by Nick Duerden
But he wasn’t. He died in hospital while I was away for work. I missed the funeral. At the very moment they were cremating him, I was buying a new pair of trainers from a warehouse-sized shoe emporium that boasted considerable discounts. I spoke to my grandmother immediately after the service, standing on Wilshire Boulevard in the hazy sunshine, wondering why I was here, with my new purchase, and not there, with her.
Today, at 93, and now confined to an old people’s home on the suburbs of Milan, my grandmother will still only ever admit to being ‘fine’. She was forced to give up her flat because she was no longer able to live there alone, and needed round-the-clock care. But the transition from independence to assisted living discombobulated her. She sounded distressed on the phone, confused and angry. She could not hear me properly because she could not get her hearing aid to work; our phone calls often ended in tears.
Elena is right. We have to go.
There is a certain comedic element present in the undertaking of a road trip across Europe when I have grown accustomed to not travelling further than the garden path without keeling over in swooning exhaustion. And so en route sightseeing is out of the question because all I can do is look out the window and pine. Paris and its squirrelly arrondissements therefore pass us by completely. We miss the Eiffel Tower, the Latin Quarter and, worse still, we miss Shakespeare and Company, the best little bookshop in the world. While I sit in the passenger seat complaining about this, Elena reminds me that this is where we are right now, so let’s just make the best of it, yes?
The whole venture requires careful planning. While I am prepared to undergo a necessarily restrictive, and very long, car journey with my wife, bringing the children along seems cruel. Keeping them cooped up in the back seat like unloved pets, with nothing but the promise of a care home at journey’s end, is hardly Center Parcs. A two-week school holiday is looming, so Elena flies them to Spain to deposit them with their grandmother, then flies back to me. The following morning, shortly before dawn, and too early to even attempt my Hour of Power, we are on our way. Elena drives, I’m shotgun, having long ago lost, or rather mislaid, my licence. I keep meaning to replace it but keep forgetting. We have no satnav, and so she expects me to be map reader. I gaze emptily out of the window.
Though she may suggest differently, we have always made for pretty good travelling companions, I think, a complementary yin and yang, as long as I get the aisle seat. She is the sensible one, the one who books tickets ahead, does pre-departure research, books hotels and manages not to lose driving licences, while, to my mind, I am the freer spirit, happy to let the wind take me where it will – again, as long as I get the aisle seat. She has always wanted to plan holidays in advance, ideally securing flights months before, while I am the more spontaneous, suggesting we go in a couple of days’ time, whenever the mood takes us, and relying not on guidebooks but on whatever it is we possess that passes for instinct.
To drive across Europe now, however, Elena puts her foot down. She will be the one driving, so we need a plan. She wants to map out our route there and back, and for now shelves my suggestion that we drive home a different route in pursuit of a different view. She wants to book all hotels in advance, deciding upfront which towns we make our overnight stops in. I argue that we should just stop whenever it is late and we are tired. ‘But you are always tired,’ she shoots back, a little sharply. I try to suggest that an impetuous Avez vous un chambre? might be romantic. Yes, but where?, she insists. To this I have no answer. All I know is that France is below us, and Italy below it. ‘Just keep driving down,’ is my advice.
Our first argument, consequently, occurs before we even make it to the outskirts of London. Our second takes place quand nous sommes arrivés en France, largely because I have started to respond to her increasingly impatient requests for directions exclusively in schoolboy French, thinking it amusing. This irritates her, but je ne regret rien.
We drive for hours in the direction of down, the motorways and their service stations eerily empty of other cars or their occupants. Where is everyone? It is just us out here, and the occasional HGV, no traffic, no roadworks, and nothing to look out at but an endless expanse of unremarkable fields that stretch to the horizon. I had no idea France was so empty or, for the car-trapped passenger, so dull. We stop for lunch in a small provincial town called Troyes, at the first restaurant we find. ‘Un menu, s’il vous plaît,’ I ask. ‘Menu? Non,’ comes the reply. The waiter points to every table in turn, each of which has on it the same big bowl of brown lentils and angry red saucisson, the house speciality. We order two. They arrive half an hour later, because why rush? It’s Sunday. It is preposterously filling, the kind of meal that demands an après siesta rather than many more hours in the car. We are due at the care home within 48 hours, ideally, my grandmother expecting us. If she is wondering why we are driving across Europe rather than flying, and leaving the girls in Spain instead of bringing them with us, she makes no mention of it.
The journey continues dully. Elena suggests I sleep, but I cannot sleep sitting up, and I grow half mad with boredom (ennui ) and clawing frustration (frustré ) at this self-imposed incarceration, stuck in a Spanish-made hatchback that my wife is driving at the speed limit, and not a kilometre more, through a country in which all I really want to do is pull over, get out and wander around for days on end in pursuit of adventure.
‘Shut up,’ Elena says. ‘Just shut up, and find out where we are on the map. Help a little, why don’t you?’
It is getting late on our first day, and she has been driving, uncomplainingly, for hours, my saintly wife. We still do not have a hotel for the night, and the afterburn of the saucisson has lessened sufficiently for us to consider dinner.
‘I told you we should have booked somewhere,’ she complains.
Her fear is that we will be forced to sleep in the car, hungry, cold and cramped. I say that when we see signs for the next town, we leave the motorway, eat at the first restaurant we come across, then find a place to stay. Non?
Our third argument commences shortly after.
It does not happen much in our relationship that I am proved right and she wrong, but on this occasion it does. We arrive into a small, possibly nameless town, directly into its pretty main square. Here there is ample parking, and opposite is a restaurant, where we have poulet et frites with a bottle of pink vin, my first drop of alcohol in months. It tastes wonderful. A short stroll finds us a decent three-star hotel, whose well-appointed room we make use of in the way we would have back in the early days of our courtship, and we awake the morning after to sunlight streaming in through the windows, both of us exhausted, but in the very best way.
The following evening, another great swatch of featureless France covered and now mercifully behind us, we pass through the Alps and into Italy. The difference is as stark as it is abrupt. Suddenly, there are vehicles everywhere, a carnival of tooting-horn chaos as careening trucks compete alongside ancient Fiat 500s that are driven too fast by fat men asleep at the wheel. For the first time in our trip, I have to faithfully fulfil my co-pilot duties, sitting up straight, turning the music – John Grant’s Pale Green Ghosts – off, now all eyes and ears, instinctively slamming my foot to the floor whenever another truck lurches into our path and prompting me to shout STOP!, STOP!, STOP!, thus no doubt confusing my neural pathways but helping Elena to keep us alive and avoid what otherwise seems an inevitable head-on collision.
We finally pull up, comprehensively rattled, at a pizza restaurant, where we talk about our daughters’ lack of godparents, and whom we would appoint as adoptive parents if, as now seems quite likely, we do not make it to Milan alive.
This leads to our fourth argument, which, after a cold night in a bleak motorway hotel and over a continental breakfast the morning after, becomes our fifth.
The outer suburbs of Milan are about as easy on the eye as the outer suburbs of Nottingham or Walsall. It is propulsively over-industrialised, its roads flanked by facto
ries, its high-bricked walls liberally graffitied with the very best Anglo-Saxon swear words, and all of it a world away from the Italy of tourist brochures. When we arrive, it is raining.
But there is relief to be out of the car after two solid days of driving, and we are glad to be here. The care home’s design will win it no architectural awards, but it is clean and basic and functional. That it is my grandmother’s home now, and probably will be for the rest of her life, is an abruptly sad realisation. I miss the flat she had shared with my grandfather for much of their lives together, and my times with them there. Never again will she make me lunch; never again will we sit around the dining table playing cards.
We find her upstairs in the cavernous, light-filled dayroom, where she looks wan and misplaced. Our reunion, as witnessed by two dozed fellow residents, is a muted one, none of the usual fussing, but for this I blame the new environment and the alienation she feels within it. We leave the dayroom for her room at the end of a long corridor, which she shares with a woman even older than she is. When we enter, the woman appears to be in distress, or perhaps it’s pain. She moans in a low, steady voice. My grandmother, normally keenly aware of the suffering of others and always ready to help, ignores her. Instead, she retrieves a packet of biscuits from her bedside table and offers us some. I don’t know how to interact with her here, everything feels out of place, and she isn’t talking to me, either. Instead, we leaf through old photograph albums in silence as I desperately think how I can possibly alleviate her wretched situation and conclude, bitterly, that I can’t.
We spend just two days with her, sitting in companionable, if always awkward, silence. She seems adrift, as far away as I have ever known her. The only time she really talks is to communicate her anger at being here, the cruel theft of the life she knew and her independence. (Within six months, we will, with the help of friends, have moved her to another care home outside the city, and here she will begin the slow process of acclimatisation and acceptance.) One afternoon, we leave the compound for a small outing, a walk, which I imagine is as much a novelty for her as it is for me, though I cannot of course communicate this to her. I am sure that my amygdala is firing its central cylinders, and that, under normal circumstances, I would be doing my level best to douse its fire, but right now my focus is solely on my grandmother. This helps. She grips hold of my arm with a tenacity she has brought to so much of her life, and we walk alongside one another, her surely holding me up as much as I am her.
At one point she looks up at me and smiles, maybe in nothing more than relief, and for a moment I feel capable, strong, if not in myself, then at least for her. Almost immediately I recognise it for the unusual sensation it is, me offering strength for someone when strength is what I have been so lacking of late. And in this instant I am not only glad that I came, but relieved, too. My grandmother needed me, and despite everything, I was able to come to her.
The journey home is gruelling, and more boring still, though Switzerland, my favoured route back, proves prettier than France, and the chocolate on sale at the motorway service stations of superior quality. We miss our allotted Channel Tunnel train by a cruel 60 seconds, and the two hours we are required to wait until the next one do not pass in a flash. I sit down somewhere, while Elena queues for duty-free wine. We arrive home late, and tired, and rise the next morning early in order to cross London again, this time to Stansted to meet our girls.
I had made this journey myself many times in the past, crossing town to greet my family coming back from Spain, butterflies in my stomach in anticipation of seeing their faces before they saw mine, these two beautiful, perfect little girls – mine, somehow – dressed in new clothes and sporting new haircuts, at once different and yet so very familiar. I would stand there alongside everybody else at the customs exit, waiting for the moment – and enjoying every drawn-out second of it – until our eyes eventually met and then, carelessly abandoning their Trunkis, they would run up to me, crying out ‘Daddy!’, while I dropped to my knees to scoop them up.
I have not been able to do this for what feels like a long time now, and I have missed it. So I am excited, and feel grateful, to be finally here, now, again. Elena has mostly recovered from our European trip, her body enviably good at revival, but my fatigue is powerful and all-encompassing. It will leave me feeling dreadful for weeks.
But it is worth it. Going on an adventure with my wife again, seeing my grandmother again, being at the gate to collect my children again: it is worth it.
Thirteen
One afternoon, a few months after Italy, I drift towards the bowels of my local bookshop, where the footfall is sparse and the carpet thicker, self-consciously browsing the self-help section. The name Eckhart Tolle has been mentioned again to me as the alternative health guru of the moment. His book The Power of Now is a modern-day Bible, it seems, always in print, always selling, equally adored and mocked, the true measure of success. Tolle is a German with complicated facial hair who lives in Canada and who spent much of his life, he explains in the introduction, in a suicidal depression. But then he underwent an ‘inner transformation’ and suddenly found that the world was in fact a miraculous place, ‘and deeply peaceful, even the traffic’. It was on a park bench in London’s Russell Square that he found this state of deep bliss, then he went away, replaced the bench for a desk and wrote The Power of Now, his guide to spiritual enlightenment in which he discusses, at length, the importance of living only in the here and now.
I leaf through the book for a while, but my attention won’t focus, my resistance to these sorts of titles stubborn, so I put it down and walk over instead to the Smart Thinking section. I have only rarely strayed here in the past, always half-convinced I might be asked to leave, but I come across a book that catches my eye, and that appeals more than Tolle’s. It is called The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by an American doctor called Norman Doidge, and it recounts stories of people whose brains have been damaged in a variety of ways, through injury and illness. These include the 89-year-old who reversed his memory loss within six weeks; the stroke victims who learned to move and talk again; the woman with half a brain that rewired itself in order to compensate for the half it lacked. The book’s central tenet is that the brain is plastic and malleable in ways we had never previously fully realised. On the flyleaf, neurologist Oliver Sacks gives it high praise: ‘A remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.’
It is part of a buy-one-get-one-half-price deal. I buy it. It’s fascinating. I read about the woman building herself a better brain, about neural stem cell rejuvenation, and how one can use the brain’s plasticity to help ease, even quell, worry, obsession, compulsion and bad habits. It is this bit that interests me most, and though this particular chapter focuses more on acute obsessions and compulsions, I recognise some of me in its pages.
‘We can all experience such thoughts fleetingly,’ Doidge writes, explaining that anyone can fall into destructive brain patterns, and that a great many of us do. Those who are trapped for too long, whose brains do not move on, begin to suffer, and do so in all sorts of ways. But the suffering is reversible. If the brain is plastic, plastic can remould. It can change. What we learn can be unlearned, because the brain needs never stop developing and correcting its mistakes.
I like the way Norman Doidge writes, and so I contact him for an interview. His assistant declines my request, plus ça change, so I turn back to the book. He writes about meditation and its myriad benefits. The more we are able to take a step back and observe our issues rather than engage in them quite so obsessively, he suggests, the more we can separate ourselves from them. And we need to separate ourselves from such issues if we want them to diminish. Meditating can help us teach our brains new skills, and the more we readapt them, the more they can be rewired.
I have been meditating for almost a year now, but it always feels half-hearted, a little too DIY. I approach it wi
th ignorance, and sometimes impatience. But it no longer feels enough to simply sit on my office chair with my eyes closed for a few minutes a day, and so I decide, now, late as I am to everything in life, to do it seriously, and properly.
A few months previously, Claire, the NHS self-help practitioner who was not permitted to teach me CBT skills due to my insufficient suicidal urges, encouraged me to look into mindfulness, convinced it would help. She did warn, however, that I might struggle, and might not be able to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time, advice that struck me as not particularly helpful.
‘You and I are alike, I think,’ she had said, smiling gently, explaining that she had recently graduated from an eight-week mindfulness course herself. ‘I found it very difficult at first, so do be prepared.’
I took offence, of course, and thought to myself: how dare she? The woman barely knew me. It was only later that I wondered whether she might have been doing some of that Waterstones’s Smart Thinking on me, waving a red flag before what she knew was a very competitive bull, and thereby all but guaranteeing I would subsequently apply myself to the task more strenuously than I otherwise might, if only to prove my own private doubts wrong.