by Poorna Bell
We are in a fight.
It’s the kind of fight that makes no sense, but I don’t think I’m just fighting Rob. I think that bitch depression and that bastard addiction have wrapped their tentacles around him again and are doing the talking.
His messages are short, abrupt. They sound like they have been written by a robot. They make no sense, they are rude, they are not written in the language of our relationship at all.
One of the messages that was not rude informs me that I will soon be receiving a handwritten letter. A huge letter that details all the things he has already spoken about. Great awareness of how he has let me down, but grand promises of what he can and will do to get our marriage back.
I do not know this at the time, but he is pinning everything on this letter. He thinks this letter will be the thing that changes my mind, that will make me see the light and be won over by big love.
It is the hope of a teenager – that love will save the day and a letter can change the world.
But if I, a person who has broken up with the love of my life, who has done so despite being in love with him, fought like a she-bear for this marriage, if I have given up, the reasons for me doing so must be colossal. It is going to take more than a letter.
I no longer live in a world where love can save the day. I have learned the most painful lesson of all: that a person cannot save you from your sadness, and you cannot save them from theirs.
I wake to messages from Rob, asking me if I’ve received the letter. I say yes, and that it was a beautiful letter, but it won’t change my mind.
He sends me a message saying that he can’t do this any more. It’s an odd message, and I ask him where he is. I call him, he doesn’t answer.
‘ROB ARE YOU SAFE?’ I text.
I am so mad. He just drops a message like that and then doesn’t answer. So I yell at him, I tell him how mad I am, that I don’t want to speak to him if he’s going to be like this, that I’m sick of worrying.
He doesn’t answer.
I go for a run, the anger steaming off me in the morning air. I am getting angrier and angrier by the second. I come back, and text him again. This time he replies that he can’t do it. He says he’s an addict, bankrupt, mentally ill, has lost his family, will never see his niece grow up, it is too much.
It finally dawns on me what he is doing. I beg. I tell him I love him. I ask him to pick up the phone.
He tells me it is not my fault, but I don’t get to talk to him on the phone because I ended our marriage in a letter. ‘Please let me say goodbye to my parents in peace.’ It’s him but it doesn’t sound like him.
‘Rob, please, honey, please,’ I plead. ‘You promised me.’
After he told me about the suicide attempt with the car eighteen months before, I made him promise. I sat him down, held his hands, looked him in the eye and made him swear he would never, ever do that again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he replies by text, ‘but I made that promise for us. There is no us.’
I know where he is trying to get to, and I am clawing at him but his body is turning to sand and an ill wind is blowing him through the cracks of a door, to a place I can’t get to. I can’t hold on, I can’t hold on, he is slipping through my fingers.
His last message to me is: ‘Look I’m sorry.’ But I don’t actually believe it. Not that he isn’t sorry, but that he is going to go through with it.
During the course of the day, there is a panic, an itch beneath my skin. I get worried phone calls from Prue, Wesley, Monique.
But I’m sure, I’m so sure he’s going to turn up sheepish and hungover. We are all glued to our phones; we are all watching the time-stamp on WhatsApp.
Last seen today 10.30am.
A full twelve hours later, we still haven’t heard from him. The time-stamp hasn’t changed. It’s now morning in New Zealand, night-time in England. The police have been called, they are looking for him. A helicopter is combing the area they traced his last mobile phone signal to.
I do something I haven’t done for three years. I get on my knees and I pray in front of the gods. I offer them everything. I offer my soul. I offer my heart. I offer my life for his.
At 1am, I get a phone call. It’s Prue and she’s crying. ‘They’ve found him,’ she says. ‘They’ve found him. He’s dead, Poorna. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’
My breath grows shallow, my throat constricts. I feel thunder crack across the world.
‘Are you sure it isn’t a mistake? Someone else?’ I ask because anything, anything but this.
‘No,’ she replies in the softest whisper.
‘Oh my God. Oh my God,’ I cry.
But there is no God. I might as well be saying the word cheese.
People will say afterwards, ‘He’s with God now,’ ‘God take care of you, my child.’ I know exactly where God was not on that night – he was not by my husband’s side. During his moments of recovery, Rob had gone to his temple for salvation, had visited his churches with his soul in his hands asking for help and was unheard. He had forsaken Rob.
God can sit and swivel.
I tell Prue I’m coming on the next flight. I tell her I love her. I tell David I love him. I tell them to hold on. Then it hits.
I run to my parents’ room and I’m wailing; it’s primal, so jagged with pain that comes from the deepest grief that my soulmate, my love, my best friend is gone forever.
My sister is downstairs, visiting for the weekend with Leela, then still quite tiny and asleep. She hears the noise and comes upstairs. They all hold me, wrap their arms in a tangle like I’m a small rubber band about to fall away.
Priya takes me downstairs and sits with me on the sofa, our knees pulled up to our chest. It’s like we’re kids again but this time we’re not covertly watching A Nightmare on Elm Street or Stephen King’s It, this a real-life fucking horror show.
What tethers a person to their life?
Is it family? Love? All the books they ever read? A sense of worth? It can be all and some of those things, but the one thing that keeps us all here is the presence of hope. That as bad as things are, they will get better at some point. It is also the one thing that is absent in those who have taken their own lives.
Although there is no way of knowing a person’s thought process in those final moments, a lot of men reach the point of no return because they aren’t taught about emotional intelligence. Mr B said that they aren’t encouraged to have social and psychological insight because it is seen as weakness.
But you can’t save someone from themselves. And Rob could have had all the therapy, all the pills in the world, but unless he was able to unravel what his values were and why he had them, why he resorted to destroying himself when he felt he wasn’t living up to the manly man ideal, he had no hope of ever finding a new path for himself.
Maybe Rob found it hard to seek help in a society that had muddled views about what depression is. But the key to making sense of why he sought oblivion was understanding how he saw himself in the world.
Mr B explained the thinking of Ken Wilber – the American writer who created the ‘Integral Theory’, a grid aimed at synthesising all human knowledge and experience as a way to explain how the individual is shaped as a person and how they see themselves in the world. Although I found Wilber’s writing hard to digest, Mr B explained that a person is made up of the internal and external world.
‘[Wilber] talks about the “I”, the “We”, the “It” and the “Its”.
‘The internal world is what’s going on inside you and we know 80 per cent of how we act generally is subconscious. So, the way we interact, we’re really only aware of 20 per cent of it. It is very important that we understand the “I” – what am I, how do I improve myself, how do I get more insight into myself internally? The “I” is when you were born, your colour, class and religion. Then there’s the “We” – people we interact with, either closely or not so closely, lovers, friends, family and so on.
‘
Next, there’s the external world. The “It” – so, what school you go to, the place you work. And the “Its” – the cultural context within which all this happens: so, “Rob was a white, middle-class male born in New Zealand to a Catholic family.” Just giving people that information, they think they have a pretty good idea as to what that means. But really, do they?
‘I interact with people from similar backgrounds – class, colour, creed, religion – but I do all that within the context of a predominantly white society. So the social and cultural context for me is: I will be well educated, therefore I will be successful; I’ll have a family; I’ll be an upstanding citizen, and what’s expected of me is to be economically productive. So, if you are changing and challenging things, you have to look at all of these things. Most of our policies exist for the external world.
‘We’re going to improve public transport, we’ll make the health service better. Why are we going to do that? Well, transport gets people around, so they can get to work on time, so it’s about the money, the GDP. Why should we have a health service? So people get well, and they can get back to being economically productive.
‘We are stuck at a stage of human evolution where we are not dealing with emotional, social and psychological aspects of our lives.
‘And the consequences are people who are not able to see that and who therefore use addictions to escape; then they get diagnosed with depression, and then get pills to treat that.’
He says that rather than slinging people on medication or writing them out of the workforce, we need a culture and workplace that respects mental health, that values people who are struggling and tries to work around them rather than rendering them invisible.
Hope is the most powerful force to be reckoned with. And I have to hope that day will come.
At some point I go to bed, but I just lie there rigid until the sun comes up. I think about Rob, and the immense sadness that he died in the woods. My brain can’t help itself. It summons the texture of the rope in his hands, the despair he felt, the crunch of leaves under his feet, the mist of the wintery night air, and then him finally completing the act.
For hours, I can’t move past the fact that he died alone, thinking those awful things about himself. For hours, I wish I could have held his hand and kissed his forehead in that last moment. Told him how magnificent he was, how loved and kind and beautiful. I wonder how he felt, at the end. I can’t bear to think of him crying.
Prue said he seemed calm and happy before he left the house. I wonder if death finally brought him peace.
And then I come back to reality, and I look about my bed. I find that I am in so many different pieces; I don’t know how I will gather myself to get up and face the days to come.
It is hard thinking about Rob and peace, when I know – even then, even as I see the first sparks of the explosion ripping through our lives, setting the world on fire – that peace will be denied to us for many, many years.
We are travelling across Lake Te Anau, a group of strangers united by a need to walk in the mountain air. The wind is whipping my hair into long streams; it feels like a river flowing back into the lake.
In the distance, I see the mountain range, and my heart lifts. It gently presses against a memory – the last time I was in a landscape like this was in the Himalayas, seven years ago.
Fiordland is a place that tumbles from one valley to another, waterfalls ribboning through the rock, deep, cold lakes gathered in extinguished craters, snowy peaks standing watch.
When I see the mountains layered against each other, solid yet so half-formed in the mist at their peaks, they look as if at any moment they may shift and move to reveal a gateway to a different world. I long for such a moment of escape.
How have seven years passed, when clambering over rocks and drinking hot tea in steel tumblers felt like yesterday?
Because I don’t know anyone else on the boat, I stick to the outside and peer my head around the corner of plastic sheeting.
The wind has picked up and little waves are scudding across the surface of the lake.
Our boat is powerful, creating bigger waves at the front as it pushes through, and in the light they look like curls of fire and ice, lit by the sun and quickly dissolving into the dark blue water. It is mesmerising.
I look at the heart of it. I feel the cold spray of lake water on my face. We are moving deeper and deeper into the centre of nowhere, remote and beautiful.
For the first time in nine months, I am peaceful, I think.
And then, and then, I can’t explain it, but in the midst of the air, water and light, I feel Rob, and I feel something say: I am here. And I am filled with him and I say: ‘I love you, honey, I miss you so much.’
And he says: I love you too, and I’m so sorry. The words just arrive inside me; I don’t know where they are coming from. I feel him standing behind me, looking over at the water, but I know what happened to Orpheus and so I’m not going to look back.
He’s here! I want this moment to be perfect, but instead I plead. I smell of desperation. ‘Why did you leave me?’
I feel the anger in my voice, the vastness of my own loneliness.
Why am I wasting this unbelievable moment on negativity? (Because it’s how you feel, you tell yourself later.)
And he answers: I wasn’t leaving you, I was leaving myself.
Chapter Eleven
I remember the exact moment I lost my faith.
It was 10 September 2012 at around eleven in the morning. I was lying on a stretcher in the operating room waiting for my heart operation, under lights so bright they pierced me clean.
I sensed the hurried movement of people going about their jobs, flicking switches, checking screens, and all of a sudden it left, like a breath, a gasp, a presence, so very much there and then so very much gone.
If I still had my faith, I would insist that, when I died, I be prepared according to Hindu rites: my body washed in milk, honey, yogurt and butter, turmeric placed on my face, and ideally set on a traditional wood pyre if the country I die in allows it.
However, now that I don’t, my arrangements are a little bit more tbc.
All of the rites, from washing the body to holding a wake, share similarities with other cultures and belief systems, from Vikings to Islam. I believe this reveals something huge, vast, bigger than religion, and more about humanity and the rituals that help us all to digest grief regardless of what we worship.
Where Hinduism differs is that it hinges on samsara, or rebirth, and so death is softened by the hope and prospect of re-entering life once more.
Till death do us part, they say in the West, but even our wedding ceremony embodies the idea that death isn’t the end for the two souls joining together. When Rob and I married, we walked round the fire seven times, to bind us together for seven lifetimes, a union seared in flame.
‘But Bobbie, how do we know which lifetime we’re at?’ I asked a few days later on our honeymoon, when we were spreadeagled, fat and brown, on sun loungers.
‘Like, what if we’re at lifetime number six and we only have one left to go?’
He smiled and pressed my hand.
Because we always cremate our dead, and because the only people I knew who had died were my grandparents, I had no idea what was actually involved when you’re the person at ground zero. The logistics, the surreal normality of things like paperwork in a situation that is so far removed from normal you don’t know how you’ll navigate the next hour, let alone the rest of your life.
Prue asked me if I wanted a cremation or a burial for Rob, and in between emails pinging back and forth on my way to New Zealand, I felt quite strongly it would be a burial.
When someone dies well before their time, far sooner than they should have done, there is a desperate, hungry need to keep them on earth a while longer. To have a place to talk, cry and laugh, to tell them your fears and dreams, even if these are just ghost conversations never quite able to take form.
&nbs
p; Also, when your husband dies prematurely and you’re Hindu – even an ex-Hindu – you tend to get a bit twitchy about cremation. After all, we once did sati. This is the practice of self-immolation, where widows would volunteer or be forced on the pyre of their dead husbands as a final tribute.
I mean, seriously – fuck that. Surely the final tribute is living; telling stories of your love, making sure his memory lives on.
‘I think it’s a completely missed opportunity,’ said Mal with absolute seriousness, ‘that airports don’t have a shop that just sells digestive biscuits and Twinings tea. Business would be booming.’
We were in Heathrow, running on little sleep, on our way to New Zealand for the funeral.
Although her business idea was terrible, I needed scraps of normality like that to tether me to the world. Mal is very passionate about how very few countries outside of Britain actually do decent tea. And, at a time like this, I needed something as safe, comforting and insane as a diatribe on tea.
I didn’t have a script for any of this. I knew from films how people reacted in times of grief. Some lay down and didn’t get up. Some couldn’t stop crying. Some packed a bag and left their lives entirely, without a word.
But that’s not how I felt. The emotions were huge and they swung so wildly, so frequently between one another – hope, rage, anger, hopelessness, sadness, love, forgiveness, fear – that it was like stepping across vast ice floes scattered over a sunless sea. I felt like a stranger in my own mind, but I also knew I was capable of functioning on a basic level.
I didn’t feel guilty when I laughed; in fact, I felt relief I was able to do so in between the moments that were so black, unending and sad. I held on to them as tightly as someone panning for gold along a dark riverbed.
And I knew what people thought: we were separated, so did that mean . . . ?
YES! I wanted to scream. Of course it means I’m grieving as if I’ve lost my spouse because, guess what, he was my fucking spouse! He was the love of my goddamn life and, just because I had decided seven days prior that I couldn’t live with his addiction any longer, it didn’t make him any less mine! He was MINE. The loss was MINE. The love was MINE. And I was going to do right by him, and say goodbye to him with dignity and honour, with my head held high because THAT was the woman he married, not some wreck who couldn’t tie her own shoelaces.