Solitude can be nourishing, but loneliness is a corrosive and negative force, a death of the soul that can precipitate the physical demise. When Magteld cried at night in those last weeks for me to come to bed, she was reacting to the pain of eternal loneliness. The difference between loneliness and solitude is intimacy: Solitude – in the form of a long walk, an afternoon spent reading or an hour on the beach with the phone switched off – can be an intimate experience, but loneliness is always alienating.
When Magteld was dying I occasionally wondered if widowhood could be somehow liberating, but after she died this desire receded. The responsibility of looking after the boys knocked any putative romantic adventures on the head. Dating still seems riddled with pitfalls: We’d better go back to your place, mine’s full of pictures of a dead woman. I didn’t want to sit across a dinner table in my best shirt and have to account for the ring on my third finger.
I discovered I slept better when I lay a cushion on her side of the bed to fill the weightless space. At the root of it all was the awkward truth that I was still in love with my dead wife. I read a stack of advice on how to make space for someone new, but I didn’t want someone new. I wanted the person I had before, unconditionally, because even the days that ended in screaming rows were better than coming downstairs once the boys were in bed to an empty room. After a row you can nestle on the sofa and console each other with a glass of wine, but my rage now was directed at the universe, and the universe doesn’t do nestling or consolation. Or wine.
After Magteld died a friend remarked that I had been lucky to experience true love at least once in my life. That was both a comforting thought and a troubling one. Magteld and I didn’t have an idyllic marriage, but we enjoyed spells of true intimacy. Intimacy, really, is the capacity to share the awkward side of ourselves, the parts we keep out of the social media realm. It is the ability to tell someone we love them, without obligation or shame. Magteld and I said it a lot in the last months. In the hospice, every time I pushed her into the lift and the door closed behind us. In bed together, after I had arranged her pillows and helped administer her medicine before collapsing, exhausted, by her side. At the dinner table, when she looked up from her iPad, drifting in and out of deep thought, and gave me a fragile smile. At the same time, I worried that her impending demise had pressed us into a false, exaggerated pastiche of intimacy. Perhaps what brought us closer in those days was not love, but pity, regret and the loss of hope. Were we coerced by the sense of the lights going out and the vortex closing, or did we really mean it this time, and, if so, why had we been so neglectful, when opportunities were abundant, to look into each other’s eyes and say, without constraint or inhibition, ‘I love you’?
Dr Houtsma had offered me a post-mortem appointment to discuss the results of the autopsy. I agreed without knowing what I hoped to learn. At the same time he had told us that her organs were unsuitable for donation because the cancer had spread too far. Six weeks later Sanneke and I sat down in his small consultation room. Dr Houtsma was as earnest and polite as ever, but his face was more sombre, and I understood that his enthusiasm had been a necessary charade. By the time Magteld arrived in the Netherlands there was little real hope that she would live much longer. He had drawn up a chemotherapy programme knowing she had a scant chance of surviving more than a few cycles. Dr Barrett’s warning that she might only manage a few weeks had, for all the optimism and energy displayed, been borne out.
In the last months the cancer had erupted through Magteld’s body. Dr Houtsma listed all the places where it had infiltrated: her lungs, liver, lymph nodes and through her skeletal system. The best efforts of medical science had been powerless in the face of a senseless, prolific assassin. It was a heartless story with no redeeming ending. Magteld had been smothered, and finally choked, by her own body. She had been right to distrust it after all.
Sanneke and I sat in the café downstairs afterwards, stunned, as if we had just listened to an eyewitness account of a massacre. We sipped coffee, wept, embraced and went home. We had our answers but no resolutions.
I had promised to gather together the friends she had made in Glasgow for a final send-off. Magteld knew she would die while most of her recent memories, and the people she shared them with, were in the country she had left behind.
When I touched down it felt like a homecoming, even though I was a native of another city and my native Glaswegian children were in The Hague with their Dutch grandparents. Glasgow was in one of its raucous, self-confident moods, fresh from the three-week jamboree of the Commonwealth Games. A month later Scotland would vote on whether or not to become an independent nation. The air was laced with apprehension. In a huge marquee in George Square the city’s denizens were gorging themselves on official merchandise at knockdown prices. What Glasgow was most proud of was that it had staged a better Commonwealth Games than Edinburgh, which had been bailed out by Robert Maxwell in 1986, yet I remembered those games with affection, having followed them as a bedridden eleven-year-old recovering from measles, the glistening rain on the television my only source of light in the world. Ours was probably one of the few households in East Anglia that roared on Liz Lynch as she splashed through the puddles of Meadowbank Stadium to claim Scotland’s only track gold medal.
The guests who assembled at Langside Hall were a collage of the thirteen years Magteld and I had spent in Glasgow. They had met her at parties in friends’ flats, or in the pub, or seen her dance at weddings. She would introduce herself with her given name, always adding, ‘but you can just call me Mags’. The gathering reverberated with the name Mags, which stood for the woman Magteld had become in Scotland. Her qualities were still developing in the last weeks of her life; in that sense she was right to say she was getting stronger every day, even as her body weakened. That was her charm, and her tragedy.
Friends and neighbours mingled with former colleagues, carers and school mums, people we chatted to almost every day and others we had not seen for years. One end of a trestle table was colonised by a group of journalists who sat gossiping at high velocity about the referendum. Another table was a microcosm of our old neighbourhood. They mixed with Magteld’s fellow carers, who had formed a blood bond from slogging through meetings with experts and officials. In another corner was my family, clustered around Dad, who had recovered enough from his injuries to support himself on crutches and a walking boot. On a small table the slideshow of photos from Magteld’s funeral cycled silently on a laptop, giving her a visible presence at her own commemoration. I thought of Luc’s description at the funeral of the little girl who stayed away from her own birthday parties, and tried to place her in the scene.
We shared stories that portrayed her as gracious and headstrong, articulate and dedicated, warm and modest and selfless, as a warrior mother who fought tenaciously for her children, a friend, campaigner and advocate. It was hard to know if she would recognise this exalted version of herself or be flattered by it, since it was anchored in our collective sense of loss and regret. In that sense it was a frozen image of Magteld, as detached from reality as the photographs stamped with her cultivated smile. It missed the essence of her, the vulnerability and the anxieties that her battles with officialdom were steeped in. Just as statues of famous warriors are always raised on pedestals, out of reach of the frothing melee, their stern faces set against the sky and their gaze fixed on a place beyond mortal understanding, so we conjured a phantom Magteld from the snippets of her life. Hardly any of those gathered had seen her in a wheelchair or a hospital gown; they remembered her dashing out of the back door to peg up the washing; or walking up the hill to Adam’s school in a headscarf, defying the shackles of chemotherapy; or striding into a room at the start of a meeting, a folder in her hand and a disarming look on her face. In a city of statues, this was the Magteld-monument that was hewn in our minds. Would she have recognised it as herself?
Gradually the impact of the twenty-sixth day lessened, like ripples on a pond spreading o
utwards. The children went back to school, restoring the rhythm that had slackened during the blissful lethargy of summer. Work slowly began to accumulate – I secured my first contract while camping in Zeeland. My Dutch graduated from a faltering command of the language to a more confident proficiency, though my accent would always mark me as foreign, as Magteld’s had in Scotland.
It took me a long time to accept that grief can’t be rushed. It is a process of adjustment and realignment as the shockwaves subside. It is, fundamentally, a healing process. Magteld and I grieved when our children were first diagnosed with autism. Only once we had dealt with that grief could we learn to love the children for who they were. The insatiability of mass consumerism and the tyranny of efficiency often denies us the space to let things run their course. Everything must have a goal, a purpose and a deadline. By these criteria, grief is a redundant emotion. But this misses its essence, which is that it cannot be reduced to a bullet-point list. My first instinct, to think that we could simply carry on as before with a few minor changes, had been wrong; my second, to push the grief and the awkward emotions out to the margins of my life, was equally misguided. I was in the land of grief, for better or worse. I needed to keep my mind in hell and find my bearings.
During the October school holiday we visited my parents in Norfolk, for the first time since emigrating. In the days beforehand the boys were anxious, but it was a defining moment in their self-orientation. On their return they were able for the first time to anchor themselves in the Netherlands. The Hague was home, while England and Scotland were places across the sea where they still felt connected, but as visitors. ‘We’re Dutch boys,’ Adam said, ‘because we were young when we came here.’
A week or so later, Adam’s teacher told me he’d started speaking Dutch in the classroom. Until then I had worried the gap between his two languages would be too great. He understood what people were saying to him but was too self-conscious to taste the words in his own mouth. Suddenly he was producing not just words but sentences, and joining in conversations. At that moment I realised Adam had made the switch in his mind to living in the Netherlands. Until then his present and his future had lacked definition. Now the obstacles started to fall away. In November he asked to have lunch at school, an idea he had fiercely resisted up till then. After Christmas he wanted to ride to school on his bike. So far he had insisted on keeping the stabilisers on, as he was terrified of falling off. So I told him, ‘If you want to ride your bike to school you’ll have to do it without the stabilisers.’
Adam looked up, uncertain. Usually at this point he’d scrunch up his face in protest. But not this time. I took him out on Sunday for a trial ride up and down our street, and with Stephanie’s help he was riding to school by the end of the week. I watched him pedal up the wide pavement, under the skeletal trees, his wheels flashing in the winter sunlight, and reflected, with a pang of sadness, on how dearly Magteld would have wanted to share this moment.
Acute pain yields to a dull ache, then to a bruise, and finally a scar. So it is with the loss of love. By the time we came back from our trip to Norfolk I thought I could feel the bruises healing. As I sat with Adam at supper one night the conversation turned to a museum we’d visited together.
‘We went there with Mum?’ he said.
‘Yes, don’t you remember?’
He looked down at his plate for a second, pondering. Then he said, ‘She was a nice lady.’
The words landed like a scorching meteorite. I burst into tears. Adam looked at me and groaned, then muttered, ‘Bloody hell.’ Until then I could only assume that he and Euan missed their mother, or thought of her now and again, so it was partly relief. But they still couldn’t cope with my grief. Weeks earlier I’d returned from the shops one evening, exhausted, and sunk to the floor in tears, and the boys responded by pulling shut the double doors that separate the living room from the dining room. At first I condemned their selfishness, but later I realised my despair was overwhelming for them.
These occasional glimpses into my children’s inner worlds were consoling and painful, like a blast of sunlight through a barred window. My motives weren’t entirely selfless, because in trying to soothe my children I was also trying to displace my own grief. I had to accept that they couldn’t save me from loneliness. The boys were coming to terms with their own loss, but in ways that were obscured from me. Self-reliance is an overlooked quality of autistic people. I had been waiting for Euan and Adam to share their grief with me, but this presumed that they wanted, or needed, to articulate their emotions as I did. I tried to show them that sorrow was not something to be kept hidden, or a source of shame. I wanted them to know they could talk about their mother when they were ready, without having a clue when that might be.
Time seemed warped in that endless first summer in The Hague. On 1 November, with the thermometer registering an outlandish twenty degrees, the boys and I ate fish and chips on Scheveningen promenade. We sat in our T-shirts and shorts as people strolled by in the freakish sunshine. I yearned for winter to come and blow out this stagnant, procrastinating season, so we could move beyond the doldrums of our grief. It was five months since Magteld had died, six since we arrived in the Netherlands, and yet the light had the same quality as when I watched her being loaded into the ambulance on that frightful May morning.
Exactly two years earlier, as Magteld was halfway through her chemo cycle – bald, weary and housebound by rain and her fear of infection – I had received an unexpected email. A Belgian filmmaker had found a short story I posted online a few years earlier on a Scottish website, Shortbread Stories. I felt mildly thrilled when the site made an audio recording of it, thinking that was as far as it would go, but now someone was proposing turning it into a short film. The story was called ‘Do Not Read This Story’ and was a metanarrative about a writer being confronted by two anonymous agents of the state. The title of the film was Kijk Hier Niet Naar (Do Not Watch This).
It was especially enticing, for Magteld and me, that the film would be made in Dutch. I wrote back and gave Guy Fellemans my consent to go ahead. Over the next few months I kept in touch, signed a contract and mainly waited. The progress of the film was something to look forward to, a counter-narrative to the course of Magteld’s treatment.
Magteld had read the story before submission and told me to change the ending, so she had a hand in its success. She was determined to live long enough to see the film. Just before Christmas in the year before we moved, Guy sent pictures from the set where the film had been shot over three days in Antwerp. It showed a monochrome series of pictures taken at close range in a cramped, soulless flat, which exactly fitted the atmosphere of the story. Magteld and I were both thrilled.
But film-making is a turgid process, and Guy was still working on the final cuts when she died. The premiere would be at a film festival in Leuven, in the first week of December. The three years Guy had spent preparing and refining fifteen minutes of cinereel was longer than it had taken cancer to consume Magteld.
I took a high-speed train down to Antwerp, paused to admire its gleaming, intricate station and carried on to Leuven. Most of the city was built of inoffensive modern concrete, with a few filigree old buildings hidden away in a well-preserved old quarter. The festival was held in a former warehouse converted into an arts venue, with a basement cinema and a capacious upstairs bar. The film captured the claustrophobic, paranoid tone of my story with close-up shots, almost monochrome lighting and rigid expressions on the actors’ faces. I had been intrigued by a promotional shot Guy had sent me of the three actors lying side by side on a bed, which had no obvious parallel in the original text, but it turned out to be a creative solution to one of the many puzzles in the narrative. Afterwards Guy introduced me to the actors and some of the crew who worked on the production, and their partners, in the bar. I wished Magteld could have been with us. The trip was the last item on her list of unfulfilled ambitions and would never have happened without her support and guidan
ce. Those memories brought warmth and sadness – that now familiar cocktail of emotions.
A few days later I had a message from someone I met that night telling me in detail about a personal, painful setback. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Since Magteld died I’ve told the story of her illness and demise countless times. Routine enquiries from strangers at parties confront me with an awkward choice about how far I should go when people ask about my family, or how I came to live in the Netherlands, or where I learned my Dutch. I try to skim over the more painful aspects, but some basic version of the truth is unavoidable. Frequently people respond with their own candid stories of grief: tales of terminal illness, the burden and pain of caring, or sometimes just shocking bad luck. These stories are dispatches from the land of grief, shared in a spirit of solidarity. It is comforting to know it isn’t a barren place. I have joined a clandestine society whose members seek solace together, because we alone understand the suffering that sets us apart.
Winter rolled in at last. We made the morning journey to school in twilight and thick coats, and in the afternoon, after a short trip to the park, we huddled over steaming mugs of hot chocolate at the table, watching rain flicker against the streetlights. Towards the end of the month a letter arrived from the crematorium. The time had come to decide how to dispose of Magteld’s ashes. I had a list of options, from burying her in a casket to scattering them at sea. This last choice seemed fitting, partly because our memories of her were already drifting towards the horizon, but mainly because her life had seesawed between both sides of the cold, inscrutable North Sea.
All the Time We Thought We Had Page 19