Woman Who Thought too Much, The

by Limburg, Joanne

  At the time of the course, Miroslav was preoccupied with the story of Sisyphus, and suggested that we all write our own Sisyphus poems. This fitted in well with some notes I’d been making: ‘walking among the shades’; ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’. And I kept thinking of a line from the Eels song ‘Novocaine for the Soul’: ‘Guess who’s living here / With the Great Undead’. So I wrote this poem, about my father and me and our twin dead weights.

  Sisyphus’ Daughter

  A mourner’s work is never done.

  There was no way to compensate my Dad

  for all the small betrayals

  of every day I lived

  when he did not,

  for the indifference of my washing, dressing,

  walking, working, talking,

  as life on the surface ground on and on

  and he was stuck beneath the mud

  without so much as a phone

  to hear what I was up to.

  I couldn’t be remembering him all day –

  I had enough to think about,

  so I resolved to rescue him instead,

  packed sandwiches, a handful of change

  and my karaoke machine,

  and set off for the Underworld,

  imagining that when I sang

  the dead would flutter to my shoulders

  like birds charmed from trees

  and I would bring them home.

  But when I reached the bank,

  I saw my father on the other side,

  washing, dressing, walking,

  working, talking.

  He didn’t seem to hear a note –

  he had enough to think about.

  The afterlife ground on and on.

  The work of the dead is never done.

  Sometime during that week, I went to look round the local church with a few other students. Next to a stone pillar I found a small table, with candles; there was a wooden board with little prayers pinned to it. I wrote one for my aunt – OK, it was the wrong religion, but I figured we needed all the help we could get.

  Later that month, my brother flew home for my father’s stone-setting, and we went to Cheshunt again. My aunt was in terrible pain, and couldn’t go. A few days passed, and Mum, my brother and I decided to go out for a meal in a nice restaurant – the three of us together, why not? The hors d’oeuvres had only just reached the table when my mother’s mobile went. My aunt had a developed a blood clot, and there was nothing they could do. We paid for the hors d’oeuvres and drove straight to the hospital.

  You could hear my aunt’s laboured breathing all the way down the corridor. My uncle showed us into the room. She was lying on her back on the bed, her head to one side, her eyes closed.

  I said something lame like, ‘We’ve come to see you.’ She acknowledged us with a flicker of her eyelids, and a very uncharacteristic remark, then fell back into her painful sleep.

  Back outside, Mum asked my uncle if he wanted my grandmother – my aunt’s mother – called. For the last couple of months, she had held on alone in the house in Cricklewood, surviving on visits from the family, home helps and meals on wheels. He thought it best not to disturb her. We went home, and in the early hours of the morning got another phone call. Mum said that she would drive over to my grandmother’s in a few hours and tell her about her daughter.

  My brother and I went with her. Mum had a key and opened the door, calling out, ‘Mum? It’s us.’

  My grandmother appeared at the top of the stairs and asked, eagerly, ‘What news?’

  Mum told her.

  She took it as a blow to her body, bending double, and letting out a wail so terrible I thought it must crack the sky.

  The prayers were at my uncle’s house, and it was the high church rabbi again. At my grandfather’s funeral, he had alluded to the deaths of my father and great-uncle, and expanded a little on how we were, all of us, caught ‘in the Cycle of Life and Death’. That was all very understandable, but we felt that we could all do with a different approach this time, so my cousins and I went up to him beforehand and asked if, for the sake of our grandmother and their father, he might focus on what a loving and positive person my aunt had been, rather than on all the deaths. He nodded and said he understood.

  When the time came for him to speak, my cousin Lisa was sitting next to our grandmother with her arm round her and I was kneeling on the floor in front of her, holding her hand. The rabbi took a deep breath, and began: ‘It was only last September . . .’ Lisa and I looked each other in the eye, and then at the ground. He’d done it again.

  In the space of ten months, my grandmother – Nanny – had buried her son, her youngest brother, her husband and now her daughter. Still, she held on in her house. She had end-stage lung disease. When I went to visit, I tried to help her with her meals on wheels and she tried to persuade me to eat them for her. For the twenty-seven years that I’d known her, she’d been in and out of her kitchen in one of her nylon check overalls, the pink and white or the brown and white, stuffing food into us while evading it on her own account. Every now and then my grandfather would go into the kitchen to try and help, and she would tell him to go away. She was by definition the subject, not the object, of the transitive verb ‘to feed’. Dependency did not suit her.

  She knew that she did not have much time left, and she wanted very much to die in the house where she’d lived for sixty-odd years. In the event, though, she spent her last two weeks, as her husband had, in the Royal Free. I don’t have the exact date of her death in front of me, but I’m quite sure that it must have been at least two weeks, because I remember her saying how awful it was that the Princess of Wales had been killed, and that she said this from a hospital bed. The televisions were showing, I thought, far too much footage of people weeping by banks of flowers. At the time, I felt almost proprietorial about grief, and resented the weeping Diana-mourners, muscling in on a bereavement that had, I thought, so very little to do with them. I’d lost real relatives, while all they’d lost was the chance to look at more pictures of a tall blonde in Hello! It could have been that they were just taking advantage of one of the few short periods in our history when the populace were encouraged to express sadness and discouraged from telling each other to cheer up. Shame it didn’t last long.

  Nanny’s last few weeks fill the last few pages of one exercise book and overflow into the next. ‘Hard to find veins in her thin arms – how they hurt her – huge bruises on her inside elbows,’ it says on one page, and on the next: ‘Disorientation from lack of oxygen and moves between wards of confused and rattly-breathing people. Thought twice when they moved her at night that she’d been moved into a room with dead people.’ They could hardly have blamed her for being so preoccupied with the end, with her end. On one visit, she leaned over to me conspiratorially and said in a low voice that someone had come to ask her if she would like any help to – ‘you know, pop off’ and that she had said yes to the offer. It turned out that a psychology student had been going round the medical wards researching elderly people’s attitudes to euthanasia. He was horrified, and went straight to her bed to explain the misunderstanding. I think she was disappointed.

  Matriarch to the very end, she tried to sort us out. She tried to get my mother to post £50 to her brother Louis, because she thought he needed something. She told Lisa, the eldest of her grandchildren, that she would be in charge now and that her advice to us all was: ‘Don’t worry about money – money comes and goes. Always stick together and enjoy yourselves.’

  Her last words to me, hacked out painfully through the plastic muzzle of her nebulizer, were, ‘I don’t know why you worry, dear – a lot of men go for short women.’

  I was with her when she died, and it was a privilege.

  26. At the time I couldn’t help wondering if this mirroring of the digits in our respective ages had some sinister hidden significance.

  27. Ronald R. Fieve, PROZAC: A Complete Guide to Today’s Most Controversial ‘Miracle Cur
e’ (HarperCollins, London, 1995)

  Avoidance

  31. I invent doubts and problems about most of the things I do.

  The Padua Inventory

  ———

  When it gets bad, the patients hide.

  Judith L. Rapoport

  When people ask me how I am, I usually do the correct thing and say, ‘Fine, thanks.’ I’m never sure if I mean it though. Right now, it is about half past eleven on an overcast August morning, I am sitting at my desk writing, and I might, for all I know, be ill. One thing I do know is that I’m terribly anxious. My skin is clammy. My chest feels corseted on the inside. My legs are tightly crossed and my bottom is on the edge of my seat. A tiny cloud of a headache is beginning to gather behind my left eye. Most of all, though, I can feel it in the pit of my stomach; if depression is a bag of wet sand in the chest, then anxiety, as befits its more primitive nature, lives further down, in the viscera. It isn’t a feeling of weight, like the depression, though it has its weighty aspects; it isn’t just a sinking feeling, either, or a knotted feeling, or a butterfly feeling – it’s all three of them, and more than the sum of them. It’s the mother of bad feelings: I think of it as the Unbearable Feeling. I would crawl out of my skin to escape it.

  There’s nothing more natural, or easier to understand, than the desire to avoid pain. It helps us to prevent harm to ourselves, and, when empathy widens its scope, to others. If, for example, you happen to touch the handle of a hot metal saucepan, then you’ll pull your hand away before you’ve even thought about it. If you anticipate that when you touch the saucepan you will feel pain, then you avoid touching it in the first place. Even if you’ve never seen a saucepan full of boiling water in your life before – let alone touched one – then an inference from your general experience of hot things, or something your mother told you about hot saucepans, or the memory of reading an article or watching a documentary in which hot saucepans featured, will lead you to anticipate that pain, and you won’t touch the saucepan. And this whole process will take only a fraction of a second: SAUCEPAN – HOT – OUCH! will flicker up in your head somewhere, accompanied probably by a just-perceptible flash of anxiety. You’ll pull your hand away, and by the time another fraction of a second has elapsed, you’ll be finishing the sentence you were uttering, or deciding to switch on the radio or heading for the fridge. SAUCEPAN – HOT – OUCH! will then turn itself off, and won’t make another appearance until the next time you need it, when, again, it will appear for a sliver of a moment and immediately vanish.

  Unfortunately, for some people, SAUCEPAN – HOT – OUCH! won’t turn itself off when it’s ceased to be useful; it may even get in the habit of switching itself on out of its proper context. In these cases, SAUCEPAN – HOT – OUCH! has become an obsessive thought. Every time it intrudes, it will bring with it a flash of anxiety. Anxiety is uncomfortable. It needs to be: it’s there to signal danger and to prompt us to take evasive action. Every time that thought appears, the hot saucepan obsessive will do what the anxiety prompts her to do, which is to take whatever action she can to make it go away: she might engage in compulsive behaviour, making frequent trips to the kitchen to check that she hasn’t left any water boiling in it; just to make sure, she might unplug the kettle and put all the saucepans in the cupboard; then five minutes later she will return to the kitchen to check that the saucepans are indeed safely in the cupboard, and the kettle unplugged. This may reassure her briefly, but five minutes later she will get the overwhelming urge to check again.

  Alternatively, she might try to neutralize the anxiety by ruminating about hot saucepans and kettles (it has spread to kettles now), working through every possible convection-heated kitchen-receptacle accident scenario that might have happened in the past or could be happening in the present or that might conceivably happen in the future, and looking for ways of convincing herself that every single one of them has been, is being and will be prevented.

  Then again, she could decide to avoid going into kitchens altogether, thus eliminating all possibility of her being responsible for any overheated metal vessel at any time, which will reduce the anxiety she feels to bearable levels. Avoidance is a popular strategy, not only for obsessive-compulsive patients, but also for those suffering from social anxiety disorder (I won’t go to the party because I’ll make an idiot of myself and then I’ll feel terrible), panic disorder (I won’t go the party because I’ll have to travel on the underground, and the last four times I did that I got that feeling that I couldn’t breathe and I was going to die, and nothing could be worse than that), body dysmorphic disorder (I won’t go to the party because if I do then all the people there will look at me and all they’ll see is my ugly nose, and knowing that all the people are thinking and talking and laughing about my ugly nose will make me feel so sad and worthless that I’ll want to die), and a whole range of other conditions. They all convince themselves that they don’t want to go to the party, that the party or the journey to it is the thing to be feared, but really, deep down, they would love to go. What they are ultimately afraid of are their own unpleasant feelings. Their Unbearable Feelings.

  I’ve always been very good at avoidance. When I was in junior school, I avoided going into the dining room most days, and on some days I could persuade myself that I felt ill, and avoid the school altogether. As an adolescent, I increased my repertoire considerably, avoiding, among other things, Bunsen burners, Van de Graaf generators, the active centres of lacrosse games, the deep end of the swimming pool and, as time went on, the mirror. Then I started picking and began to avoid showing my arms or shoulders. Then I got picked on by ten-year-old boys and started to avoid a certain street corner. All the while I was avoiding dressing in any way that might make me look sexually available. By the time I got to university, I had also got into the habit of avoiding work until the last minute, so as to stop myself experiencing the unpleasant tension I feel when I’m in the middle of a piece of work and I don’t know if I’m going to make a good job of it or not. I avoided the college dining room and, for one term, the whole college. After I graduated, I avoided leaving home and going out. I think I rose to the status of a Master Avoider at this stage, managing to avoid the very process of maturation for three whole years by sitting in an analyst’s consulting room and discussing it instead. At the end of the three years I avoided going into full analysis, which had been the ostensible purpose of the discussion. I moved to Edinburgh to try to stop avoiding in my own way and, for a while, it looked as if I had succeeded pretty well. Then I had a few discouraging experiences. I went back to staying in. Then my father died, I left Edinburgh and tried to try again, to train for a proper professional job, a responsible job, acting not thinking, out there in the Real World. But then, when the time came to take up the job, I avoided it.

  5/10/97

  Dream last night – my hair turned white – every comb stroke pulled down a new streak till no brown was left.

  A year of hospitals, cemeteries and lawyers’ offices had left the whole family punch-drunk. It was surely no coincidence that, about this time, three out of four of the newly ex-grandchildren were suffering from physical illnesses that needed hospital treatment, while the fourth dreamed that she combed her hair white. I was back in Nottingham where, following the usual protocol for the treatment of reactive depression, my doctor and I began to reduce my Prozac doses, preparatory to taking me off the drug. In my notebook, I mentioned ‘the flat feeling, the game-playing feeling’ and then ‘the stage-set feeling. Rusty bolts and peeling paint,’ and, then, a few pages later, I add that, ‘Life tastes thin and flat at the moment, like gruel.’ I couldn’t bring myself to care what career step sixteen-year-olds took next. They were all going to die anyway, some of them of accountancy. My anxiety over my interviews was as hard to bear as it had always been, and I could no longer see any point in trying to master it. So I would avoid it instead, and the money I was inheriting from my dead relatives would help me make a clean escape.

&nb
sp; I finished the taught part of the course, though, so that I could gain my half-qualification. The last term was difficult, and I was difficult through it: the snot-monster returned, throwing herself about the classroom, and trying the patience of the other students. My second work placement, in Birkenhead, ended prematurely when I caught a stomach bug off the friend I was staying with, and couldn’t bring myself to go back to the office when I recovered. I couldn’t face any of it: the dark streets, the sad-looking shop windows hung with cheap clothes, the confused, drugged-up boys who occasionally wandered into reception, the fifteen-year-old girls arriving at drop-in sessions, ‘because I’m going to have a baby and me mum told me to come and see what benefits I was entitled to’. The staff meanwhile were bright, determined and cheerful. They were up to the challenge: they were strong, they were useful, they were practical, they had resources to give to the world. I obviously didn’t; I was a person who cried in toilets.

  My superego had changed personae. The great-aunt had gone along with the rest of her generation, and had been replaced by a contemporary of mine, a young urban professional I called The Person at the Party. She had been to university at the same time as me, but she hadn’t been messing about since. She had gone straight into law school, or postgraduate medical school, or the civil service ‘fast-track’ programme, or perhaps into an accountancy firm, as a graduate trainee. She earned enough money to share a flat in a decent area, perhaps even with her boyfriend. Perhaps, along with the right clothes, the right shoes and the perfectly applied make-up, she was sporting a tasteful little engagement ring presented to her by this same boyfriend. Perhaps he was standing next to her as we talked, and, as we talked, the two of them would exchange the odd glance. In their shared vocabulary were killing words, like ‘waster’ and ‘loser’ and ‘sad’.