by Roger Cohen
My mother had no safe place where she could learn to contend. She had no sanctuary. She was a transplant that did not take. Fresh soil invigorated my father. It overwhelmed my mother in the end. Too much of her was left behind in South Africa.
June tried to kill herself again on April 15, 1982, almost four years after the first attempt. Again she took an overdose. There was another note to my father.
I see no end to our pain. You talked of five years of purgatory—it could be endless. You are too fine and noble a person to be deeply worried about me so much. You’ve done all (and more) to help. I’m just too tired now to fight anymore.
That morning June had called her old friend Noreen Weber, who lived down the road. Noreen, whose husband, Harry, was a psychiatrist, had followed my mother’s mental struggle over a quarter century. Words June had spoken to her in a psychiatric hospital in 1957—I’ve got a perfect baby and I don’t know why I’m crying but I can’t stop—never left her. When they first met, in 1954, Noreen had wondered if they could be friends. June was “Mrs. Perfect.” Her husband was perfect, her life was perfect, her clothes were perfect, everything had to be just so. Then she discovered June’s rapier intelligence, her honesty, her humor—and finally her pain.
There had been occasions in recent years when June, in her dressing gown and nightdress, would come running down to Noreen’s house at night, saying she could not stand to stay at home anymore. One of the problems in the marriage, as Noreen saw it, was that June developed. She discovered assertiveness. Now all June said was: “I just want to tell you how much I love you.”
As she thought about the conversation, Noreen had the uneasy feeling June was saying goodbye. She grabbed a key my mother had given her and rushed up to the house. My mother was on her bed with a bottle of pills beside her and a plastic bag over her head. Noreen pulled her upright and called for an ambulance. She reached my father at Guy’s. June was rushed to the Royal Free Hospital, where she remained for several days.
You, I hope, will find a worthy companion to enjoy the beauty of the farm—the rugged walks, the bracing air, the solitude and gorgeous garden.
My father, in 1973, had bought a 240-acre farm in central Wales, a beautiful property set in rolling hills. Here he could be alone with the sheep, the kestrels, the streams, the silence, and the pitch-black nights. He worked his magic in the form of a garden that flourished even in the rare sunlight. He planted pines. He built himself a carpentry workshop in a barn from which beguiling benches and tables emerged. For my mother, with her longing for the South African sun of her youth, the house was hard to love. It was not what she would have chosen. The soft air of the Mediterranean was more her habitat. She did her best. But cold sapped her. The wind always seemed to be up.
I wanted so much to help you always, but it is now no longer possible. I am sure our children will be a great comfort—they have grown into fine people. But our Jen needs a lot of love and understanding.
Just six months earlier Sydney had written to Benaim to say how delighted he was with June’s progress since her discharge from a mental health facility: “She is lively and energetic, but sleeping very well with minimum sedation and altogether a delight to be with. I am at last optimistic that the nightmare might be over. If it is, then her recovery is due in my estimation almost entirely to your unfailing support and skill through all the dark years.”
Such spasms of hope—that the turbulent horror might forever recede, that June might be liberated from her demons—occurred for some time before the repetitive pattern became too set to allow serious contemplation of uninterrupted relief. Most long marriages, at some stage, need at least the mirage of a new start. There could be none. The infernal illness had to be endured. It allowed only moments of lightness and laughter. She loved children, who adored her in turn. I see her seated on the carpet, legs folded back behind her, playing cards for hours with my daughter Jessica, born in 1981, and son Daniel born the next year. Treasures, she called them.
My mother spent more time in South Africa. When in London, long silences were punctuated by occasional explosions as June emerged from depression into a manic phase and expressed all her bottled-up rage. Then plates would be smashed. Sometimes she would call friends to come “rescue” her. Her fury was the obverse of her devotion to my father.
You are ashamed of me for reasons best known to yourself! I do not know who your friends are! You blame me for something I cannot control! You REALLY want to pursue your own life unhindered by my presence! I am not a laboratory specimen!
My mother’s second suicide note ended with these words:
My precious, forgive me, forgive me. I never meant to hurt you or anyone for all the world. I will always be near you in spirit—always my love—my dearest, dearest love, my beloved.
My mother in South Africa six years before her death, September 1993
“At the moment June is somewhat euphoric,” wrote my father in 1983, “and on past experience this state is likely to persist for perhaps a few months, after which her spirits and level of activity will gradually decline and then quite swiftly severe depression will take relentless grip of her mind.”
I have tried to measure the agony he went through and concluded that I do not have an adequate frame of reference.
I walk with my mother on the beach at Muizenberg. It is a calm, clear morning. We can see Simon’s Town and, stretching beyond it, the Cape of Good Hope pointing its green tongue toward Antarctica. The sand is ridged and firm at water’s edge. The bracing sea washes now and then over our feet, planted here at the bottom of Africa. The laughter and voices of children mingle with the sound of the surf. June is wearing sunglasses and a floppy white hat and a pink swimsuit. The jingle of an ice-cream van drawing up next to the mini-golf course reaches us in the warm breeze. A plane leaves its softening vapor trail across the immense blue sky. My mother slips her cool hand into mine and speaks.
“What is it, darling?”
“Well, it’s a long story.”
“You can tell me.” A little squeeze of the hand …
“Shall I begin at the beginning?”
“Or in the middle, it doesn’t really matter now. Les jeux sont faits! Oh, how Laurie loved the roulette tables in Monte Carlo.”
“Those were good times.”
“You know I tried my best, wanted everything to be right, even perfect. And I failed, but perhaps it was not my fault.”
“You never wanted to leave, did you, Mama?”
“Leave?”
“South Africa. It was your home.”
“Yes. I suppose it is. I had my bearings here. And I lost them. I got uprooted. Absence is terrible. You know, darling, what Mole says in The Wind in the Willows: ‘Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way!’ ”
My mother stops, smiles, breathes the salt air in, contemplates the faraway horizon, as if asking how anyone could exhale all this and inhale the forbidding north.
“Ever since I lost you,” I say, “it has proved hard to love. The loss was a catastrophe, you see, it took away all meaning. The temple collapsed. My love was frozen. And now I find myself alone.”
“Lost me? But darling …”
“Yes, they took you away. I know now what happened. Because I was not old enough to have an explanation, I could only blame myself. It was a brutal change. I could never restore you to life, nor let go of you. I could not trust enough to love. In the end I always had to punish those who tried to love me, avenge myself somehow for the bereavement you caused. I had to find vitality at any price. Every relationship was a mausoleum in the making.”
“I was alive and with you. I came back to you,” she says.
“You returned like a faint echo.”
“No more than that?”
“Like the light from a dead star.”
“Still, I was there,” says my mother.
“
My mourning continued. There was a gaping hole. You had been buried alive. And Dad was too preoccupied to fill the gap.”
“But there were happy times, darling. We recovered. You were a golden boy. You did so well!”
“The doing was also a cover-up, Mama. It is time to say that now. The hectic achievement was a distraction from an empty core. Ambition and imagination were the best sanctuaries I could find; and passion, physical pleasure, the surest distraction.”
“I tried to resume our conversation. I know how much words matter to you.”
“You did give me the gift of loving closeness. I knew what it was before I lost it. To have lost it is better than never to have had it. I have understood how you gave love and how it was taken away. I have also learned through you how stubborn and fixed love can be. Perhaps that gift has saved me in the darkest times.”
“Darling …”
I looked up. My mother was gone.
A decade after her second suicide attempt, during a visit to South Africa, my mother was diagnosed with cancer of the liver and lung. She told my sister, who burst into tears on the phone. “Darling, you must not cry for me,” June said. “As far as I’m concerned, this gives me a legitimate way out.”
She was brave. Cancer to my mother was a derisory thing, even a solace. The cajoling voice in her ear had become an insistent intruder. Yet the illness moved slowly. She lived far longer than expected, testimony to the force of her spirit. As for her will, I am sure that it often tugged in the opposite direction.
Her chatty letters would arrive from time to time at my homes in Paris and Berlin.
We leave on Sunday for Madeira—the sight of blue skies and feeling warm is a joy to relish. It’s been quite arctic here with the usual chaos and disruption.
Or this:
The cancer is moving VERY slowly. As you know I accept it and refuse to let it interfere with what I want to do. Pain can be controlled with drugs so I have little to fear.
And in the same letter:
I’m sorry—I forgot to bring you the mats for glasses which go with your set. I’m rather forgetful now!
As the illness ate away at her, and she became thinner and frailer, she gave parties at which there was no room for sadness. In Johannesburg and London she gathered friends for tea and cakes in the Killarney Mall or at the Ritz, and she would say, with a disconcerting joie de vivre, that she wished to thank everyone for their kindness and patience. Her zest was hard to reconcile with the message delivered: she was dying. Cancer was doing what it does, feeding on her flesh. But nobody should worry too much about that. She was in good hands.
Her private torment continued. When she was down, she hid away. She kept her dignity. She was now almost a half century into the marriage that had begun on her family’s fairyland Houghton estate back in 1950. Close to half of it had been under the manic-depressive cloud. Once, over lunch in the West End, she confided in a close friend, Eve Pollecoff: There’s somebody else. It’s somebody at the hospital. Eve, another Jewish woman who had grown up in Africa (and who had been told on arrival at Cheltenham College that she was one over the quota of 1 percent for Jews), insisted that she was wrong. That could not be. June waved her away. She knew.
My parents’ wedding in Johannesburg on June 29, 1950. My uncle Bert is standing left. Next to him, my grandmother Polly. In the center are my parents, June and Sydney. My maternal grandparents, Laurie and Flossie, are standing at right, my grandmother looking pained. The bridesmaids, left to right, are my mother’s cousins Peta and Sue Michel, my father’s nieces Linda Gillman and Barbara Fink, and my mother’s cousin Jane Sive.
She wrote letters to Sydney she never sent, made resolutions she did not keep.
You need to admit to yourself that you see me as an enormous burden, as someone with whom you are unable to emote or to share your thoughts. However, after so many years together I can read your thoughts very well. Your manner and expression tell me all.
I want you to know and to believe that I consider you to have many great and wonderful virtues for which I respect and love you. You have stood by me when I’m ill and you’ve always been extremely generous. You are reliable, dependable, capable, honest and highly talented, both in your chosen field and in your pastimes. I have never been able to measure up to your standards however hard I have tried. I have felt myself to be very much in your shadow and under your constant scrutiny and judgment.
I WANT you to feel free and to pursue your own interests when and how you please. As long as I am fit I now intend to be away from you as much as possible. Should you ever need me (for whatever reason) you will find me by your side. I will never stop loving you—as you once said, “Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.”
We need to see whether our lives will be happier when we are apart. I suggest we put this to the test in the following six months and then review our situation. I certainly do not intend to stay trapped in an unhappy relationship where you look at me with utmost displeasure and you keep your life very apart from mine. I take this decision with a very heavy heart but I am quite firm in my resolve. You obviously need and want your own lifestyle and you find me and my lifestyle a serious obstruction to your peace of mind. I only wish you well. May you find peace and be happy. I am yours when and if you want me.
They stayed together. My father cared for my mother day after day. She lay in bed propped on pillows. She showed no self-pity and, when she could still muster it, a good deal of gaiety. June was good at dying. It was her grand finale, her last and irreproachable act.
A few months before she died, on August 4, 1998, Sydney wrote a poem about her:
I have lost my way
And can only stare at the stars
I drift in neuronal void
And lament forgotten days.
I crave the faces I knew
And the clatter of tongues
Yet those about me
Seem voiceless and grey.
Thoughts revolve in a shrunken shell
And silence is the throb of despair
Oblivion tugs at my hand—
For I have lost my way.
He called the poem “JBC”—her initials. He might have called it “SC.” It was as much about his pain in that moment as about hers.
She was quiet but resolute. In that small frame, reduced almost to nothing now, she summoned some indomitable force that would not be quieted even with her passing. When she opened her eyes and saw me, three days before the end, she took a moment to focus—and then happiness filled her eyes like morning sunlight filtering through a curtain. Her breathing was thin. We are all Lazarus for a moment. Death does not come unannounced. Liminal states precede it. Cancer had tamed at last the crippling gyration of her moods. For June there could be no greater peace. She held my hand and would not let go. My sister fed her a last meal—half of a canned pear and chocolate ice cream—running the spoon across her mouth to get the bits.
Her last words to my father were: “Thank you, darling.”
Love, to my mother, was—in the words of a Shakespeare sonnet she liked to quote—“an ever-fixed mark,” an idea that “bears it out even to the edge of doom.” It was single and indissoluble, the deepest truth of her tormented life. In death, against all odds, it was love that prevailed.
My mother died on January 2, 1999. Her corpse was carried out of the house in a black plastic bag. The undertakers carrying her wore dark suits. I thought they looked like murderers. As she was loaded into their van, the sky darkened. Inky clouds crowded across the sky. There was an explosive thunderclap—her soul, I thought, snapping loose. Lightning stabbed downward in a shard worthy of a Giorgione painting. Rain fell in torrents, the good rain. My father, a man of great self-control, was gripped by convulsive weeping.
“Go free now,” my sister whispered.
At my father’s request, I had made the mistake of trying to pry June’s wedding ring off her stiffening finger and struggled for minutes before completing a t
ask that should have been left to others. My mother had always been slight but now seemed more bone than flesh. Her face was beaked like a small bird’s, her arms as slender as those of Degas’s dancers. Yet her finger was unyielding. I found myself whispering coaxing words—“Let it all go”—to the pinched mask of my mother, propped at a regal angle recalling the likeness of some undersize French monarch in a frosty medieval crypt.
The black van carrying her corpse disappeared into the deluge.
My father turned the ring in his long fingers, examining this evidence of his marriage as if it were a report on an unfathomable symptom. “You know,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to stifle a sob, “I’m amazed how grief-stricken I am. This has been coming for so long. It’s like falling in love again.” Cathartic grief had drawn us, however fleetingly, into the togetherness June had always wanted.
Her funeral, a humanist service she and Sydney had chosen, was held at the Golders Green Crematorium, in the heart of Jewish London but without a Jewish reference. The chapel was packed with mourners. June’s friends spoke movingly of her courage. I tried to say something of the light and the shadow: