by Roger Cohen
My father had come from work and found the bedroom doors closed. He thought nothing of it. June was often in bed. He fixed himself a whiskey, sat down with the papers. It was a mild summer’s evening, sunlight glinting through the trees, bees circling the roses, clouds of gnats against the fence. June’s cycles were running at three-month intervals. With luck, come September she would be active again. But, truth be told, was there any luck in this matter? If she veered manic, she would be full of ideas—another house, a small Old Master drawing, or a long weekend in Venice—and by the time the ideas came to fruition, they would both be ruing them. He saw himself in a beautiful room at the Gritti Palace in Venice overlooking the Grand Canal. June would have a single thought in her mind: drowning herself.
Sydney tossed the papers aside. You never knew in life. That, on balance, was a blessing. He tried the bedroom door, leading onto the L-shaped hallway of my childhood fears. It was locked. He raced around to the other door, from the bathroom. It was locked. He ran outside. The net curtains were drawn. The windows looked sealed. On closer inspection, one was very slightly ajar.
My mother lay sprawled on the bed, a bottle of gin beside her. She had taken large doses of Doxepin and Valium, washed down with the alcohol. (Its emetic effect probably saved her.) Her arms were thrown back behind her head. Her pupils were scarcely responsive, her breathing shallow.
At present I am filled only with self-hate. I do love my family and dear friends but I can’t go on and on and on like this. God bless you sweetest dearest angel.
Jenny happened to be back from Paris for a few days. She was out with a friend, whose father gave her a message to call home immediately. She had dreamed the night before that June had tried to take her life: white sheets flapped in the wind on a washing line in an empty yard. My mother, when she last saw her, had been in her room with the curtains drawn, smoking a lot, filled with hopelessness. Now Jenny ran down a broad staircase onto Albemarle Street in Mayfair. The thought in her head was: Let the agony end, let her be dead.
Can my body—any part of it—be used for research? I wish I did not have to cause you pain but it will pass—you’re a survivor my brave good love. Wish and pray I could have been better. Thank you. Bless Floss and Laurie for so much kindness and love.
Jenny found my father in a disembodied state, draping stained sheets over chairs. All the lights were on. “Mom’s in hospital. She took a large overdose. They’ve pumped her stomach. She seems to be stable now.” I remember his ghostly voice when he called me in Paris that night. It was two months since my mother, in high spirits, had visited.
My mother’s first words to Jenny when she walked into the Whittington Hospital the next day were: “What a lovely cardigan! Have I seen that before?” She was no longer depressed.
By the time I reached London that day, she was already home. We gathered in the lounge, the room reserved during my childhood for special occasions. I suppose this was one. We hugged and cried. June wanted to move on. As soon as the deathly darkness lifted, she was brisk and businesslike. She wrote to me soon after: “I realize full well that you have my interest at heart. Remember, darling, I love you all deeply and dearly and devotedly. I realize the pain I’ve caused but it is DONE—we must now look forward PLEASE.”
In early September, she wrote to my uncle Bert and his wife, Hazel:
I want you to know how grateful and sorry I am that you were involved (for a second time, alas) in such a traumatic drama. Both Sydney and Jen have told me of your kindness, help and understanding. I alone have to bear the pain of knowing how I involved those I love and I have to come to terms with the knowledge over the years as best I can—I can assure and promise you that now, knowing the pain and hurt I caused, NEVER again will I resort to such a drastic step.
I know that when one’s in a trough of black despair one is either on the brink of insanity or suicide. This time I felt sure I’d never recover, be committed to a mental home and there was no fight in me. There has to be some quality to life to make it worthwhile.
I had become a mental and physical shell and a burden to those I love.
Virginia Woolf wrote to Leonard: “Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.”
This precisely reflects what I felt had happened except in my case the children, too, were involved. I was certain that Sydney’s health and work would suffer forever and the beloved children would be obliged to carry an intolerable emotional burden. This was too much for me to bear.
With love and endless gratitude,
June
On September 18, 1978, my father’s fifty-seventh birthday, she wrote a letter to him promising a new beginning:
My Darling,
Think of your birthday as a new year—a fresh start. Please, please let the trauma fade into your unconscious. Put your mind at peace—it’s never going to happen again. You have nothing to blame yourself for. You have been my best and truest friend, a loving, caring husband and you did more than could have been expected over a long test of endurance that would have broken most noble spirits. We are together with so many things to look forward to—that’s what matters—and our darling children are united in our mutual love.
Something is always gained from anguish and pain if one has the strength to survive. We have a deep understanding and the children shared our troubles—how I’d have wished to spare it all—but it’s made them stronger and given them an insight into what life can throw up unexpectedly.
On November 5, 1978, three months after her suicide attempt, my mother contemplated the fireworks in the night sky over London. She wrote: “Guy Fawkes night—bonfires, sparks and a catastrophic fire once planned, yet many, many years after here we are and Parliament stands yet.”
She watched the trails of light falling down the sky. At the last they were like tears. As sure as death is sure, she told herself, her love for Sydney was everlasting. She had been reading Dylan Thomas. His marriage to Caitlin was fraught. “They fought physical fights,” she noted, “threw verbal spears to pain and hurt, and yet their love was very deep and their need for each other great.” She told my father: “I worshipped you and our children at the brink of death and I’ll love you always, always and always.”
I circle back to my mother as I imagine her, the curl and bounce of her hair in her fleeting passages of happiness. There is no trace of her now but in memory. I could not abide the blankness of her burden. Of course she would again “resort to such a drastic step.” That was in the nature of things. In her condition, death was always the cajoling voice in her ear.
I have tried to give form to the facts of my mother’s life and death. Part of the unraveling that followed her first barely thwarted attempt to take her life became clear at once. The undercurrents took longer to emerge and were more devastating. Mental illness is a charnel house from which nobody escapes unscathed.
Orhan Pamuk has written: “What is important for a painter is not a thing’s reality but its shape, and what is important for a novelist is not the course of events but their ordering, and what is important for a memoirist is not the factual accuracy of the account but its symmetry.”
At the far end of the garden, next to the greenhouse where my father’s African cuttings bloomed, I see him piling objects on a fire. A frenetic determination marks his movements as he stoops and straightens, sometimes half hidden by smoke, and the fire grows. Smoke billows upward into the plane trees. Onto the flames go old toys, battered suitcases, furniture long stored in the cellar of the house, files of papers, and the weathered, much-loved “Don Bradman” cricket bat I had used as a child and he had used before me. His frenzy allows no interruption. The fire consuming my childhood, in the very place it was most intensely lived, would burn for a couple of days.
The blaze was intended to prepare a move away from a place now blighted with Valium and gin. June, within weeks of her suicide attempt, had found an apartment in central London, a few bl
ocks from Lord North Street. It would be “easier to maintain,” closer to Sydney’s work, and smaller, of a size more appropriate for the two of them. This time the move went through.
It was a disaster. In an apartment, my father, starved of the wide skies of his garden, suffocated. On a gloomy balcony, overlooking other redbrick apartment buildings, he managed to coax a number of lush plants into life, creating a tiny midtown jungle. In the midst of this greenery, he looked like a morose lion peering out from a Douanier Rousseau painting. One day, when the light in his study remained unchanged as a dull day gave way to sunshine, he decided he could stand his confinement no longer. Very soon, in November 1979, my parents moved back to Hampstead, to a house they both liked less than the one they had left.
In the space of twenty months, they had bought a house, only to change their minds; an apartment near that house, only to find they loathed it; and a third place a stone’s throw from our original home (the only house they really loved). This commotion amounted to the physical expression of my mother’s mental turmoil. Of course, given the self-aggression involved in depression, she ended up in a house that “punished” her through its proximity to the true object of her affection and attachment.
As they moved into the second Hampstead house, with its wisteria and much smaller and shaded garden, June wrote to my father:
I realize the great pressure—emotional and physical—that has been placed upon you these last few years. Only someone of your strength and courage could have put up with the strain so nobly—your love and devotion never swerved and, God knows, it was sorely put to the test.
I can only hope the ghastly illness is really receding, if not disappearing altogether. At present I do feel an inner calm and a great joy in life and all it has to offer.
The new house has a welcoming and charming atmosphere. We will be together with room for our loved ones if they want to stay. So I view the future very optimistically. My innermost love for you is everlasting—let us pray that the black clouds have disappeared and be happy in creating a peaceful, harmonious new life in a beautiful new setting. I adore you.
Sydney’s sense of confinement did not abate in their new home. June had become multiple, one “me” morphing into another “me” overnight. He never quite knew where he stood. None of us did. As a husband and a physician, he tried to care for my mother. That he loved her, I have no doubt. Only a deep love could leave a man so stricken at his wife’s loss. But each of us has limits. Caring could easily give way to impatience or become an exercise in control. Stern, in an upright chair, my father was punishing and intimidating by turns. He felt he could not leave. After July 1978 the danger was evident. He had to stay. Like everyone, he also had to live.
The June he had known had been progressively hollowed out. His response was to adopt a double life, a substantial part of it hidden. This dual existence had, as I learned much later, begun in 1967, midway between my mother’s postpartum breakdown and her first suicide attempt. The solution was damaging, its fabric deception and silence. The idea was not to share troubles but to evade them. June, despite everything, was always fiercely loyal, at least in public.
He was gone and unreachable much of the time, the absent figure at family gatherings, the gap in the photograph, the invisible puppet master. His controlled resentment was often palpable. I tried and failed, more than once, to breach his armor. My father preferred me at a distance. He could not tell me everything and so preferred to say nothing. There was no middle ground. I suppose I wanted him to offset a pain it was no longer in his power to assuage.
The warm father he had been in my early childhood and the chilly figure he had become seemed unrelated. He was inaccessible. He managed June’s split life in function not only of her well-being, as far as it could ever be assured, but of his need for relief. Were there better possible outcomes than this mutually reinforcing suffering? No easy resolution offered itself. It rarely does as life closes in. My father, in his human frailty, did what he could, confronted by the “ghastly illness” afflicting his wife.
June was far too intelligent and sensitive not to know what her loyalty forbade her to say. More honesty, whatever its initial cost, would surely have helped. I know that what goes unsaid festers and wounds. That had been part of the problem ever since June first collapsed on arrival in Britain in 1957. The pattern was never broken. We knew little of love as a gift freely given. A recriminatory silence settled on our home as my mother’s illness took its long toll.
On January 1, 1979, June began treatment with Silvio Benaim, a psychiatrist whose Jewish family had fled Fascist Italy for England in 1938. Benaim, three years older than my mother, was a fellow immigrant. They had both come to rainy shores from sunlit lands. A trial he conducted early in his career on insulin coma therapy helped sound the death knell of a treatment from which my mother, at the age of twenty-eight, had suffered. He was interested in the phenomenon of hysterical epidemics. One appeared to occur in 1958 among the nursing staff at his own Royal Free Hospital.
Benaim, whose relationship with my mother would become close (he was at her funeral), was an early advocate of lithium carbonate in the treatment of bipolar illness. My mother started on lithium at once. Benaim, in a letter of May 10, 1979, described June’s depressions as times “when every day is a challenge and tends to be worse in the morning.” There followed emergence “into a state of hypo-manic activity during which she is excited, elated and over-active.” He wrote: “It is my impression that during the last few months, both her depressions and her hypo-manic phases have been milder, shorter and less disabling.”
Lithium often causes deep ambivalence in patients. It saves countless lives. It is also a muffler and a deadener, robbing manic-depressives—at least as they often see it—of the elixir of their mania, those times when sleep is unnecessary, the mind leaps in giddying bounds, ideas proliferate, desire swells, confidence bubbles, assertiveness abounds, sensitivity is acute, and anything seems possible. Virginia Woolf noted, “As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.”
My mother, in general, took her lithium. She broke off for a while after she developed a transient cerebellar lesion (which resolved completely) but never found any more effective treatment. It attenuated the highs. It did less for the lows. Of course she disliked the regimen, feeling muted and often despairing.
She would lie in the bath and let the water run out. She lay there, blank. She was numb in the empty bathtub. When she could cry, it was a relief because crying constituted feeling. At the same time, she recognized that the alternative to lithium would almost certainly be worse.
Even when taking it, her manic phases could involve paranoid delusion that brought mayhem in its wake. She was given to rages in which all her accumulated frustration at being “monitored” by my father burst out. Don’t, please, WATCH and TIME me. She bought a ticket for a Concorde flight to New York, only desisting at the last. She was honest and brash to the point of tactlessness. She bought all sorts of small gifts, sometimes giving the same one more than once to the same person. There was at least one incident of shoplifting in South Africa that required a delicate intervention from her brother. She screamed at him for getting involved in her business. A relative against whom she had conceived a grudge received enough harassing late-night phone calls in London to contact the police and have the calls traced. June screamed in outraged denial when the police came to the door. She would be up all night calling family and friends in the United States. Once, during a period of regular IRA bombings, she left a bag unattended in the middle of the food hall at Fortnum & Mason. She was questioned and—such was her hysterical outburst—detained for a spell in a locked room. She screamed at the startled security staff. I am a magistrate, how dare you do this to me! The next day the store sent a beautiful bouquet by way of apology. Des
pite my father’s pleas, she would have none of it. The flowers were returned with a furious note.
As her moods careened, June had little in the way of regular psychotherapy. My father viewed her condition as biological or endogenous. She had the far-flung, recurrent family gene whose antecedents he had plotted on a chart. In Benaim she had a wise and sympathetic physician who was treating her with the most effective medicine available. Pharmacology was the answer. But as Sydney noted in a letter to a colleague in 1983, “conventional medical therapy has, in my view and despite the unfailing support of Silvio Benaim, been almost totally ineffective.”
Was there some complement to a “conventional” approach that might have helped? As Anthony Storr has noted, “The adjective endogenous is merely a confession of ignorance, since all that it implies is that the condition of depression takes origin from within the patient, and that the psychiatrist cannot detect any obvious cause for it.” I thought my mother—in her loneliness and guilt and anger and inertia—needed regular psychotherapy to serve as an outlet for the expression of the turbulent feelings that went with the various disasters and fractures of her condition. In June 1981 she had been obliged to quit as justice of the peace, an awful blow to her self-esteem. She could not even explain the reasons for her resignation. Being a magistrate had meant a lot to her. The more I thought about her, the more I saw her as a figure in isolated exile. Therapy would not cure her, but it might ease her pain.
In her personal account of the manic-depressive condition, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Kay Redfield Jamison writes:
At this point in my existence, I cannot imagine leading a normal life without both taking lithium and having had the benefits of psychotherapy. Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible. But, ineffably, psychotherapy heals. It makes some sense of the confusion, reins in the terrifying thoughts and feelings, returns some control and hope and possibility of learning from it all. Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening, and faster than can be endured at the time. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief. But, always, it is where I have believed—or have learned to believe—that I might someday be able to contend with all this.