Woman Who Thought too Much, The

by Limburg, Joanne

  We usually think of grief only in terms of the death of a loved one, but bereavement reactions also occur in response to the loss of a job, a large quantity of money, an important object such as a home, or even an idealistic concept that one has long pursued. Weeping, anxiety, sadness, anger, irritability, guilt, insomnia, and obsessive thinking about the loss are all common reactions, but if these symptoms do not begin to level off after three to four months, psychiatrists usually diagnose major depressive disorder. In such cases, Prozac or another antidepressant, along with therapy, is indicated. Indeed, it may help earlier.27

  So I decided to give the pills a try.

  And they worked, they really did. For a couple of days, I felt drowsy and nauseous, but these symptoms passed quickly, and after a few weeks had elapsed, I realized that it was becoming easier to get out of bed in the mornings and get on with what could be reasonably expected of me. It hadn’t changed my thoughts, it hadn’t changed the way I felt about myself, my life or my losses, but it had improved my ability to function. I was no longer wading through treacle.

  I say that it hadn’t changed me, but a journal entry I wrote in March, in a flat in Bradford, during my first work placement, suggests otherwise: ‘Prozac making me very Alpha, pushing Tigger forward & suppressing my Eeyore.’

  As the diploma in careers guidance is a vocational course, where students are assessed on their observed behaviour, I have a whole folder of evidence of how I seemed to the people teaching me. The professional development officer at the careers service in Bradford said in her report that I ‘came with a positive attitude and willingness to take part and learn. Negotiated her programme with staff and made full use of the access.’ ‘Generally’, I was ‘willing to get involved, help out, answer phones, etc.’ She noticed no difficulties in my punctuality, dress, attendance or self-presentation, and said that I was able to ‘relate and interact . . . satisfactorily’ with ‘a range of clients’. My ‘approach and manner’ were apparently ‘a refreshing change’. It makes me wonder what the others had been like.

  Other documents from my DipCG Part I file tell a similar story. For a start, my written work – essays and project reports – was completed and handed in on time. I got very good marks for it too, but as I’d always been strong academically, this was not really a surprise. What took me aback at the time was the discovery that I wasn’t, after all, especially lousy with people. My ‘skills work’ was pretty good too. The most important part of the careers adviser’s role is, obviously, the careers interview, for which the overwhelming majority of interviewees are likely to be kids in their mid- to late teens, probably still in compulsory education. The CA is supposed to engage the kid – sorry, Young Person – with the whole process, establish a working relationship with them, assess and if necessary enhance their decision-making skills, find out what they believe they can offer the world of work, find out what they think the world of work might offer them, and enable them to look at ways in which they might employ their decision-making skills to bring themselves and the world of work together in the most satisfactory way. Our practice interviewees came from local schools and colleges; the interviews were videoed if they came to us, and audiotaped if we went out to them. You never knew, beforehand, who you were going to get, or even if they were going to turn up. Some of them talked too much and threatened to run away with the interview; some of them hardly talked at all, and needed lots of encouragement to stop the interview spluttering to a stop; some were utterly charming; others were obviously bored. They all knew that I was only a student. Still, I was the only adult in the room, and I was supposed to be in charge. I couldn’t control them, but, all the same, I was solely responsible for, as they call it, ‘managing the interaction’. I must have managed the interactions reasonably well, because I got good marks on my assessed interviews all the way through, but I was every bit as scared before my last interview as I had been before my first – more scared, even. There were just too many ways to fail.

  I enjoyed the ‘group leading’ more, and discovered a talent for off-the-cuff speaking that I’d never known I had, but the termly group-leading assignments involved teaching the other students, and they were not only adults, but also known quantities. Besides, the group leading always took place in the safety of the university premises, and didn’t entail walking into secondary schools, smelling the adolescent pheromones, serving as an object of transient curiosity to the wary, secretive half-child/half-adult beasts who roamed the corridors, watching the teachers compete in front of you in the staffroom to see who could come across as the most tired and cynical, feeling sick, or wanting to run away.

  I know I could have made it easier for myself: I could have volunteered for fewer unpopular things, or not have thrown myself into class discussion with quite so much gusto; I could have asked for nice cushy placements instead of opting for Bradford in the first term and Birkenhead in the third; I could have stopped chasing the highest marks for everything and allowed myself to cruise a bit – there were no firsts or distinctions up for grabs, only passes – but as far as my inner perfectionist was concerned, any assessed course was a salient area, so cruising was out of the question. On good or reasonable days, I went in and hurled myself at the day’s business; on bad days, I phoned in sick and hid at home. There was little in between. At one point my tutor said to me that she was concerned that I was putting more into the course than I was getting out of it. The medication might have lent me just enough energy to continue overdoing it, but the habit of over-doing it was, and had always been, all mine.

  In the spring holiday, I made my first transatlantic flight, with my mother, to visit my brother in New England. We landed at JFK in the dark. All I could see from my window as the plane banked were lights on water and I remember a few panicked moments when I thought that we were about to plunge straight into Long Island Sound. This I know from reading the notes I made on 28 March. They were all about the flight, what the clouds and ice floes over Greenland and Newfoundland looked like from above, what it had been like to land so close to water. I also recorded a dream, the weird, intensely detailed kind that I have on SSRIs.

  . . . found myself after some events or either [sic], in some place or other – which maybe I was on the run from? – through a gap in a rock onto the strangest shore.

  A rust beach under a dark sky. For far around black cliffs – not easy to see how you get out. The sea was up in dark blue peaks with white flecks, like Sydney Opera House domes, or irons, or shark fins. I realized the waves were still, dead – all was still & dead & motionless here, nothing could grow and there was no time, it just kept looping back on itself – they were made of cardboard or plaster, arranged in painted serrated rows, as in a toy theatre – I pulled at one & a corner came away crumbly, in my hands – like stale . . . ?

  A storm was brewing over the black cliffs up in the brown-orange sky. The odd fork of lightning & thunder. It was dangerous to be there – with the sun/moon so low and heavy in the sky – but I couldn’t remember where to go or how to get there.

  Mum and I went shopping at a local mall, where we bought far too much. The three of us went on a day trip to New York, where we visited MoMA and the Guggenheim, and an elderly lady in a delicatessen on Lexington Avenue exclaimed at my brother’s hair, which his housemate had sprayed to look like a Mondrian painting, and asked what his mother thought of it. ‘Your sister doesn’t have hair like that,’ she said, in case her disapproval wasn’t clear. We returned to the small town where my brother lived, and ate some very good breakfasts; I spent much of my time during the day watching the household’s enormous TV set and discovering that, for the most part, America was as bad for television as it was good for breakfasts. Mum and I moved on to Boston. We went to the Science Museum and shopped for bargains in Filenes’s Basement. Mum took photographs of me walking through the Boston Holocaust Memorial, hair and trench coat flaring out behind me as steam rose up through vents in the flagstones. In our hotel lounge, I intervi
ewed my mother about her career as a social worker so that I could write an occupational profile, another assignment for the course. I read Don Juan and empathized with Byron’s bowel trouble. Wherever we were in the northern hemisphere, we could see Comet Hale-Bopp, setting a burning seal on the strangeness of it all.

  Late in April, my mother called to tell me that Grandad was in the Royal Free Hospital again. He’d had another stroke and couldn’t speak. She told me that if I wanted to visit him, I’d better do it soon. I remember the harrowing look – half sharp, half terrified – coming over his face as I approached his bed, as he took in what an unscheduled visit from me must mean. No offers of tea, no bad jokes, no war stories, none of the pet names he used for me and I loathed – just that penetrating, utterly truthful look. It wasn’t just because he couldn’t speak; once people know they’re dying, and soon, they tend to drop their usual spiel.

  He died a few days later, on the day of the general election. I was still on the register in Edinburgh then, and had already voted by post. Blair’s face was all over the covers of the newspapers for sale at the station. I was a member of the Labour Party, and this was going to be our glorious day. The day after the previous election, in 1992, I had been stuffing envelopes at the offices of a left-wing magazine, and the mood had been dismal. The others commiserated with me when I told them how jubilant my father had been. A few months later my grandfather had talked enthusiastically of the Major government, how they had cut taxes which put, he said, ‘more money in your pocket!’ I had probably said something sanctimonious about how I’d rather the money was back in the Treasury where it belonged. We joked later that the date of his death was no coincidence: he just couldn’t bear the thought of a Labour government.

  That reminds me of my only really vivid memory of that day, which is of my going to answer a knock on the door at my grandparents’ house early that evening. I opened it to a neat young man sporting a shiny blue rosette, who asked if Mr Limburg were there, and if he needed any help to get to the polling booth. I had to tell him that Mr Limburg had died that morning, and as I watched him try to find an appropriate face, I found myself, for the first time, feeling sorry for a Tory. It was the weirdest year.

  I believe that I write better when medicated. It would be fair to say that I choose to continue to take fluoxetine (the generic name for ‘Prozac’) almost as much for performance enhancement purposes as I do for treatment, although my GP, quite properly, prescribes it only for the second reason. While I was working on this chapter, I found a copy of Peter D. Kramer’s book Listening to Prozac in an Oxfam bookshop, and took it home to read. He wrote about certain patients of his, typically women, who were often, like me, awkward, conscientious, ‘uptight’ and highly sensitive to rejection or perceived slights, but who blossomed once they were given this new drug. Like many of them, I found that year, and continue to find, that when I am taking fluoxetine or a similar drug, I am more socially confident, more assertive and less inhibited. I also share the sense many of his patients had that when I am taking the drug my thoughts seem to move faster. Most crucially for my writing, it makes me better able to stop worrying about whether my work will be any good or not, and what people might think of it, and how difficult it will feel to do it, and to just get on and try instead. I once asked my husband, who has known me both with and without any pharmaceutical assistance, whether he thought I seemed ‘better’, happier, when I was on SSRIs, and he replied that he couldn’t say for sure, but one thing he was certain about was that I was happier when my writing was going well, whether I was popping pills or not.

  Of course, it’s impossible to know precisely what can and can’t be attributed to the drugs, but the mess my office is in at the moment attests to how much I got done that year. Every time I start a new chapter, I first retrieve whatever writing I’ve kept from the relevant period: not just the notebooks already mentioned, but all the drafts of all my poems, whether these have been published or just abandoned. In strict chronological terms, this chapter should be relatively short: it only covers a year of my life. But in terms of inches of paper covered that year, it could almost make a book in itself. Between the month of my father’s death and the last month of my year in Nottingham, I completed twenty-five poems, seventeen of which were finished enough to be included in my first book, where they made up about a third of the whole collection. I also have four paper exercise books and one larger hardback book which cover the same period, and include the beginnings of many later poems. And that’s all on top of the coursework I was doing.

  At this point, a Prozac-sceptic would point out – and they’d be right – that what was happening to my family and to me gave me a lot to write about. They might add that it was hardly surprising that, in my grief and confusion, I would turn to writing as a way of containing and expressing these intense feelings, that in making these poems I was seeking to remake my broken world. It makes perfect sense to me that my grief would be the source of the extraordinary drive to write that I had that year: I needed to write my ideas down, I needed to give shape to them, and I needed to finish the poems as best I could in order to get the feeling of resolution that only a completed piece of work can provide. I was already addicted to that feeling. I had bereavement counselling that year, and it helped, but the poems were vital. They were helping me figure out what I could preserve of my father and my family and my old self, and what I could only let go. They were helping me to take stock of my inheritance from him.

  The Return

  Dad,

  I come home

  and find you sitting

  in every room in the house,

  its smell your smell,

  as if it were a jacket

  you’d only just thrown off,

  still warm.

  As the house recalls you,

  so do I,

  resurrecting you

  fifty times a day,

  in the way you clench my teeth

  when something fails to work,

  as we prowl in step together

  round my room,

  hours into the night,

  as you fret me into being ready

  an hour early for every journey.

  As I bite into something undercooked,

  I feel you pull

  that comical, disappointed face.

  You prefer to hide

  in better foods:

  strong cheese, strong coffee,

  anything sweet.

  I find myself eating

  a whole quarter of wine gums

  just to give you

  twenty more minutes

  of borrowed life.

  A first round of chemo had had only limited success for my aunt. By the time I went down to London for the long summer holiday that year, her cancer was back and she was in and out of hospital again. Her mother, my mother, my uncle, and my cousins were spending much of their time travelling back and forth to the hospital. Marian had always hated being alone. My memories of my own visits are very hazy, but I’m sure she was doing her best, when she could, to be as she always had been, trying to extract every detail of everything I had been doing or planned to do. It was a private hospital with pleasant rooms and a nice view; it had less of a fearful smell than NHS hospitals, where the blood and antiseptic is left to hang around in the air undisguised. Yes, she was ill, but they were treating her. They were trying some other drug first but they were keeping Taxol in reserve.

  One day, the phone rang. It was for me, someone called Malcolm. I didn’t know who the hell he was or why he was calling. I was polite but that much was clear from my tone.

  He said he was Sarah’s son. Sarah’s son?

  ‘Your aunt didn’t say anything to you, did she?’ he said, as he realized the awful truth.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Oh . . . well . . . I’m the son of a friend of your aunt, and she thought, and my mother thought, that we might get along, and that I should – er – phone you.’

  Now I unde
rstood. It was excruciating for both of us. He was also interested in writing so we attempted to have a chat about that, for the sake of my aunt, his mother, and the saving of our red faces, but it was clear very soon that the conversation was never going to take off with such a heavy freight of embarrassment, so we said our goodbyes and hung up as soon as it was decently possible. It turned out my aunt and his mother had got their wires crossed: he was not supposed to have phoned until my aunt had spoken to me and prepared the ground. She was mortified. Malcolm and I never met. Never mind, it was sweet of her to have tried. She hated to see other people on their own too.

  Early in July, I went on another one-week residential writing course. It was an advanced course, tutored by Miroslav Holub and George Szirtes, and I had only managed to get a place because someone else had dropped out. It was a tremendous privilege: George was (is) as fine a teacher as he is a poet, and Holub was a truly great man, a writer who had stood up to the communist government in Czechoslovakia and had his poems and essays banned from publication, a long-standing contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature – and possibly for medicine too, for his work as an immunologist. He approached poetry with a scientist’s eye. The directness and clarity of his language, the way he used poems to explore ideas, his characteristic mixture of humour and seriousness had drawn me to his work from my first encounter with it in the school library. It later acted as a powerful influence on my own (a reviewer once described my work as ‘second-hand Miroslav Holub’, which I chose to take as a compliment – thanks). When I said in one of his tutorials that the process of grieving was ‘interesting’, and he commented that the two of us used the word ‘interesting’ in the same way, it was, in context, the most wonderful thing anyone had ever said to me. OCD, by the way, is ‘interesting’ like that.