Hanging with the Elephant: A Story of Love, Loss and Meditation

by Michael Harding

  In her diary she wrote.

  Very upset about the water. He did nothing. I have no one to help me.

  And the next day.

  Stayed up to watch the New Year on television. Nobody rang.

  And the next day.

  Nobody called. Bad day.

  She lived through sixteen more Christmases, mostly spending them with us, either in Leitrim or Mullingar, and they were always much the same. There was a glass wall between mother and son. We went through various rituals and we sometimes brushed our cheeks against each other when we met or parted, but that was about it. Intimacy was a project we had both abandoned.

  When she came for Christmas, we tried to do as much as we could for her. We warmed the bed. We put on big fires in the front room. We got water for her at night and a bedside lamp that she could manipulate with ease if she needed to go to the toilet. But nothing worked.

  She was isolated in a little world of her own, which she tracked in her diary but was resolute in keeping from her son. And she teared up with automatic melancholy when other folk walked into her presence. I asked her once why she didn’t share more with me. She said, ‘I don’t want to be upsetting you.’

  But she did upset me. She was unhappy all the time, and that made me sad.

  Sometimes, I wondered why. Did I not visit her often enough? Did she feel she ought to be living with us even though we only had a cottage with two tiny bedrooms? And no matter how many Sundays we took her to dinner in the Kilmore Hotel, or no matter how many times we brought her to family festivals, birthday parties, or for Christmas, we never really were able to cross the line and reach the space where she lay wounded for so many years. In hotels, she always insisted on paying for the dinner. At Christmas, she brought puddings, Christmas cake and bottles of whiskey. But when Christmas or Easter or the child’s birthday was over, she went home to her own house and closed the door, and wrote in her diary and said nothing more to us.

  I would often spend half an hour on the phone.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mammy?’ I would say. And she would break into willowy sobs.

  ‘Nothing,’ she would reply. ‘Nothing at all.’ The silence would stretch out between us on the line like a great empty beach in Donegal and we might as well have been at either end of that beach, whispering into the wind.

  ‘Please tell me what’s wrong, Mammy. Did I do something to annoy you?’ Over and over again. Until eventually she would say it again: ‘Nothing.’ And the phone would go dead, leaving me full of anxiety that I had failed as a son.

  Maybe she didn’t have the language to express her terror of old age or her rage at ending up so frail. Perhaps there was something about growing old that she couldn’t accept or articulate.

  And yet with other people, she could be the direct opposite. When other people held her, called her, touched her, she responded like a little girl who is admired in a new dress. This was the most important mystery about her life – that, alone, she sank deep into the dark and yet when she was teased into company, she became almost alarmingly jolly. She was vivacious. And she was even jolly in old age when anyone reached out to her. When her neighbours came to the door with the newspapers or groceries or collecting for the parish, she’d bring them into the drawing room and show them pictures of her grandchild and talk about how well her children were doing in the world and gossip for hours about other neighbours. She wouldn’t let them go for hours, because she needed them so much.

  And yet if, subsequently, I phoned her and enquired if she had seen anyone over the previous few days, she would leave a pause on the line that had a kind of anger in it, and eventually she would whisper, ‘Nobody.’

  THE SAME NOBODY I was left with when the beloved was in Poland. And I feared that the days would pass slowly and that I would be bored with no one to talk to. But I was wrong. In fact, the days flew.

  It snowed twice. Rainstorms battered the roof at night, and the gutters got clogged with pine needles blown from the trees and the water began to overspill from the guttering onto the window sills. One night, the electricity went out and I sat by the fire reading from a Kindle, and I lit the stove in the sun room and then fried potato cakes, eggs and rashers in a pan on top of the stove. It felt like camping out.

  Every morning, I made a bowl of porridge and a pot of coffee. I went to the studio and lit the stove there. I sat looking out at the mountain. Around noon, I went walking up the hill. In the afternoons, I sat again in the studio, dozing, eating apples and drinking coffee. On the first day, I had made a shrine by clearing a small table and layering it with blue Mongolian prayer scarves and white Tibetan prayer scarves and I brought out a statue of Buddha from the glass case. A precious Buddha statue I had got from the reincarnation of the King of Tibet in India years before. I had put a candle beside it. I wanted to set out the water bowls as well, but when I saw them in the drawer corroded from having been left unused for too long, I’d decided to leave them where they were.

  After five days alone, I had seen nobody apart from the postman, whom I saw occasionally through the window as he dropped electricity bills and flyers for Aldi in the letterbox or when he knocked on the glass door of my studio with a parcel. I had planned to clean the house to a standard of military perfection because I’ve always had the notion that with one person away, cleaning would require less effort. But after almost a week, things were getting more chaotic.

  The dirty clothes defeated me. I put on a wash, probably on too high a heat, which turned the bed sheets pink because I had thrown in some particularly red tartan pyjama bottoms, which I had been given the previous Christmas to match the pair of tartan slippers. I wasn’t bothered about that, apart from being angry with the pyjamas. First, they killed my libido and now they were destroying the sheets. I dragged them out of the tumbler and hissed at them as if I was holding a disobedient dog.

  ‘You fucking stupid excuse for pyjamas,’ I said.

  I do know that pyjama bottoms are an inanimate object and incapable of feeling. I know they didn’t worm their way into the washing machine unbeknownst to me. But being alone has many strange effects on the mind, and I had begun to develop a compulsion to vent my anger at the most innocuous of objects around me.

  Drying clothes was another difficulty. I couldn’t master the art of drying anything outside. I presume it’s possible because the beloved does it all the time. But women may have some secret ability to sense when the rain is going to stop, so they can dash out and throw everything on the line immediately and take them in again two hours later before the rain resumes.

  I decided to dry them in the house. I even found three clotheshorses in the shed that had been there since the time the child was in Baby-gros, and I set them up in the sun room and lit the stove. We have central heating, but we also have four stoves – one for her studio, one for my studio, one for the office and one for the sun room. They were bought one at a time, and the theory was that they saved money. But the stove in the sun room is rarely used, and so it smoked all day while I was out in my studio chanting like a Mongolian Lama. Even the cobwebs went sooty. I had no alternative but to put on the central heating and leave the clotheshorses stacked against the radiators all night. But that didn’t work either. Maybe I stacked up too much because the radiators just warmed the wet garments and detergent filled the room with a soft damp aroma in the morning.

  After that, I didn’t bother with clothes. I put the wet ones back in the machine, given that many of them were sooty from the smoking stove, and I resolved not to bother changing the clothes I was wearing for the rest of the month. I just needed to be careful. After that, I allowed my elephant go where he wanted. I was going to suit myself. Let the elephant do what he likes and sit where he wants and wear pyjamas. Don’t keep trying to improve him. Besides, no one was going to know if I didn’t change my clothes for the month.

  That attitude clearly suited me. I relaxed. I started to become gentle with myself. I stopped pushing myself out of bed in the morning
s or pushing myself up the hill for exercise or pushing myself into the kitchen to tidy up. Just leave things as they are, I thought. ‘Let the universe unfold, man,’ as my artistic friends say when they’re rolling a doobie. ‘Give the poor fucken elephant a break.’

  Yes, my libido had gradually been declining since I began wearing tartan pyjamas but now even my need for other people was fading. My interest in the postman or the radio was dying. I was drifting into a soft, unfocused coma.

  My only stimulation came from the wilderness. The majestic Lough Allen and Sliabh an Iarainn, the Scots pines with their long hanging branches over the door, the storms at night and the magpie that struggled to grip the moving branch and save himself from the sleet and snow. He was marching about on the water tank one morning for so long that I felt he had things to tell me. I think the beloved used to feed him bits of bread, so he was probably missing her. And he had the courage to hop towards me across the water tank until he was quite close; one eye staring at me like my friend the General in bad humour. I could actually imagine him speaking as I covered the ash bucket with a plastic bag.

  ‘Where’s that woman gone?’ I imagined him saying.

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘She was nice.’

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ I repeated out loud.

  ‘It will be,’ he said, ‘if you’re running the show much longer. Jesus, look at this place.’

  He stared at me and then at the ash buckets.

  True enough, we had four buckets for ashes but they were all full and the wind was blowing ash everywhere.

  ‘This place is in shit,’ the magpie declared.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘Go find your own breakfast.’

  I was trying to get the ashes from the bucket into the plastic bag and he was so aggressive that I got distracted.

  It’s a tricky operation. You have to cover the entire bucket with the bag, then turn the bucket upside down so that the ashes fall cleanly into the bag and then you make sure not to take the bucket out too soon in case the ash dust blows all over the yard.

  I executed everything very well, except for one part – you’re not supposed to do it with last night’s ashes in case they’re still hot.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I screamed as the black plastic melted and the ashes fell in a formless lump like loose snow.

  ‘Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh,’ the magpie cackled, so I took a stone and flung it at him. But I missed. Although I did hit the postman, who was coming around the gable of the house. I laughed it off and accepted the mail; a brochure from Sky and The Path to Freedom, a dissertation on an ancient Tibetan text by the Dalai Lama which I had ordered from Amazon in a flush of optimism when my beloved first announced she was going to Poland.

  ‘Them magpies are whores,’ I declared to the postman, affecting the tone of tribes indigenous to the Cavan region. ‘If I had a fucken gun I’d scatter the lot of them,’ I added, which I suppose just shows how much I needed to read something by the Dalai Lama.

  Clearly meditation wasn’t doing me any good.

  I considered the situation when the postman had clipped the door of his van closed, smiled at me through the window and driven off up the hill. It was too late in the day to be trying to communicate with gods or gurus, I thought, and I decided to dismantle my shrine and put away the statue of the Buddha. To coin a phrase – you can’t teach an old elephant new tricks.

  I suppose that was a fundamental act of despair. The truth is that the future always offers limitless possibilities. We can never predict what will happen next. For example, the beloved might never return from Poland. Who was to say? Maybe she would find someone else out there on the side of the road and fall in love over a few vodkas, or succumb to the power of prayer and turn herself in at the door of a monastery in some remote and snowy mountain from where she would never emerge and I would never find her. I might be traipsing across the Tatra Mountains for the remaining years of my life calling her name. There was no point in being anxious about the future, because the future is unknown. All I could do was try to survive for a while without her.

  I know that sitting still for half an hour a day, and avoiding television and Facebook and looking into the lake, can have a great calming effect on lots of other people. I’ve seen them chilled out sometimes at Buddhist retreats, like they’ve been stiffened by the faintest lair of shellac sprayed on their skin as they sit immobile in the lotus position for hours. But my fists were clenched, I was frightening the magpies, the postman may have suspected I was having a nervous breakdown, and the house was a kip.

  So I abandoned everything. I abandoned the Buddha and the prayer shawls and the candles and the incense and all the books and leaflets and pictures of dakinis. I put them all in a drawer and I sat by the stove in the empty room for a while, saying, ‘Just take it easy and be gentle with yourself.’ Over and over again I said it. ‘Let the old elephant go where he wants.’

  I was watching the rhythm of the flames behind the glass door. If there was an elephant in the room, then he was standing completely still, and tranquil, like he was made of gossamer and filled with light and he was about to fly off over the lake.

  ‘Maybe I’m already enlightened,’ I whispered, with not another soul present, unless you consider the millions of other Buddha beings, bodhisattvas and the communion of Catholic saints, Doctor Who and Jesus and Mary, and really so many more that I can’t go through them all. I believe in them all. I couldn’t see them but I felt they were surrounding me, like a swarm of bees, and I decided to address them formally in this crucial moment.

  ‘I apologise for being angry with the magpie and the pyjama bottoms,’ I said. ‘After all, what harm have they done me? And I’m sorry I was fretting about cleaning the house. I realise none of it matters.’

  And in that single instant, I felt enlightened in the way that ordinary folk are enlightened. Just like the widow woman in west Cavan who used to say the rosary in the church on quiet afternoons, and then slap herself with holy water and walk on down to the shop to make lewd jokes with the other women about the young curate. Just like the old philosopher in Clare Island who made his own whiskey and had a handlebar moustache and philosophised by his own fireside for eighty winters. And all the women with headscarves who used to sit in the shelter shed in Lough Derg through the night talking about the quality of soda bread in the midlands. And the shepherd in Lizzy Buggy’s Bar in Dowra, whose dog was always under the legs of his high stool and who used to sit with one glass of stout all afternoon, listening to the clock, and looking out the window at the children coming from school and seeing in them the same beautiful innocence that he regarded every spring in newborn lambs.

  Maybe enlightenment is nothing more than a highly developed emotional intelligence, or what used to be described as common sense; a word that long ago faded from the lexicon of mental health.

  And then the good feeling vanished, like the vicarious sunlight in Leitrim that often withers behind a sudden cloud. I no longer felt enlightened and the only thing I wanted was to go into Tesco. I had an intense craving for everything. Every lust and appetite that had been sleeping in me woke up at the same moment. I was so consumed by my general appetites that I was almost afraid to get into the jeep in case I’d crash. But Jesus, Mary and Saint Joseph, I fucking needed Tesco. I wanted Tesco. I wasn’t going to cling to the dry solitude of meditation if I didn’t feel like it. I wasn’t going to clench my fist all day in some act of resistance and say, ‘I must not submit to my appetites, because I’m on a journey of spiritual inquiry.’ Fuck that. Let it go. Stop clinging to spiritual inquiries. I was off to Tesco.

  And it was glorious. So many people with shopping trollies, so much colour and light and the decadent excess of glossy products on the shelves. And I was dizzy at the sight of women again. Buying too much and bringing it all home. The lady on the till asked me if I had a clubcard.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Do you have a clubcard?’

/>   ‘Ah, listen,’ I said. ‘Do I look like I have a clubcard?’

  ‘No,’ she said, looking at me and laughing, ‘you don’t.’

  And her good humour encouraged me to continue, not quite knowing what I was talking about.

  ‘Sure, in the long run none of us have clubcards,’ I said.

  ‘You’re dead right,’ she said.

  ‘If we only had the clubcards,’ I said, ‘we’d be singing.’

  She laughed again.

  Not that I understood what she was laughing at either, or what a clubcard was, but I had just had so much fun meandering up and down the aisles after being two weeks on my own that I was enormously over-excited.

  And I got so much stuff I didn’t need, and then came home and cooked a curry and ate it with rice as I sat at the television watching Girls.

  The cat was looking at me and whining as I ate. It was a devastating moment. I had not thought about her in Tesco. I had thought only of myself. And here she was like the reincarnation of some great teacher in a former lifetime, chastising me. She and I may have been together for endless lifetimes. She may have been my mother in a former life or I hers. She, I believe, was certainly my precious guru at some stage and now it was my responsibility to mind her. So I told her that, in the morning, I would go to the vet and get her a bag of Science Plan, her favourite dish. I apologised and said that, for now, I could only offer her some curry. I put a little curry and rice on her saucer. She turned her nose up once or twice, but eventually she dug in with such enthusiasm for the hot spices that I felt it was almost a confirmation that she was indeed my precious teacher in a former life in the wilds of Tamil Nadu, teaching dance perhaps to young classical singers dressed in saffron robes, their ankles adorned with jingling bells. Anything is possible, I thought. And I sat with her, the two of us, as happy as laughing Buddhas on the sofa watching FashionTV on the fifty-inch screen.