The other view, a more Eastern one, regards this vision of the self as fundamentally mistaken. It sees the personality, the fixed self, as a kind of optical illusion. We are a wave, a fluid sequence of mental states and perceptions, passing through time. When we look back at the path the wave has travelled we see a trick of memory, which makes it seem as if that self is still travelling with us – but just as the water in a wave stays where it is and only the energy moves forward, so it is with the personality, which is only in this moment, right here, right now. We remember past moments (or we think we do – we continually convince ourselves that we do) and we invent continuity with that earlier self, but it is a fiction. We are only who we are right now, and the stability and continuity of the self is a comforting illusion. We tell ourselves stories to arrange these successive selves into a single unity; we make stories to make a self. In this version, my anxieties would be no more than something I kept doing to myself, a story I was telling myself over and over again.
I think that neither of these accounts of identity is quite right. We are not fixed and permanent, and the Buddhist or Humean emphasis on fluidity is right in so far as it stresses that; but we also don’t make ourselves up out of ourselves, moment by moment. The second of these views just doesn’t feel right. I’m not exactly the same person I was yesterday, or a year ago, or a decade ago. But it is also true to say that I’m not an entirely different person. There is a continuity between our past selves and our current ones; this is something we feel in our deepest being. And that feeling is not entirely an illusion. Indeed we often wish that there were less of a continuity, and all of us have aspects of ourselves that we wish we could simply slough off. But it doesn’t work like that.
I would suggest that instead of regarding ourselves as either a building or a wave, we should see the personality as more like a literary work, a poem perhaps, with themes and subjects and imagery, and motifs that run through it but are not quite (or not necessarily) the same thing as stories. We have narratives, but we are not made out of narrative; we have stabilities, structures, but they are things we hold in place by internal tensions, braced by thematic energies. We hold ourselves in place with meanings – or if not meanings, with parallels, balances, rhythms, echoes, patterns. A life is a set of events but it is also a set of themes and meanings, and it is often the meaning that determines the event, and not the other way around. In other words, what you said and did with your first love, for instance, is given content by what you choose to make of it, much more than by the actual words that were spoken and the deeds that were done. Some people decide that their first love is the great event of their lives, and others can barely remember it a year or two later, and they might be remembering the exact same sequence of events. More than a building or a wave, what we most truly resemble is a work of art. That’s something therapy has brought me to think.
What therapy didn’t do for me directly is cure the phobia. It’s much more manageable now – I’ve flown around the world, been all over the place, and lived my life as well as I can. But I’m not entirely free of irrational anxiety, not really. I don’t know if I ever will be. Still, I can live with not being free of it, since it is part of who I am, and I have no choice about it. Anxiety is freedom. Freedom is anxiety. There are people for whom that is not true, and I envy them; I truly, deeply envy them. They don’t know their own luck. But I’m not one of them, and that’s just the way it is.
That, too, is why I’ve never tried to cure the fear by taking medication. Many readers will have wanted to bang my head against a wall and order me to take Xanax (or another benzodiazepene tranquilliser) or Prozac (or another SSRI antidepressant) and just medicate my way through the fear. That, after all, is what most people now do. As Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker, talking is out, and taking is in. To many people, the idea of deliberately not taking medication to help with a condition like mine is like refusing to use a prosthesis when you have a missing limb. It’s a wilful refusal to accept the available help.
I disagree. I don’t disagree for everyone, and I don’t see this as an issue where you can make general rules. In my own case, though, and with the single exception of when I fly, I won’t take pills. That is because I don’t want to be mentally blurred, or assisted, or comforted, or calmed, or eased, or tranquillised. I want all my faculties, even if some of those faculties sometimes turn against me and make me feel anxious. That anxiety is part of who I am, and in order to write books I feel I need all of me, even the parts I don’t want. If I thought that the pills were just curing a physical condition, the way my inhaler takes away the symptoms of asthma when I wheeze, I would take them. But I don’t see my phobia as a purely physical condition. It lives in my mind, and it’s part of my mind, for better or worse. And I need my mind to be the way it is in order to write.
To put it another way, I think that my phobia has some meaning. It’s trying to tell me something, even though I don’t usually know what. Writing and therapy are linked, because they are both about a search for meaning. To take the fear away with antidepressants would for me be to say that the fear is just a meaningless chemical accident.
4
So as 1991 turned into 1992, I had a girlfriend who was on the way to being a wife, a therapist, a novel I had been incubating for some years and ‘working on’ for two, a principled aversion to taking medication, and a room of my own. I had freedom, and the anxiety which for me was its price. So naturally my book wrote itself, yes?
Ah no … and this is a hard thing for me to accept; but I’m not sure I could finally have been able to get on with the book if it hadn’t been for one more loss. It happened in the summer of 1992, and it was the loss of my mother as she had been: of Julie as I had known her.
In the summer of 1992 Miranda and I went on holiday to Scotland. I was working at Penguin Books at the time, and had landed a parallel job writing restaurant reviews for the Observer. That gig, as we say in show business, was due to start in the autumn, and I planned to do some Scottish eating and sprinkle it through my columns in the next few months, thus making me look more adventurous and wide-travelling than was actually the case. But there was another component to the holiday plan: we would borrow my mother’s car for the course of the two weeks. I would get lots of driving practice, and when I got back to London would book, take, and pass my driving test. I had got to thirty without learning to drive, no doubt mainly because I’d always lived in cities; however, it was now time to do what a man’s gotta do. So Miranda and I went up to Norwich, stayed the night, and then drove off in Julie’s car, with many a strong injunction about not crashing it, returning it clean, making sure we put unleaded petrol in, and calling her every evening to let her know we were OK. (I should say here that my mother, who had never warmed to any of my girlfriends, strongly approved of Miranda. The first time they met, Julie opened the door to us, said hello, took our coats, told Miranda to go upstairs to the sitting room and help herself to tea, and said to me: You mustn’t let this one get away.)
So we set off and drove around Scotland for two weeks, reaching as far as Ullapool in the distant north-west and then working our way back. Ullapool was delightful. We were staying at the also delightful Altnaharrie Inn, accessible only by boat, and without telephones or mains electricity, so that night I called from the payphone by the boat dock and checked in with my mother. Julie sounded a little distracted. We crossed, had dinner, spent the night, and the next day drove to Fort William, where we were staying at the utterly grotesque Inverlochy Castle, a ‘baronial pile’ where Queen Victoria had spent quality time, now an over-the-top grand hotel, the kind of place where they make you feel like an escaped homicidal maniac if you aren’t wearing a tie. It was raining – it’s always raining in Fort William. I called my mother after we got there, at about 6.30, but there was no reply. That’s odd, I thought – she must have gone to her Greek friends Costa and Reula for supper. But that seemed strange: she hadn’t mentioned it, and she’d been there only a
couple of nights before, so in between courses, at about nine, I popped back to the room and called again. No reply. If Julie went out in the evening she was always back by then, so I began to be properly worried. At the end of the meal, say ten or 10.30, I called again and there still wasn’t a reply, so I called the neighbour who had a key, and explained my worry. I let ten minutes pass and then called my mother’s number again, and it was engaged. That’s when I realised something really was wrong.
Julie had had a stroke. She had fallen on the stairs and, according to the ambulance men, spent many hours there, unable to move. In their opinion she had been there all the previous night and all day. This was obviously a disaster, but there were several providential aspects, among them the fact that if I hadn’t been calling every day – which I was only doing because I’d borrowed her car – I wouldn’t have known that something was wrong; no one would have had any reason to notice Julie’s condition for a few days, and since she couldn’t move, she would have died there on the landing.
Miranda and I drove down from Fort William to Norwich overnight, about as long a drive as you can make in mainland UK, with a few hours’ sleep in a fleapit hotel somewhere. The first time I ever drove at night was through Glencoe at about one in the morning, with the mist descending, Miranda asleep beside me, and an extraordinary vision of a stag standing on a crest just at the end of the valley, lit by the headlights as they bounced off the mist. It was the only moment I’ve felt a shamanistic presence, as if that animal were somehow a watchful or presiding spirit; strange and creepy, on a very strange and frightening night.
When we got to Norwich, at about 6 p.m. the next day, Julie was in intensive care, which is where she stayed for the next forty-eight hours or so. Then she spent a couple of weeks in a ward in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital; she was transferred to what was supposed to be a convalescent hospital. There was next to no medical care at the hospital and the patients were essentially left to rot. My mother was there for a couple of months, and then went to a residential home in a place called Sparham in north-west Norfolk for a few more months. Then she moved to the flat I had bought for her in Wimbledon, after selling her house in Norwich, about fifteen minutes by car from where Miranda and I were living in Battersea. When I say I bought it for her, I don’t mean I paid, rather that I arranged the sale of her house, and her move down to London with enough of her stuff to live with. She moved in May 1993, so all of this took nine months or so.
By the end of this period Julie was nowhere near fully recovered; physically, she would never be the same. She would never drive again, never walk more than about two hundred yards. One of the great appealing factors about her flat was that it was within easy walking distance of a Catholic church, so she could go ‘under my own steam’, as she always put it, to Saturday evening mass. (Evening was always her preferred time for mass, rather than Sunday morning; I don’t know why. The exception was midnight mass on Christmas Eve, which Mum always avoided on the basis that ‘the smell of Guinness would knock you down’.) The period of inactivity she had undergone in hospital, in addition to the stroke, had permanently slowed her down.
I don’t want to make these months sound easier than they were. Julie’s cognitive powers did not come back immediately. The doctors had said that most of the function she would get back would return within the first two weeks. This proved not to be true. The first two weeks, when the initial bruising from the stroke subsided, gave her about 40 per cent of what she was to get back. The rest of the recovery took a year or more. I suspect, from what I now know about strokes and doctors and the NHS, that the medics knew perfectly well it would be like that, but they gave me the bleak two-week prognosis in order to minimise the amount that was demanded of them. Obviously, if they had told me it would take a year for her to recover fully, I would have asked what they were going to do to help over the course of that year. This way they got to wash their hands of her recovery after a fortnight. The policy at the convalescent hospital, which had no resident doctor, seemed to be to ignore the patients until their relatives could stand it no more and either took them home or began paying for private residential care. The only moment of animation I saw from the medical staff there came when I said that I had found my mother a place in a nearby residential home. ‘We mustn’t miss out on this,’ the visiting doctor in charge said, not to me but to the ward sister who would handle my mother’s transfer; this was the single note of urgency or real concern I heard from any medical staff at any point during my mother’s hospitalisation.
She recovered enough, though, to be able to live on her own. That had been a big worry for me while she was ill. I had a terror that I would have no alternative between seeing her in paid care for the rest of her life, which she would hate, would make me feel guilty about, and which we could barely afford; or having to look after her myself, which I frankly dreaded, not least because of my sense that I had only just begun to live my own life. The fact that she slowly, ever so slowly, got sufficiently better to live on her own was a great relief all round. The Wimbledon flat was in ‘sheltered housing’, i.e. accommodation specifically arranged for older people, with emergency alarms in the rooms if they needed help and a warden who dropped in every day to see if people were OK. My mother decided to resent this at the start, but very soon became firm friends with Maureen the warden. She made one other very close friendship in Cloister House, as the place was called, and enjoyed being on nodding and gossiping terms with the other residents. She was appointed to the residents’ committee – another thing I learned only after her death. I had been particularly nervous about her cooking – whether she would be able to manage without malnourishing herself or burning down the building, or both simultaneously. But she managed fine, or fineish, or fine enough, with only the occasional mishap. It has to be said that the microwave oven, which she had always spurned, came into its own. One day she put on a tin of condensed milk to boil and turn into toffee, then forgot that it was on the stove. It exploded and left an impressive toffee-bomb stain on the cooker and on the ceiling. She made an impression on the workman who came to repair the damage. ‘She’s a nice old lady but she didn’t apologise or anything, the way most people do,’ he said. ‘She seemed sort of … defiant.’ That was Julie. Never apologise, never explain.
I noticed, though – and it helped once I had noticed – that there was a direct correlation in Julie between her anxiety, her level of cognitive functioning (especially her short-term memory), her mood, and her temper. When she was anxious she would also be forgetful and irritable and depressed, and vice versa; conversely, when she was calmer and felt more in control, she would be able to think and remember better, would be much chattier, and was consequently happy. Once I’d spotted that and was able to allow for it, coping with her moments of anger or snappishness became much easier. In general, once she got into her flat on her own, surrounded again by her own belongings – her stuff – she calmed and eased and grew happier. This was the final phase of her life, and unlike the others it was not one marked by a change of name. She was still Julie, Julia, Mrs B. T. J. Lanchester, Mum. But there was a change of character; or rather a kind of easing of character. My mother let many of her worries go. She did not project anxiety in the way that she had; she did not use worry as a controlling mechanism; there was not a constant sense that she was radiating grievance. Instead, a sweetness which had always been present, but which she hadn’t often allowed out to breathe, was increasingly manifest. Julie had her gentle, yielding, trusting side; it was just that she hadn’t often trusted it. Now, more and more, she did.
Some of this had, no doubt, to do with the stroke; but a large part of it was due to the shift in our relationship. We had, as I said, been locked in stasis, an undeclared civil war, the basic gesture of which was her pushing me away for fear that I wanted to run away, and me always edging half-way out of the door, physically and emotionally, for fear of being caught and forced to stay put. I felt that I had left home many, many year
s before, and had no intention of being manoeuvred into moving back. Now, though, there had been a crisis, and I had surprised both my mother and myself by wanting to be there to help her. That was, from my point of view, the great plot twist: I didn’t run away because I didn’t want to run away. I wanted to go and see her in hospital, I wanted her to get better, I wanted her to move to London so that we could be near each other. I won’t pretend that it wasn’t stressful and difficult and painful. I’m not sure I could have done it without being in a stable relationship (in fact, I’m sure I couldn’t), and also without being in therapy, where for all this time I was going mainly in order to let off steam about my mother and all my various griefs and fears and anger for her and about her. (That’s one of the things that happen in therapy which is easiest to describe: you go there to complain, in order not to suffocate the other people in your life with your complaints.) But I did want to do it: and I knew that and she knew that, and it brought an easing between us.
I’ve used the word ‘ease’ more than once, and that is for me the thing that chiefly changed in the last phase of Julie’s life. She was easier, easier on herself and easier to be with. We could sit together and do things together without a sense of being locked in struggle. A big contributing factor to this was that we saw so much more of each other and spoke to each other much more often. I would call her every day, or at least every other day – not that there was usually much to report on either side, but just to check in. (I remember she once said, with a newsreader’s intonation, ‘It’s been a quiet day here at Cloister House’ – somehow her inflection implied the existence of noisier alternatives, OAP rioting or raves.) Once a week Miranda and I would either take her out or have her over to supper, usually the latter, and usually on Saturday night, when I would go over and pick her up after evening mass. One of Julie’s proudest possessions was a mink coat my father had bought for her in Hong Kong. It had originally been floor length, but she had had it altered into a jacket which came to below her hips. With this on and her walking stick, and wearing tinted sunglasses, she would cut quite a figure waiting outside the church. Once when I was on my way over to pick something up from her flat, I saw her on the way to her doctor’s – it was only about two hundred yards away – and had that moment of fresh vision you sometimes have when you unexpectedly see someone you know too well to see at all. She had her mink and stick and shades and looked indomitable, and brave and stylish and dotty and practical-minded and in a world of her own, and I was taken off balance by the surge of pure love that you feel most readily towards your own children.
Family Romance Page 34