Levels of Life

by Julian Barnes

  When he landed near the Château de Montigny, the French were as hospitable as he had always found them. They did not even mind his raillery about the superiority of the British political system. They merely fed him some more, and urged him to smoke another cigar in the far safer conditions of their fireside.

  On his return to England, he sat down and wrote a book. His flight had taken place on the 23rd of March. A Ride Across the Channel and Other Adventures In The Air was published by Samson, Low thirteen days later, on the 5th of April.

  On the previous day, the 4th of April 1882, Sarah Bernhardt had married Aristides Damal, a Greek diplomat turned actor, a famously vain and insolent womaniser (also spendthrift, gambler and morphine addict). Since he was Greek Orthodox, and she a Jewish Roman Catholic, the easiest place for them to be married quickly was London: at the Protestant church of St Andrew’s, Wells Street. Whether she was able to buy a copy of Fred Burnaby’s book to read on her honeymoon is not known. The marriage was a disaster.

  Three years later, having illicitly joined Lord Wolseley’s expedition to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, Burnaby was killed at the Battle of Abu Klea by a spear-thrust to the neck from one of the Mahdi’s soldiers.

  Mrs Burnaby was to marry again; she also established herself as a prolific authoress. Ten years after her first husband’s death, she published a manual, now long unavailable, called Hints on Snow Photography.

  THE LOSS OF DEPTH

  You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

  After the Battle of Abu Klea there were ‘immense hordes of dead Arabs’, who were ‘by necessity, left unburied’. But not unexamined. Each had a leather band round one arm containing a prayer composed by the Mahdi, who promised his soldiers that it would turn British bullets to water. Love gives us a similar feeling of faith and invincibility. And sometimes, perhaps often, it works. We dodge between bullets as Sarah Bernhardt claimed to dodge between raindrops. But there is always the sudden spear-thrust to the neck. Because every love story is a potential grief story.

  Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still – at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) – it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

  We were together for thirty years. I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart. And though she hated the idea of growing old – in her twenties, she thought she would never live past forty – I happily looked forward to our continuing life together: to things becoming slower and calmer, to collaborative recollection. I could imagine myself taking care of her; I could even – though I didn’t – have imagined myself, like Nadar, easing the hair from her aphasiac temples, learning the part of the tender nurse (and the fact that she might have hated such dependency is irrelevant). Instead, from a summer to an autumn, there was anxiety, alarm, fear, terror. It was thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death. I tried never to look away, always to face it; and a kind of crazy lucidity resulted. Most evenings, as I left the hospital, I would find myself staring resentfully at people on buses merely going home at the end of their day. How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?

  We are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern. And as E. M. Forster put it, ‘One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another.’ So grief in turn becomes unimaginable: not just its length and depth, but its tone and texture, its deceptions and false dawns, its recidivism. Also, its initial shock: you have suddenly come down in the freezing German Ocean, equipped only with an absurd cork overjacket that is supposed to keep you alive.

  And you can never prepare for this new reality in which you have been dunked. I know someone who thought, or hoped, she could. Her husband was a long time dying of cancer; being practical, she asked in advance for a reading list, and assembled the classic texts of bereavement. They made no difference when the moment came. ‘The moment’: that feeling of months which on examination prove only to have been days.

  For many years I would occasionally think of an account I read by a woman novelist about the death of her older husband. Amid her grief, she admitted, there was a small inner voice of truth murmuring to her, ‘I’m free.’ I remembered this when my own time came, fearing that prompter’s whisper which would sound like a betrayal. But no such voice was heard, no such words. One grief throws no light upon another.

  Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to other drivers, to the unwidowed.

  We grieve in character. That too seems obvious, but this is a time when nothing seems or feels obvious. A friend died, leaving a wife and two children. How did they respond? The wife set about redecorating the house; the son went into his father’s study and did not emerge until he had read every message, every document, every hint of evidence left behind; the daughter made paper lanterns to float on the lake where her father’s ashes were to be cast.

  Another friend died, suddenly, catastrophically, by the baggage carousel of a foreign airport. His wife had gone to fetch a trolley; when she returned, there was a scrum of people surrounding something. Perhaps a suitcase had burst open. But no, her husband had burst open, and was already dead. A year or two later, when my wife died, she wrote to me: ‘The thing is – nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.’ I found this consoling, and kept her letter on my desk for a long time; though I doubted I would ever come to relish the pain. But then I was only at the start of things.

  I did already know that only the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak. Nothing modernly evasive or medicalising. Grief is a human, not a medical, condition, and while there are pills to help us forget it – and everything else – there are no pills to cure it. The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically (‘it hurts exactly as much as it is worth’) sad. One euphemistic verb I especially loathed was ‘pass’. ‘I’m sorry to hear your wife has passed’ (as in ‘passed water’? ‘passed blood’?). You do not have to force the word ‘die’ on others, even if you always use it yourself. There is a midpoint. At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, ‘There’s someone missing.’ That felt correct, in both senses.

  Griefs do not explain one another, but they may overlap. And so there is a complicity among the griefstruck. Only you know what you know – even if it is just that you know different things. You have stepped through a mirror, as in some Cocteau film, and find yourself in a world reordered in logic and pattern. A small example. Three years before my wife died, an old friend of mine, the poet Christopher Reid, was also widowed. He wrote about his wife’s dying and its aftermath. In one poem he described the denial by the living of those who have died:

  but I too have met the tribal will to impose

  taboos and codes, and have behaved rudely,

  invoking my dead wife in dinner-table conversatio
n.

  A beat of silence, of shared fear and sick shock, falls.

  When I first read these lines, I thought: what strange friends you must have. I also thought: you didn’t really believe you were behaving rudely, did you? Later, when my own turn came, I understood. I took the early decision (or, more likely, given the turmoil of my brain, the decision took me) to speak of my wife whenever I wanted or needed to: invoking her would be a normal part of any normal exchange – even though ‘normality’ was long fled. I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear lightweight. The young do better than the middle-aged; women better than men. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does. After all, you might expect those closest to you in age and sex and marital status to understand best. What a naivety. I remember a ‘dinner-table conversation’ in a restaurant with three married friends of roughly my age. Each had known her for many years – perhaps eighty or ninety in total – and each would have said, if asked, that they loved her. I mentioned her name; no one picked it up. I did it again, and again nothing. Perhaps the third time I was deliberately trying to provoke, being pissed off at what struck me not as good manners but cowardice. Afraid to touch her name, they denied her thrice, and I thought the worse of them for it.

  There is the question of anger. Some are angry with the person who has died, who has abandoned them, betrayed them by losing life. What could be more irrational than that? Few die willingly, not even most suicides. Some of the griefstruck are angry with God, but if He doesn’t exist, that too is irrational. Some are angry with the universe for letting it happen, for this being the inevitable, irreversible case. I didn’t exactly feel this, but through that autumn of 2008 I read the papers and followed events on television with an overpowering indifference. ‘The News’ seemed just a larger, more insulting version of those busfuls of unheeding passengers, the fuel of their transport solipsism and ignorance. For some reason I cared a lot about Obama getting elected, but very little about anything else in the world. They said that the whole financial system might be about to crash and burn, but this didn’t bother me. Money could not have saved her, so what good was money, and what was the point in saving its neck? They said the world’s climate was reaching a point of no return, but it could go to that point and beyond for all it mattered to me. I would drive home from the hospital and at a certain stretch of road, just before a railway bridge, the words would come into my head, and I would repeat them aloud: ‘It’s just the universe doing its stuff.’ That was ‘all’ that ‘it’ – this enormous, tremendous ‘it’ – was. The words didn’t hold any consolation; perhaps they were a way of resisting alternative, false consolations. But if the universe was just doing its stuff, it could do its stuff to itself as well, and to hell with it. What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn’t, wouldn’t, save her?

  A friend whose husband died almost instantly of a stroke in his mid-fifties told me of her anger not at him, but at the fact that he didn’t know. Didn’t know he was going to die, didn’t have time to prepare, to say farewells to her and their children. This is a form of being angry with the universe. An anger at indifference – the indifference of life merely continuing until it merely ends.

  So the anger may be visited instead on friends. For their inability to say or do the right things, for their unwanted pressingness or seeming froideur. And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common. Some friends are as scared of grief as they are of death; they avoid you as if they fear infection. Some, without knowing it, half expect you to do their mourning for them. Others put on a bright practicality. ‘So,’ a voice on the phone asks, a week after I have buried my wife, ‘what are you up to? Are you going on walking holidays?’ I shout at the phone for a moment or two, then put it down. No: walking holidays were what we did together, when my life was on the level.

  But strangely, in retrospect, this impertinent question wasn’t too far out. I had occasionally, over the years, imagined what I might do if ‘something bad’ happened in my life. I did not specify the ‘something bad’ to myself, but the possibilities were very limited. I decided in advance that I would do one trivial and one more serious thing. The first was that I would finally succumb to Rupert Murdoch and sign up for a panoply of sports channels. The second would be to walk, by myself, across France – or, if that seemed unfeasible, across a corner of it, specifically along the Canal du Midi, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, my rucksack containing a notebook in which I would record my attempts to deal with the ‘something bad’. But when it happened, I had no desire to pull on my boots. And ‘walking holiday’ would hardly be the name for such a grief-trudge.

  Other distractions were proposed, other advice given. Some reacted as if the death of the loved one were merely an extreme form of divorce. I was advised to get a dog. I would reply sarcastically that this did not seem much of a substitute for a wife. I was warned by a widow to ‘try not to notice other couples’ – but most of my friends form couples. Someone suggested I rent a flat in Paris for six months, or, failing that, ‘a beach cabin in Guadeloupe’. She and her husband would look after my house while I was away. This would be convenient for them, and ‘we’d have a garden for Freddie’. The proposal came by email during the last day of my wife’s life. And Freddie was their dog.

  Of course, the Silent Ones and the advice givers will be feeling grief of their own, and perhaps their own anger, which may be aimed at us – at me. They might be wanting to say: ‘Your grief is an embarrassment. We’re just waiting for it to pass. And, by the way, you’re less interesting without her.’ (This is true: I do feel less interesting without her. When, alone, I talk to her, I am worth listening to; when I talk to myself, not. ‘Oh, stop boring me,’ I say in voiced rebuke, as I repeat myself to myself.) Yes, if they thought that, I’d agree. An American friend told me straightforwardly, ‘I always thought she’d see you out.’ I quite understood: my survival had seemed the less likely possibility. But perhaps he also meant that he would have preferred her survival to mine. And I could hardly quarrel with that either.

  Nor do you know how you appear to others. How you feel and how you look may or may not be the same. So how do you feel? As if you have dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body. That is what it feels like, and why should it look any different? No wonder some want to swerve away to a safer topic of conversation. And perhaps they are not avoiding death, and her; they are avoiding you.

  I do not believe I shall ever see her again. Never see, hear, touch, embrace, listen to, laugh with; never again wait for her footstep, smile at the sound of an opening door, fit her body into mine, mine into hers. Nor do I believe we shall meet again in some dematerialised form. I believe dead is dead. Some think grief a kind of violent if justifiable self-pity; some that it is merely one’s own reflection in death’s eye; others say it’s the survivor they feel sorry for, because they’re the one going through it, whereas the lost loved one can no longer suffer. Such approaches try to handle grief by minimising it – and doing the same with death. It’s true that some of my grief is self-directed – look what I have lost, look how my life has been diminished – but it is more, much more, and has been from the beginning, about her: look what she has lost, now that she has lost life. Her body, her spirit; her radiant curiosity about life. At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.

  The griefstruck are angered when others shy away from the facts, the truth, even the simple use of a name. Yet how much truth do the griefstruck themselves tell, and how often do they coll
ude in evasion? Because the truths they have fallen into, not just up to their knees, but their hearts, necks, brains, are sometimes indefinable; or even if definable, inexpressible. I remember a friend who suffered from gallstones and had an operation for their removal. He said it had been the most painful thing he had ever endured. He was a journalist, and used to describing things; I asked if he could describe the pain. He looked at me, his eyes watered at the memory, and he remained silent; he couldn’t find words which came close to being useful. And words fail also at a lower, merely conversational level. When I was hot in grief an acquaintance asked me, in front of others, ‘So, how are you?’ I shook my head to imply that this wasn’t the place (it was across a noisy lunch table). He persisted, as if helpfully refining the question, ‘No, but how are you in yourself?’ I waved him away; besides, I felt not in myself but way out of myself. I could have passed it off by saying, for example, ‘A bit up and down.’ That would have been a proper, prim and English answer. Except that the griefstruck rarely feel either proper, prim, or even English.