nobody in the world with the same eclectic combination of talents and feelings and interests. I know nobody who is as truly learned and who wears his learning so lightly (although my sons are contenders, possibly). I feel his absence constantly. But it hurts less, even as I gain ever more insight into how much we had together and how unique and special and perhaps strange our marriage was.

  It took a few years before I could walk down a street in Dingle, where we used to go on holidays, without weeping. During my first visits to Kerry, in 2014, this was not possible. I missed him every second of the day in Dunquin and the surroundings. I would park my car in the car park near the mart in Dingle, and walk down to Main Street and Green Street, and break down in tears. Always we had parked, then gone our separate ways for an hour or so – while I shopped and went to the Internet Cafe to check my emails. We would meet in Cafe Liteartha, where Bo would be engaged in conversation with someone, or just reading and drinking coffee, and then we’d drive home. These were very simple pleasures, but afternoons of real happiness – my only consolation was that I was aware of how happy I was while experiencing those times. But it took a long time be
fore walking around Dingle alone brought me anything other than pain.

  One is advised to ‘live through the grief’, not to avoid it or try to bat it away. There is not a lot of choice – grief waylaid me in predictable and unpredictable ways. I hate words like ‘wallowing’ or ‘self-pity’. They are judgemental and used by those who have a tendency to dismiss and deny emotional pain – yes, it would be great if it did not exist, but unfortunately it does. And of course you wallow in sorrow when you lose your husband. Of course you feel self-pity, as well as pity for him. How could it be otherwise? I do not have a stiff upper lip, nor do I want one. I ‘went through it’. But I needed also to find ways of escaping from it. If you ‘went through it’ from morning to night and morning again, your life would not be worth living. You would drown in sorrow. And some do.

  I quickly began to look for ways of temporary escape. I noticed already in the first month that while I was teaching a class, on the short story or the novel, I felt no sadness: all my attention was focussed on the students and the texts we were discussing. After my class, in Belfield, going back up the stairs, I would feel horribly empty, and suffer huge pangs of sorrow. Woe betide anyone who bumped into me on the stairs – they would be treated to a spate of tears. Everyone was of course entirely kind and sympathetic, but it must have been embarrassing or frightening for them sometimes. Usually they asked, kindly, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Belfield was strongly linked to Bo in my heart. I had met him there, and all through our life we had been in and out of the college. It was part of our ordinary personal landscape. Very often after my class we met outside the Folklore Department, and we then had lunch together in the canteen. If I was late Bo would telephone. Now I went up the grey stairs alone. Bo would not phone to ask, what’s keeping you?

  Soon after Bo’s death, one of the things several people said was ‘Be kind to yourself’. Lots of empty formulae and annoying comments are iterated to new widows (‘Call me if there’s anything I can do’, ‘We must have lunch sometime’, ‘What age was he?’) but this is one of the most irritating, and puzzling. Whenever I heard it, my immediate thought was ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you were kind to me?’ But I wasn’t even sure what the phrase was supposed to mean, and I don’t think those who trot it out knew either. When I asked someone for clarification, she was clearly taken aback, then shrugged and said, ‘Well, have a massage. Eat a whole box of chocolates if you feel like it.’ Ah, yes! Possibly the advice about the massage – very common – was not bad, in that it acknowledges that the body suffers grief as well as the mind. Grief is visceral; the emotions and the physique are affected alike. Hence the knot in the stomach, the tightness in the chest.

  After a while I interpreted ‘Be kind to yourself’ as finding out what I really liked to do and allowing myself to do it.

  I set myself goals and tasks in fields that I liked. Easy tasks for the most part, but tasks that I knew would require concentration. I enrolled for an online course in Swedish writing, since my writing skills in the language were poor: I learnt to write Danish correctly in 1978 but although I had made the transition to oral Swedish decades ago and even though I read Swedish regularly my spelling and grammar when I wrote were not good – surprisingly, I seem to be able to read endlessly and still not write the language accurately, possibly because I tend to read fast. I continued to write book reviews regularly for the Irish Times – they continued to ask for them, which was a real blessing. I wrote a diary and kept a record of dreams. In the summer, I took a summer course on Irish grammar in Kerry – I realised that doing a course would help me to come to terms with being in Dunquin without Bo, which was a huge challenge, since, in thirty years, I had never been in our house down there without him, and since, over the past six or seven years, our summers there had been idyllic. In 2015 I began to learn a new language, Bulgarian. It’s very hard to sink into grief when dealing with the aspect of the verb in a Slavonic language, or trying to pronounce a new word of ten syllables.

  I also watched a lot of films. I found out how to get Swedish TV programmes on the internet and watch them on my TV set, and I saw many drama series that interested me; this was an easy way to keep in touch with the Swedish language, which went out of my everyday life with Bo. I went for long walks alone and with a group, swam once or twice a week. I socialised with my good friends, and made some new friends – wonderful people, actively kind – during this time.

  For the first year, though, my only goal was to survive. After that I would start working properly again. Joyce Carol Oates in her moving account of her own first year of widowhood confirmed that. ‘On the first anniversary of her husband’s death, the widow should congratulate herself. I have survived.’ That is enough, for the first year.

  My interest in writing fiction vanished completely, although I continued to read it, and some novels were directly comforting (especially those by the Brontës, who were so acquainted with death and grief). But the creation of fiction seemed trivial, like a pointless child’s game. When, after a year, I took on commissions to write I tended to write autobiographically, about death, since everything else seemed irrelevant and insignificant.

  The counsellor was adamant that I had to allow grief to take its time and its toll. At her sessions, I wept copiously, to the extent that I worried about her capacity to stand all my crying. But she was unfailingly sympathetic and encouraging.

  ‘You can’t believe this now,’ she said. ‘But one day you will look in the mirror and feel a lightening of spirit.’

  As with the cliché about time’s healing processes, I stored this, or it stored itself, in my memory. I don’t think I have felt that lightening even yet. But I have had many enjoyable experiences, and wonderful relationships – especially with my new grandchildren, Freja, Niko and Sadhbh. ‘Present pleasures are no replacement for past joys,’ Julian Barnes writes in Levels of Life. Joy is difficult to feel, in the absence of the love of one’s life. But it is in any case always elusive and becomes rarer as we get older. Like grief, or death, joy visits us, but it is impossible to make a reservation for a minute or hour or day of joy. It obeys no commands. A more everyday contentment is something we can strive for, however, and manage to achieve.

  My life is fairly privileged. I am not well off but I have enough money to live on, my adult children still live in Dublin and are warm and supportive. I have many good friends. Teaching creative writing has always been engaging and enjoyable, and during the first year of Bo’s absence was a reliable harbour in the stormy ocean of grief. I have written this memoir at home on my sofa in Shankill, but also at various residences in other centres for artists and writers – Haihatus, in Joutsa in Finland; the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, in Sweden; and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig.

  ‘Be kind to yourself.’

  It all helps.

  Dreams

  Unlike Orpheus, we can no longer descend to the Underworld in search of our lost spouses, nor can I hope to ascend to an Overworld where Bo waits for me with open arms. Dead is dead, I believe. As Julian Barnes points out in his account of bereavement, we can descend into our memories and into our dreams. Dreams are particularly analogous to another numinous world, since we have no control over them. You can buy a ticket to China or New Zealand, but when you fall asleep you go on a mystery tour, and who knows who you will meet in the place where you may find yourself. A place that is almost always both vaguely familiar and somewhat strange, a mixture of the known and unknown.

  In the first weeks I was surprised and disappointed that my dreams about Bo were few, or nonexistent. For six weeks, he did not come to me in my dreams, at all, although I thought about him during all my waking moments.

  The first time he came was around Christmas, when I was staying with Ragnar and Ailbhe, for a night, in their house in Stoneybatter. In the dream Bo hugged me tightly, and said, ‘I wish we could be together for a hundred years.’

  Dreams express desires, a
s Nadezhda, my other daughter-inlaw and a psychoanalyst, points out.

  After that, Bo began to come to me in dreams quite frequently. Some of the dreams were filled with love, but many were at least tinged with anxiousness about his survival. For instance, this dream, which I had on 20 January:

  We were walking in a park, covered in snow. Bo was nevertheless dressed in his usual tweed jacket, checked shirt and tweed tie – no coat. It wasn’t cold. There was no temperature, actually – I don’t feel hot or cold in dreams, just neutral. We were happy but in the normal way, happy walking together. Ahead of us was a hill or cliff of snow. I began to throw snowballs, trying to get them to go over the edge of this cliff. Bo laughed at me. Mostly I could not get the snowballs to go over the edge.

  Then I was at the other side of the ledge – more like a snowy plateau, snowier and more open than where we’d been before. Bo was throwing snowballs now. He came over the edge of the hill. I said, don’t do that. I could see that the snow was fragile, like thin ice. I felt he was in danger. And sure enough the snow gave way, and he sank into it and was covered in snow. I managed to get him out. His eyes were closed but he was breathing and I knew he was alive. Perfectly dressed, looking quite normal, lying in the snow.

  There were other people in the background but they didn’t come to us.

  The part of the dream where we walked was comforting. It was comforting to dream of Bo at all. But now that I write it down I see I am rehearsing the panic, the danger, the fall. Bo fell and I thought I could rescue him on my own, but I couldn’t.

  Later, in March, I had a dream in which I suddenly remembered that Bo was dead:

  I was in my own bed, our bed. Where I actually was. Something was nibbling my toe. I thought, a mouse. Bo said something comforting, some jokey thing, or I had a sense of Bo saying the sort of comforting, ironic thing he would have, in such a situation. I had a sense of being in bed on a Sunday morning, in a joking relaxed mood, as we must have been on hundreds and hundreds of occasions during our life.