by Jenny Diski
Do I want to live another year or so, or do I want to throw up, feel ill and eat when I haven’t the slightest appetite? That is a new alternative. I have to digest it before I can begin to answer it. A decline caused by fibrosis or lung cancer is very unpleasant. But throwing up that night, and the prospect of stronger and nastier medication, left me thinking about the balance. Worth another few months? Worth it for whom? How miserable will these extra months of life be? What the docs call quality of life measured in qualia. Versus, I suppose, no life at all. I had believed that Francis Bacon’s ‘fair and easy passage’ was a real possibility. But I no longer trust the hospice key-worker’s assurance that the dying process can be made painless. There was an unpleasant incident recently when I was told I could have a week’s respite (for me and the Poet) at the local hospice, and ended up leaving ten minutes after I arrived – they had no record of my request (granted twice: the week before and the day before) for a single room. A bed was available in a four-bed room, but a need for privacy and the degree of my depression made that impossible. I wanted a private place to cry where no one would be upset or ask me to stop. I was polite, I hope, but very disappointed. Later in the evening a doctor from the hospice called and told me that they ‘don’t provide respite care’ and couldn’t possibly guarantee that there would be a room for me when the time came for dying and palliative care. I had thought that both things were precisely the point of the hospice movement. I was shaken and distressed. The doctor later phoned my GP (not me) to say that she thought she might have upset me by being too definite in what she’d said. Well, we all have our bad days. But who the bad days affect matters too.
People offer me things to live for. (Another TV quiz show?) ‘But what about the grandchildren? They’re worth living for, aren’t they? And family and friends?’ But finding what is good about life makes their loss all the more miserable, even if you know there will be no you to miss anything. In this long meantime, dying sooner rather than later can be upsetting. Additionally, how much do I want to be dependent on others for my everyday life or, indeed, for finding a reason to stay alive a little while longer? Missing a few months of feeling awful, being dead, versus not missing those months of feeling awful. Dead, at least theoretically, is the less painful of the two options, assuming that dead equals not being at all. Whatever terror there is lies in the present fear of dying, not so much of death. The stoics tell me that I’ve been ‘dead’ before, prior to my birth, and that was no hardship, was it? Back to Beckett, I think. So that’s how I am at the moment of writing this. But of course it’s more complicated than that, more complicated than is allowed by the linear business of writing one word, one sentence, one paragraph after another with the intention of being coherent.
I have a feeling that if I describe my daily life, ‘the reader’ will react with sympathy for the blank, sedentary existence my condition causes. The thing of it is, though, that my daily life is (with obvious exceptions) very close to my idea of a perfect existence. The day usually begins with the Poet and me having tea in bed. I also have porridge or Weetabix (or did before I revolted over taking the awful pill). Every third day my fentanyl pain patch has to be changed. Not cancer pain but long years of chronic pain in my neck. Then we generally moan about the news, our dreams, the awfulness of now compared to then, the awfulness of then compared to now. An hour or so of this and the Poet gets up, washes, spruces himself with one of the strange, expensive perfumes he has on his bathroom shelf. Not that he’s a narcissist; well, he is a narcissist, but he’s also, I think, chasing the scent that is his spirit smell. He has about a dozen that are close, but none of them so far is quite it. His totemic smell. So further investigations and purchases are intermittently required. Knize Ten and Géranium by Dominique Ropion for Frédéric Malle rate very highly, but there’s probably a scent out there somewhere that is more essentially him. This is much the same attitude as I have to clothes. I look now at a handful of catalogues or I look online, but when I got around, in shops, just sometimes there was a garment that had been patiently hanging on its hanger waiting for me to find it. It’s a mystical thing and also expensive.
When he’s finished with the shower, the shaving, the unguents, he gets dressed. So far so uninteresting. At this point, he writes on a whiteboard on the back of the door the events and times of the present day. For the last few months, I have lost all sense of where we are in the week. Every day for me now is usually Monday, or sometimes Sunday, occasionally Friday. You know that certainty one has about time and its larger chunks? Well, I don’t have it any more. Since the treatment started, I have to check (and often recheck) the day at least and sometimes the month. Still, not a really big deal, though unsteadying when I thought I had that cracked around the age of six or seven. While the Poet eats his breakfast in the kitchen – no porridge for him, but homemade granola, lightly home-stewed berries and plain yoghurt (shop bought, I’m glad to say) – I begin my day, which involves straightening the bed and getting my laptop on my lap. The Poet goes off to college or the library and my day’s work starts here, between an hour and three hours usually, either on these memoirs or the monthly article I write for a Swedish paper (in English, to be translated into Swedish. Strange). Work finishes when it finishes, with me tired out, physically exhausted, or I discover that I have closed the lid of the laptop and, without thinking, declared that’s that. The Macmillan book of cancer treatment says it can be as long as two years before the exhaustion goes, and that doesn’t take account of my original pulmonary fibrosis. And then the big decision of the day: do I put away the laptop and sleep, or do I have a shower and get up? It makes no difference except that it feels silly to shower, clean my teeth and dress, and then take everything except a T-shirt off and get back into bed to sleep for between one and three hours. As differences go, it’s vanishingly small. Either way I end up back in bed, exhausted. More if I’ve washed and dressed, and much more so than before my cancer treatment started. Of course, there’s the wash and dress first option, then get undressed and get into bed to work (but actually having to sleep off the tiredness of having got up in the first place). So many options, so few options. And so many ways of operating them.
Eventually, after teaching, or poking around in the University Library, or writing references (when do the poems get written?), the Poet returns, for lunch or supper which again I have to eat, against my better judgement, in order to take my pills. Then I shower, or wash, if I haven’t already, and dive in slo-mo into a djellaba thing or baggy pants (not baggy enough since the steroid weight-gain catastrophe). I read, we watch some TV and chat, and then, around ten, I go to bed, having taken my handful of antidepressant pills, which serve me better as sleeping pills. End of my eventfully uneventful day.
Tomorrow is, or so the Poet insists when it comes, another day, but I usually say ‘Sunday’ or ‘Friday’ in answer to his question or my own testing. My two-year-old grandson, when asked a question he can’t or doesn’t want to answer, says after a moment: ‘Ella’. Which, I think, serves for the ‘Fuck off’ that I’ve been forbidden by his mother to say in front of him. I might adopt this ploy, and each instalment of this memoir/cancer diary will be filled with the word ‘Ella’, from top to bottom of each page. That’s a pleasing notion. Restful. Dear keyboard please repeat copied word – ‘Ella’ – to end of memoir. Cf.:
Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused . . . Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head – everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.
My calendar is frighteningly full, to me. It no longer involves the arrival of couriers delivering my pills or the district nurses taking blood to see if the pills are damaging my liver; the senior psychiatric nurse who has brought a fold-up wheelchair in case I’m taken with the idea of a wheel round the Fitzwilliam or the Botanic Garden. The geriatric psychiatric consultant comes every two or three weeks. On her
last visit, she decided there wasn’t much point in changing the pills around, adding this or upping that, because my depression is ‘well-founded’. This distinction is new to me. It presumably replaces the now disgraced endogenous/exogenous types, abolished by the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because, I suppose, they found a couple of descriptors they like better. ‘Well-founded’ and . . . actually, I don’t know what the new word is for ‘endogenous’: ‘She’s just like that,’ perhaps, or ‘idiopathic’, which is also the description of my kind of fibrosis, which might have been caused by working in asbestos-lined factories or spending quality time with certain birds, but wasn’t. It means ‘don’t know how that got there’. Another use for ‘Ella’. Why have you got pulmonary fibrosis? Ella. Do you want to be wheeled round the Fitzwilliam? Ella. Meaning I’d like to look at a couple of pictures I especially like, but don’t want to be wheelchaired. Maybe I’ll Google the recent divisions of depression later on, between naps. ‘Well-founded’ has a double response from me. On the one hand it tells me that I’ve a perfectly good reason to be depressed (dying sooner rather than later from two incurable diseases and haunted by the memory of my former GP saying, in a torment of pity and tactlessness: ‘Oh Jenny, they’re both such terrible ways to die’). I presume, if I weren’t depressed by that, I would be diagnosed as being in pathological denial or psychotic over-optimism, but no one has ever suggested that I suffer from either of those. Sometimes other members of the Cambridge health team turn up: occupational therapists who have organised grab rails for nasty spots where I might fall and break something more than my wrist; outreach workers from the local hospital or hospice who have also given me a course of six foot massages. Very nice, but I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve them. I even have my very own friend. Sourced from the Poet’s many pals (who I like but usually don’t go out with him to visit or ‘dine’), my new press-ganged friend pops around once a week or so and we gossip. That’s very nice. I enjoy it. Then there’s my daughter Chloe and her frighteningly large family – two small children and partner. Vast by my miniaturist standards. One child good. More than one, tempting fate. But also very nice. I get more breathless but less bothered by it. I get out of the house just once a week when the Poet drives me to the top of our road, to have my hair washed by my splendid young hairdressers. They are sweet and kind and seem to have substituted ‘ah bless’ with ‘definitely’. ‘My hair is a real mess.’ ‘Definitely.’
So having given up on the vomit-making pill, there is one other: ‘There’s nothing else we can do for you.’ Doc language for ‘You’ve failed us and you’ll just have to die, which is not our speciality, so goodbye.’ Or as my grandson would put it, ‘Ella’. My breathing has got worse and I can’t get to the car without waving an electric hand-held fan in my face and swigging on liquid morphine. A pain in my left side has suddenly ratcheted up times ten. I’m a bit of a wreck. Actually, a super-sized wreck. I presume that the three stone I put on within two weeks of starting steroids make me all the more breathless and less able to pick myself up when I fall. I’d never thought about it before but the weight you are is the weight you carry. Literally. I suppose all this is what most people experience. It’s either dying suddenly in a car accident, or having a helicopter fall on you, or one of your many organs that manage your many other organs going out of kilter and spinning the whole system into a whirlwind heading deathward. I’m perfectly sure that there are quiet deaths that creep up on you gently at a decently old age, or thanks to skilful palliative care, and that I must hope for that sort of ending.
PART THREE
Spray It Silver
I am not writing volume three of my autobiography because of possible hurt to vulnerable people. Which does not mean I have novelised autobiography. There are no parallels here to actual people, except for one, a very minor character.
The Sweetest Dream
I can’t get away from that paragraph. It feels like a well, bottomless; time to hold your breath before you hear the distant splash of a coin somewhere down there. It’s the careful donation of kindness. The passage is a kind of labyrinth: not to hurt ‘vulnerable’ people. They must be real, they must be alive, or why bother with it? So we know that what follows is a sort of non-fiction. That wouldn’t surprise us: Doris often used people and situations in her writing without feeling the need to alert readers. Even those not particularly vulnerable might still have cause to feel upset, since no one is named yet anyone could be implicated. Doris is protecting some people but giving them due warning, and warning others who are real and might take it that they are included. Could there be a more simple way to warn certain people, and cause many blameless others distress than these three sentences?
What judgements are being made about whom? Here is a sticky business. She is protecting some (real-world) people by not writing about them. But by saying that she is not writing autobiography she is telling us that something happened. (What kind of something? What is she telling us about? Sex, politics, her version of some truth that has been confabulated?) Only when they are dead are the letters here allowed to be read. That is the meaning, the weight of having the last word. Something happened, or someone did something – and those of us who are innocent will have to remain in ignorance, never knowing who did what. The accusation doesn’t go away. Nor can the magnitude of the ‘truth’ contained here now be known, or checked and then questioned.
I can’t help comparing the author’s note in The Sweetest Dream to the letter I found on the table that morning, for me, furiously accusing me of emotional blackmail for wondering whether she liked me, or even wanted me in her house. But what is to be done? If fear or abandonment are arresting your heart, can you forever live without an answer, pretending it doesn’t matter? Or in a multiple blindness, can both parties know the question and the need but never speak of them? Apparently you can. That is what’s so odd about the author’s note. It only has one meaning for a particular person. But its tentacles of worry reach out to include everyone. When a child is told to stand in class and accused of something they haven’t done, a fountain of guilt springs instantly from the vastly overstocked pressure cooker – god, the relief and terror – and whether or not you are guilty (and sometimes I was), the spume rises up from the passive wicked place inside you. There’s always more, of course, the dark deep place being fathomless, but this release is some lightening of the load both for the genuinely guilty and for the free-floating anxiety that longs to be locked within the innumerable tentacles. Who did it?
Another Sufi story comes to mind that Doris used often. A bowl of rice has been stolen and the possible culprits are made to stand in a line. ‘We shall see who took the rice.’ There is a silence and then the Mullah speaks and points to the villain. ‘It was you.’ But Master, how did you know? ‘Only you touched your beard for fear that some rice might have stuck to it.’ Not a really convincing story. All the components must be in place already: rice, thief, beards, knowledgeable Mullah. Good thieves would not touch their beards. It’s a poker story: watch out for the tell. But those loaded with free-floating guilt will touch their beards too. Injustice is written in to the story. Someone stole the rice, someone was hungry, they all had beards. A wisdom story must do better than that. Doris’s author’s note declares: I will tell the world who the guilty ones are, but not until they are safely dead and cannot answer back. And then there is that single ‘very minor’ character. Why? Why does such minorness get his or her reality mentioned? Are we to scour the pages? Is it worse to be a minor character than to be an important one protected both by sound and silence?
I feel as if there ought to be a machine perhaps made of paper clips, or rubber bands, that this piece of prose could be put through and it would come out the other end making simple, complete sense. We are supposed to have one (I call it a brain although some care to call it mind) but it is always going wrong. When I read those lines, the less sense they make, and the more my word-untangling machi
ne seems to tangle words and everything in sight, Yes, that, and that, and even this. So I give it another go. Read it fast, read it shallow, read it deep, don’t read it at all but keep it under the pillow on my bed; doesn’t matter. Shut the book and think of something else, hope for a sweet dream, but anything would do.
More and more I hear Alice moaning along with her dream and her mirror companions, Humpty Dumpty, the Red Queen, the vanishing cat: all that terrible caterwauling from most of them extracting every last drop of juice from the words readers have forced them to speak. They speak the puzzles a new language presents to them. They are easily distracted by etymologies, rhymes and the lack of precision of the language that Alice was once so sure of. Alice, of course, is somewhere else, in Wonderland or Looking-Glass world, and both she and the others explain just what she means by the words she has used all her life, words which have consistently been responded to as if there was no problem about them. If that author’s note were an Alice character, she would have the same problems as the others do with language and the White Queen does with hair pins. Here comes Alice’s entourage again – and again – to tell us that some things make nonsense, or at any rate only make sense to the teller and the story. And that, I’m afraid, we just have to put up with.
The author’s note in The Sweetest Dream is more than a metafictional trick, like John Ray, Jr, PhD’s foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita, the outsider’s perspective on the mad and repellent Humbert Humbert telling us it’s all right to sit back and enjoy the perversions of others. But this is Doris Lessing: not playful, not one for fun, the writer, knowing how her book is going to be received, instructing her readers how to read what has been written by her in the following pages about the atmosphere and events of the middle years of the twentieth century, although there is the further warning: ‘Some events described as taking place at the end of the Seventies and early Eighties in fact happened later, by a decade.’ So the book is fictional – it’s The Sweetest Dream – although at least one of its characters might, if they read it, recognise themselves: it’s not too hard, even given a hair-colour change or the fact they wear high heels rather than trainers. But it’s non-fiction, too, in her use of timings. It’s OK, apparently, to make events that occurred in the month of May 1962 happen, after all, in 1982. She doesn’t explain very clearly. The 1980s have their own problems, their own pleasures; but for Doris, not wanting to hurt feelings or wanting events to make more sense for her ‘novel’ means reorganising time. Decades have their own time and feel.