All the Time We Thought We Had

by Gordon Darroch

  These staged pictures, carefully arranged to project an aura of family contentment, will probably be the most enduring memories of Magteld, and may be passed down through the family when everyone in them is long gone, but do they show any more than the scrap of a person? Where do we preserve the aspects that never show in photographs: the look of passionate rage in the heat of an argument, or the slight but definitive way Magteld twisted her head, turning up her nose, to signal that her disagreement was final? And what of her voice, the texture of her skin, the warmth of her limbs as we lay in bed, the stork-like cadence of her gait? (I didn’t keep the voicemail messages as you’re supposed to; the only record I have of her voice is the television clip of her talking about cancer treatment.) All the private moments we shared, when the two of us stood apart from the universe: I am their sole custodian now. But when I choose to share them or put them in a book, am I honouring her memory, or constructing a mannequin-Magteld from the snippets of her life?

  ‘We die only once, and for such a long time!’ lamented Molière. But in our fragmented age we no longer disappear when our hearts stop beating. We litter the future with documentary flotsam. Bank accounts, letters, diaries, passports, driving licences, emails, shopping lists, blogs, not to mention the slag heaps of digital images. Facebook pages stay online for months or years after the person dies, their mundane jottings preserved like graffiti on a cathedral pillar. But in the end all these things perish too. Memories fade, and those who remember us die too. Paperwork ends up, sooner or later, being pulped or incinerated. Magteld used to enjoy visiting cemeteries and graveyards, and as we perused the headstones I noticed how few graves were tended for more than fifty years. After another fifty years the names were barely legible. A century is barely a flicker in cosmic terms, but it’s longer than most of us can hope to endure. Even the celebrities of the early twentieth century are mostly bleached from memory now. As Virginia Woolf observed in To the Lighthouse: ‘The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.’ Further ahead, societies will disintegrate, languages become unintelligible and cathedrals fall down. Who now can name the foremost scribes of ancient Egypt or three poets from the Chinese dynasties? Yet all these people had the sense, in their time, of being immortal, just as today’s writers furiously scribble against the tide of mortality.

  In writing this memoir I realised how moth-holed the fabric of her life had become. Without having a diary to consult I would have forgotten how Magteld pulled her hair out in clumps in the bathroom, the sensation of her fingers crawling up my shoulders as I levered her into her wheelchair, or the way she sang raucously along to Janis Joplin in the car (Janis was her trade-off for me making her endure The Smiths). Her intense hatred of whistling, which she called the Devil’s foghorn; the echo of her urging me to stop checking my phone and get out of the door. Now and again she intrudes on my dreams – once I saw her walking up the stairs to Adam’s bedroom, smiling at me – but I can’t summon her, and on waking all I have is a lingering sensation, like the taste of ash on the tongue.

  Molière was wrong. We die countless times and say multiple goodbyes, leaving a trail of pain and fear and grief. Some of us are longer dying than living. It is one of the mercies of the universe that we only endure our own death once.

  There was no heaven for Magteld, or so we presumed. She spoke of the ‘eternal blackness’ and nothing beyond. No hell either. I promised her it wouldn’t hurt, and I meant it. I laid the spare dress in her coffin as a memento, not in any sincere hope that she would regenerate in some magical realm. After the catastrophe that had ravaged her physical form I didn’t want any creator meddling with her again. A supreme being who could permit what happened to her was a monstrous tyrant, not the embodiment of love and justice. If it was a punishment, what on earth had she done to deserve it? Justice must be instructive to the delinquent or it is worthless. If not, was it a reckless design flaw or the bully’s pleasure in inflicting pain on weaker beings? No, she was better off staying dead. But my real rage against God flared in the aftermath of her death: when I needed him to make sense of it all, he couldn’t even be bothered to exist.

  The first-century historian Diodorus Siculus recounted how the ancient Egyptians wrote letters to the dead as a way of retaining them in their lives. These were not sentimental missives but direct appeals to deceased relatives to intervene at the court of the underworld. The Egyptians believed that unkind or restless spirits had the power to disrupt the lives of the living, so the writer would often grovel to the dead person, insisting they had treated them well in life and should be spared any misfortune. Ancestors were called upon to resolve instances of ill health, misfortune or disputes about property. The recipients were not the distant dead but the recently departed, since the Egyptians saw the ghosts of living memory as more influential than those who were long settled in their tombs.

  It seems cruel to the dead, after all they’ve been through, to expect them to perform this kind of mediation service for the living. An afterlife of being plagued by squabbling relatives to sort out a boundary dispute, or decide who should inherit Great-Uncle Albert’s antique wardrobe, sounds like a fate worse than hell. But for those of us that remain, the idea has some merit. ‘Who could sufficiently praise the acquisition of letters?’ asked Siculus. ‘It is by this alone that the dead survive in the memory of the living or that people in places widely separated one from the other communicate, even with those at the greatest distance from them, by means of the written word, just as though they were close by.’

  Magteld and I began our relationship with letters, back when we were separated by the sea, and when she first moved into the hospice we communicated by email. There is a comfort in including Magteld in our lives, sharing her children’s achievements, which offsets the sadness of her absence. Writing to her creates a sense that she is still among us. It’s an illusion, sure, but so is all memory. The Egyptians preserved their dead in bandages and lived among them; in our more materialistic world we furnish our lives with the words and images of those we have lost.

  Darling Magteld,

  More than a year has passed since you left us, and a lot has happened in that time. What would you think of us, I often wonder, if you could visit us for a day? You would marvel at your children, heading off to school on their bikes, packed lunches and homework tucked into their bags. You could fetch Adam at lunchtime; he will break away from his friends and come running towards you, shouting with joy, and you will wonder if it can really be the same boy who was so quiet and withdrawn in the playground in Glasgow. After school you’ll take them off to the park on their scooters and smile as they play in the sunshine, as you did the last time we went out together, when you were in the wheelchair (remember the wheelchair? I can’t wait to tell you how my father ended up in it and watch you rock with laughter when you hear it happened on a boat, remembering how you loved to tease him about his ferry stories). You can have tea with Stephanie, at our old kitchen table, and hear about the progress she has made with the boys. Mostly you will listen appreciatively, filling her in on events of their early years that have escaped my mind, and encouraging her. There will be more laughter, and knowing digressions on the bureaucratic merry-go-round, though I hope you’ll be impressed when you see how nimbly I now cavort through the paperwork.

  Later we will go up to the beach and stroll by the shore, the North Sea rolling at your feet, your hand soft and firm, and I will tell you how much we miss you. I will tell you how the boys speak of you sometimes: how Adam reminded me, as we visited a castle in Sweden, of the castle in Scotland where we stayed a few nights while you were recovering from surgery. It must have been a magical time for him, even though you were sick and tired. Euan is harder to fathom, but sometimes he has sat at the table and said things about you to Stephanie, and at school he told his class how you were ‘very, very sick’ in the hospital. He understands far more than he can express, but you could see that long ago. They have forgotten the pains of
your illness; their memories of you are untainted by the guilt and regret that adults struggle with.

  I will put the boys to bed and you can kiss them goodnight, so they can look up at you with the undiluted love that sons have for their mothers, and drift off to sleep, happy, memories replenished. We will sit with a glass of prosecco, for nothing else would do to celebrate this day. We will hold hands, and I will have so many questions, but mostly I will just gaze into your soft blue eyes, and see your quivering smile, and kiss your warm lips, and hold you close. I will restrict myself to a single enquiry: how can you bear to be dead? How, when there is so much living to be done and your shadow is present in everything we share? And a tear will rise in your eye and you will explain to me that you are in a different place now, where you can no longer be touched by age or pain or grief, and that this visit is not for your benefit, but to absolve us, so we can go on living without you. You will kiss me again, and clutch my hands, and I will tell you how much I still love you.

  We will not finish the bottle. I will carry you off to bed, and slip in beside you under the covers, and hold you in my arms until I fall asleep, and in the morning you will be gone, and in your place will be the indistinct imprint of you that is there when I wake every morning, for all the days I have left.

  Yours for ever,

  Gordon

  Magteld at her sister Marlies’s wedding in June 2010.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks, variously, to Judy Moir, my agent; to Alison Rae, Neville Moir and everyone at Birlinn; to Ailsa Bathgate for her diligent editing; to Kari Brownlie for the book cover; to Jonathan Pinnock for the website; to Dr Sophie Barrett, Alison Winter-Wright and Dr Danny Houtsma; to Lieke, Anne-Marie and all the volunteers at the Jacobshospice; to my parents, Alasdair and Elizabeth; to my in-laws, Luc and Diny; to Sanneke and Sjoerd, Marlies and Peter; to Allan and Linda Burnett, Paul and Fiona Hunter, Arup and Sarah Biswas, Catherine Edmunds, Simon Stuart, Victoria Thompson, Sandra Webster, Phil Miller, Fiona Story, Robert Hutton-Squire, Jacqui Law, Stephen Sharp, Barbara Gibson, Anthea Chan, Murray Buchanan, Hilda Huisman, Gill Hoffs, Guy Fellemans, Liz Small and Claudia Kusian.

  An earlier, much shorter version of this memoir was long-listed for the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize in 2015 under the title ‘Not the Journey We Were Expecting’.

  Special thanks are due to Stephanie Hogewoning and Astrid Lowe, without whose support and generosity at crucial moments this book could never have taken shape.