Woman Who Thought too Much, The

by Limburg, Joanne

  So I sat in and wrote. I sat in with my Walkman, the TV and bags of chips. I attended a beginner’s workshop on Buddhist meditation and spent most of the session trying and failing to sit with my legs crossed the right way. I had a consultation with a Jungian analyst; we agreed that I couldn’t afford her but she got me in touch with a counselling trainee who was willing to see me, for £10 a session, once a week. Her main job at that time was as director of the Scottish branch of an employees’ association, so I would go to see her in her large, pleasant office in their building near the east end of George Street. This was a very different experience from my therapy with the Freudian. The counsellor – let’s call her Linda – was not wedded to any particular set of theoretical constructs, and her therapeutic boundaries were considerably less rigid. We remained friends after I left Edinburgh. Recently, I phoned her after a long gap and told her about this book, and the OCD diagnosis. ‘That figures,’ she said. I asked if it was something she’d diagnosed in me herself, without saying as much to me at the time. She replied that she didn’t think or work in those terms, but she did remember my talking one day about how in my poems, every word had to be the right word, and in the right place, and thinking how obsessive that sounded. I said that I remembered her pointing out how often I used words like ‘should’ and ‘ought’ when I talked about myself. She always tried to encourage me to be kinder.

  My first Scottish winter was, even by local standards, exceptionally tough. The whole country froze. Three Lothian towns with wonderful names – Prestonpans, Cockenzie and Tranent – spent days without power. One morning, I saw a strange rainbow-like ring in the sky as I walked to the bus stop: it was a nacreous cloud, something only seen in the coldest conditions. Another morning – or was it the same morning? – I set off for work with wet hair and arrived at the office sporting a headful of icicles.

  Spring came around, but only in the literal sense. The boss’s deputy left to pursue a writing career and I returned to full-time work as his successor. The rate of pay was no higher than it had been first time round, but I had been getting more overdrawn each month, so I was grateful for the extra work – until a few weeks in, when I had another of my blinding flashes and realized that I couldn’t stand to work in a horrible, pointless job just for the money a minute longer than I had to. I was fed up with Edinburgh altogether: it hadn’t delivered a great new me, it already contained too many people I wanted to avoid, and I was still pining over the Shepherd, who was about to get married – and not to me. I did what I usually did when I felt stuck: I began to collect prospectuses. I was going to train – don’t laugh – as a careers adviser.

  I applied for three courses: two in Nottingham and Edinburgh, which didn’t begin until January and so wouldn’t interview me until late September; another in Huddersfield, which began in autumn but could interview late candidates in early September. The first day of September was a Sunday, and I was busy preparing my presentation for the Huddersfield interview on the fourth. I phoned my mother to tell her how I was getting on. We chatted for a bit and then she passed the phone to my father. We spoke for maybe five or ten minutes, in our usual bantering way. Then he passed the phone back to Mum. We discussed my application for a little longer, then I said goodbye and put the phone down.

  24. Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life (Random House, London, 1991, p. 53)

  25. Judith L. Rapoport, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing (Penguin, New York, 1989, p. 63)

  Grief

  38. When I hear about a disaster, I think it is somehow my fault.

  The Padua Inventory

  ———

  Life is hard

  and so am I

  You’d better give me something

  so I don’t die

  Novocaine for the soul

  before I splutter out.

  ‘Eels’

  The phone rang at 6.30 the next morning, a very bad time for phones to ring. I picked it up; it was my mother, with a shredded voice: ‘I’m sorry, there’s no nice way to tell you this, darling – Dad died last night.’

  That was what she called my grandfather, so I asked, ‘Whose dad?’

  ‘Your dad.’

  Oh.

  Sometime in early adulthood – before or after his national service, I’m not sure – my father spent two years’ worth of evenings lying on the sofa in his parents’ front room, watching television. Before that he had been a keen gymnast, but had injured his shoulder and given it up. He had stopped playing the piano too, although the reams of unplayed Chopin and Liszt we had lying around years later always suggested to me that he must have once been quite good at it, good enough to have persevered. He had wanted to be a research chemist, but his parents had taken him out of the grammar school sixth form where he was failing at A level science, and his Uncle Derek had found him a place as an accountancy trainee. He never bothered studying for the exams, and passed them third time round.

  There are bright people with loving families who succeed in sabotaging their lives, but to do a really thorough job you need to be both sicker and more single-minded about it than my father or his daughter ever were. After a while his sister Marian pulled him off the sofa and back into a social life. They went on holidays abroad; he stood in front of cameras and smiled his handsome smile; he bought a red MG and courted my mother in it; he married my mother, sold the MG and fathered two children, of whom he couldn’t have been more proud. He read a lot of science fiction and ate a lot of sweets. He smoked and then gave up and then started smoking again. He made some bad professional decisions. He was an excellent auditor but no kind of businessman, lousy at self-promotion, and the sort of man clients found it easy to forget to pay. He hated his work, but he had a family to support, and that’s what he did. I realize now what a remarkable achievement that was, and just how much it cost him. He had a family to support, and his growing dead weight.

  If I’ve got my foreshadowing right, this should be less of a shock to you than it was to me. Even leaving aside the fact that he was only sixty-two and I was only twenty-six,26 he could hardly have chosen a more inconvenient time to die, at least from my point of view. I was just about to move again, this time to a room in a flat just off the Meadows where I would be helping a former flatmate to pay his new mortgage, and my boss had gone on holiday that very morning, leaving me in charge for the week. But Jews bury their dead quickly, almost as quickly as Muslims, so there was nothing for it but to throw a few clothes in a bag and head straight for the station. When I got to the ticket office, I found that I couldn’t think ahead any more, so I asked for a single. The man behind the desk, who was only trying to save me money, kept asking me when I planned to return – in a few days? I said I didn’t know. A few weeks? I didn’t know. Within a month? I DIDN’T KNOW! So he sold me a single, I left a message on the answerphone at work and then I got on a train. It was a miserable, sweaty journey. I was wearing a black hoodie over my summer dress and the train was packed. Halfway to London I had to shut myself in the loo for a few minutes and wash under my arms. I don’t think I read at all. Every now and then, I leaked a few tears.

  When I got to King’s Cross, I phoned work again and spoke to a person this time, who told me not to worry. Then my cousins picked me up and drove me home. On the way we set about the work that has to be done after a death, that of weaving back into the family narrative the event which has ruptured it. Somewhere between the Finchley Road/Hendon Way junction and Apex Corner, Lisa said that, the way he smoked, that massive heart attack was always going to happen. At least it had been quick – there were so many worse ways to die. But what a nightmare for my mother, crying on the bedside phone at two in the morning, watching the final stages of arrest while the operator at the ambulance station kept her talking. And so sad for our grandparents. And for his sister too. At least you expect to lose your parents – just not so early on in the journey, and you don’t expect to be quite so far from home when it happens.

 
Of course, the house was full of people: my mother in tears, my grandparents looking as though someone had punched them both in the stomach, my aunt worrying over my grandparents, my mother’s brother and his wife, who were holding their faces together and sorting things out. The rabbi from my parents’ synagogue came and discussed the funeral arrangements. Mum burst into tears and so did I. We were calmed down and then everyone chipped in with stories for the eulogy: what a wonderful sense of humour my father had, what a truly appalling singing voice, what a sweet tooth; how he was first and foremost a family man . . . My clearest memory is of my grandfather, who had spent an exciting and improving war in the Eighth Army, telling the rabbi, with affectionate regret, that my father had been the worst soldier in the world. After he’d collected his stories, the rabbi went, leaving his condolences and a special card which would sit on a shelf during the immediate mourning period, expressing the hope that we might be comforted among the mourners for Zion.

  My brother was in the States, studying for the PhD in chemistry that his father – and, for that matter, his grandfather – might have dreamed of but could never obtain. It was the Labor Day holiday, the chemistry department was closed and his home number was out of order. In the end my uncle phoned the campus police, who banged on his door and told him to call home. So he called home, swore, and was soon on his way.

  That night, when my brother was leaking his own tears somewhere over the Atlantic and everyone else had gone to their own beds to try and get some sleep, my mother and I were alone together in the house for the first time. Around half past eleven, lying in my old room not sleeping, I heard her sobbing in the room next door. I went in, sat down on the half-empty bed and put my hand on her shoulder. And that was the beginning of my adulthood, more or less.

  You don’t have to be Jewish to experience bereavement, but it helps. Every member of a synagogue is also a member of an allied burial society, which takes care of funeral arrangements on the family’s behalf, so they are relieved, at least, of that part of the stress. Besides this, everything about the mourning is prescribed and structured for you. After the burial (cremation being, strictly speaking, a no-no) and funeral, the chief mourners – the spouse, children, siblings and, in some cases, parents of the deceased – will ‘sit shiva’ at home for five days, while their extended family, friends, neighbours, and interested acquaintances who might have read about the death in the Jewish Chronicle and are sorry enough to drop by will come to sit with them, offer condolences, share stories about the lost loved one, feed them, look after them, answer the door, answer the phone, make too many cups of tea and join them in prayer every evening. Traditionally, the chief mourners were expected to rend their garments and sit in ashes; we kept our garments intact but sat in the special, low-slung mourners’ chairs the synagogue provided.

  From then on, the mourning proceeds in graduated stages. For the first month after the death, the immediate family is considered to be in deep mourning, and must not go out in the evenings, or do anything else that might be considered fun or frivolous. Once that first month is up, they are expected to begin to return to normal life, more or less, and a tombstone will be laid and consecrated in the ceremony I’ve always known as a ‘stone-setting’; the stone is usually set somewhere between a month and a year after the death, and once this has happened the mourning period is over and you are supposed to get on with your life. You are not expected to forget the deceased, for whom you will light a slow-burning memorial candle twice a year, once on Yom Kippur, and once on the anniversary of their death, but all the same, you must get on with it. You don’t wear black because God has chosen to take the dead away and you shouldn’t criticize him like that. Younger widows, especially, are encouraged to remarry: when my mother’s father died suddenly in his thirties, everyone tried to dissuade my grandmother from buying the burial plot next door, but she was stubborn, bought the plot, never looked at another man, secretly took herself off to spiritualist meetings, and was eventually buried next to him at the orthodox cemetery in Edmonton.

  Somewhere in Numbers or Leviticus there must be an extra verse especially for London Jews which commands that they shall bury their dead off the M25. The orthodox Jews have another north London cemetery in Bushey; my father’s final resting place was in the joint reform synagogues’ cemetery at Cheshunt. When you arrive, you come first into a small car park, with trees planted tactfully round three of its sides; the fourth is taken up by the chapel, where the mourners gather to pray and hear the eulogy read before accompanying the body out to its burial. It’s only when you walk through the chapel, or round the side, to the burial ground behind, that you get a sense of the enormous scale of the place, with its rows of tombstones marching off to the left, to the right, and in front almost as far as the horizon. They are in numbered rows, mostly upright; the size and shape of tombstones is prescribed, so no Highgate-style flights of fancy here. Some are inscribed in Hebrew only, some in English, most in both. Family members are often grouped together, and here and there you can play Spot the Assimilator – Schneider, Schneider, Schneider . . . Saunders! – as the deceased go down a generation.

  They must have started filling up the cemetery from the back, because my father’s plot is – or was – one of a new row, far out to the left. My defining memory of the funeral is of walking to that plot behind the coffin on its two-wheeled wagon, then glancing over my shoulder as we were halfway there, and seeing how the procession snaked three or four abreast all the way back down the dirt track and round the corner into the chapel. There must have been more than 200 people there: the family, of course, but also friends, neighbours, committee people, colleagues of both my parents. I remember thinking that surely nobody who had so many people to mourn him could have wasted his life completely.

  Then people came back to our house with us, and for the next five days they kept coming. Every day began with a flood of condolence notes through the door and ended with my mother, my brother and I, alone and no longer on show, crying together before bedtime. People told us what a lovely man he had been; such a handsome man, so clever, and so proud of his kids. People told us, again and again, to look after our mother. I went out into the back for some air, saw my late father’s discarded cigarette butts littering the lawn and the flower bed, started trying to clear them away, then gave up and went back in. Another time, my grandparents and my grandmother’s childless brother, Derek, were sitting out on the patio. My brother sat with them, and then came in, grey-faced: ‘I couldn’t stay out there,’ he said. ‘They were talking about changing their wills.’ Later, Uncle Derek found my brother and me upstairs; he put one hand on my shoulder, one on my brother’s, and told us not to try and get over it – you didn’t ever get over it – but you did learn to live with it. Decades before, he had lost his wife, Ivy, to TB, and had never remarried.

  The prayers were led by a different rabbi every evening. One or two had known my father for years; others hadn’t. One of the less familiar ones had a sonorous, Church of England kind of delivery, which sounded rather out of place in a north-west London through-lounge, and he wound my mother up straight away by launching into the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, before my mother, brother and grandfather had a chance to join in (my Hebrew was all but non-existent, so I never even tried). Then the eulogy came flowing out of his mouth and nostrils like a largo through a set of organ pipes. It concluded: ‘And Maurice will be sadly missed, by his parents Dorothy and Alec, his wife Ruth, sister Marian, his son and daughter, and by his son-in-law Brian . . .’ He had just married me off to my uncle. I felt the biggest involuntary giggle of my life surging up from my diaphragm, and tried as hard as I could to choke it down. An old but not very observant friend thought I was sobbing, and put her arm round me, which didn’t help. I was irritated at her, ashamed of myself, and furious with the high church rabbi. It wouldn’t be long before I’d be unwillingly entertained by him again.

  I had been due to take two weeks’ holiday anyway, and a week
’s compassionate leave brought it up to three. After the distant relatives and rabbis had gone, the three of us spent a few days together in Nottinghamshire, where I still had my careers advice interview to go to, and then it was time for my brother to go back to the States, me to go back to Scotland, and my mother to face the house on her own.

  At the end of the month, I started writing in my notebook again. The first entry reads, ‘New and horrible feelings keep nosing in like strange beasts.’ Below it, I’ve written, ‘Like the joke about cutting off your hand to cure a headache.’ I know exactly what I meant by that: I’d spent most of life up till then in a fog of mild-to-moderate mental discomfort, but now it had all been blown sideways by a hurricane of grief. And I discovered, like C.S. Lewis, that grief was very much like fear. The world seemed more than usually full of terrible portents: on the way back from London, we stopped at Doncaster, and for the first time, I found I couldn’t help noticing what a sinister-looking word ‘Doncaster’ was, the bleeding stump of a longer word which someone or something had mutilated and then plastered back onto a sign. I was absurdly relieved when the train moved on. I’d never been scared of a word before – not in waking life, anyway.

  Another note in the exercise book, marked ‘Re – Dad’s death’ says, ‘Suddenly you realize, you/your house are/is open on one side, and the wind’s blowing through.’ Perhaps I was using the flat I was living in as a metaphor here. My friend and new landlord had warned me that the flat would still need a little work after we’d all moved in, but to me it felt as if I had come in to land at a building site: walls were coming down; there were dirty sheets and plaster dust all over the hall and the bathroom; the washing machine drained through a pipe into the bath. My friend was short of money, so he, his father and his brothers were doing the work themselves as and when they could, and it was going to take a while. The heating was by Calor gas only, and I had a very uncomfortable bed. On my first evening back, I declined an offer of a pub quiz, and phoned Linda the counsellor, sobbing. She turned up the next day with a spare futon, which helped – not only because it was more comfortable, but also because in doing so she had provided a bit of mothering when I needed it most. Therapeutic boundaries are all very well, but there are times when you can stuff them up your arse.