Self and wellbeing
‘Gloom is good’: after my wife died I found solace in poetry and music
You can’t fight death, sickness, ageing and life’s various indignities, but you can play very loud rock’n’roll
Every morning my older daughter calls from London. “What you doing today?” Erm… she’s most solicitous. She’s really checking in to check that I’m not checking out – that I haven’t woken up dead or had a stroke or a dizzy spell or plunged down some stairs or otherwise conked out. That I’m still above ground and that the manifold pills I’m compelled to take to prevent extinction, continue to kick in. “So what are you up to today?”
Erm… doing? Up to? That’s a little too chirpy. Active. Aspirational. I’m 79. I’ve been fortunate: I’m still here, a lucky boomer with privilege and a triple-lock pension. A war baby with free orange juice, free milk and a free education for life. They paid me. I even passed the 11-plus. It’s been all right. It’s been more than all right. Then it wasn’t. My wife, Jill, died. Cancer in a time of plague.
We were both English teachers in west London for nigh on 40 years. It was mostly thrilling. Then we moved to the sea at the edge of the world for nigh on 10 years – wild, empty, elemental. We’d just planned a final, big trip, a much-anticipated jaunt to the heart of the American south, the rock’n’roll south, the haunted, gothic south. The time of our lives. Then blam, we ran out of time.
We never made it to the voodoo cemeteries of New Orleans. We only made it to the Covid crematorium of Yeovil. Three of us – me and our two daughters – standing useless in the rain, lugging a basket coffin. A miserable trinity – and quite unwitnessed.
I went through a few therapists and persons of faith. It didn’t take. I was immune to the online grief industry. Grief doesn’t go through phases, doesn’t have tickboxes, it’s rather a perpetual cosmic vertigo. And I resisted all religions. Jill didn’t “pass”, she isn’t elsewhere, she isn’t snoozing in a graveyard. She is dead. Extinct.
So I’m alone at the edge of this world. Sometimes I’m all right. Other times I’m all over the place, trawling through the wreckage. My moods are wildly various.
I have a few good chums, though they tend to keep conking out, too. I suppose I should be seeking distractions, jolly group activities like Zumba or the Quakers or quilting or bell ringing or Morris dancing or rambling. But collectives just get on my nerves. I’m giving the piano a bit of a bash. I am cultivating a garden. Well, Jill’s. Her flowers are riotous. I’ve gone totally teetotal to banish any maundering self-pity and rampant egocentricity. I walk a lot. I swim a lot, miles out to sea. I have epiphanies in sunblind waves.
But the crucial source of solace is poetry and music, blues and rock’n’roll. It just works. Stuff I thought I’d forgotten can surface at any time. I’m ambushed by quotations, killer lines. They fly up like butterflies. They fall like confetti. They connect me to passing time. They dignify things. They give them grace.
After great pain a formal feeling comes.
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.
[…] A Quartz contentment, like a stone.
Wow! Emily knows. When I’m feeling a little moribund or melancholic or the whispers of mortality, lines like this make things nearly all right.
“I’m not afraid of death, it’s the ‘preliminaries’,” said the patron saint of gloom, Leonard Cohen. Gloom is necessary. Gloom is good. When things start to fall off, fall out, fall in, fade, creak, crack, twitch or blow up, this helps. When I’m running out of significance or relevance, when things gang up on me. And lately things have ganged up. I’ve just had an eye operation on the epiretinal membrane. I panic. Things are getting irretrievably dimmer. Am I going blind?
My only companion, Dolly the cat, gave up the ghost. The assisted dying was more prohibitive than Dignitas, so I dug her grave – too shallow – and foxes laid waste to her limbs.
“So what’s happening today?”
Erm… the same as yesterday, the same as tomorrow. Quotidian repetition. A sisyphean activity. A day will go like this, it will proceed thus: I prise myself out of bed after racked slumbers, punctuated by podcasts about inner peace, cosmic harmony, satori, bliss. Zen calm, the spheres tinkling, quack gurus preside. I’m urged to be “mindful” of mindlessness. I’m urged to cultivate “an empty mind”. It seems quite empty enough. These podcasts don’t work. Oblivion doesn’t occur. I just get the giggles. I get up. I totter into the crepuscular murk towards the bathroom, fail to find my ravaged visage in a mirror. My goodness those bags under the eyes are mighty fulsome (the grandchild calls them “plums”).
“That’s a funeral in the mirror and it’s stopping at your face.” Shut up Leonard!
Onwards. I brush the scant gnashers, apply the sexy dentures – not always the correct way up. Dear me. Time for the meds. I get out a shoebox of pills – bendroflumethiazide, ramipril, atorvastatin, omeprazole, hemlock. You’re only as good as your last pill.
Then it’s time for the multiple drops to eyes: Maxidex; chloramphenicol; iodine. They’re meant to bring my sight back. They don’t. Things are still a bit foggy. Then it’s time for the diurnal cardio blood-pressure monitor, a non-invasive sphygmomanometer. It monitors anxiety. It can make you more anxious than you’ve ever been. It monitors if you’re going to live beyond the next few minutes. If the batteries are flat you might be dead. This is no way to pass the time. This is no life for an old man. Then I leave water for Dolly. Then remember she’s dead. Then I regard Jill’s ashes on the piano. I hear her sane and sunny voice.
“All right?”
“Just.”
“What are you doing, today then?” she quizzes.
Erm… she seems still to have my back. Then, wired on caffeine, I’ll attempt to render verbatim Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues as reassurance that tiny strokes haven’t trashed the memory. “Johnny’s in the basement…” Yep. Done it. The lot. So far so good. Then I’ll check the online Guardianheadlines. Then I feel like eating my gums.
Onwards. The day begins properly. Vertically. I take to the hills, fields and forests, plush with bluebells, I gaze at the glow off the breaking waves, “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns”. I’m gone. Ah William!
But it’s not all transcendence. I can get quite bored by all this useless beauty. Samuel Beckett surfaces. “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
The afternoons are a high point. Then it’s time for the music. Ah, the healing power of rock’n’roll! I play it loud. Very loud. At bone-rattling volume. Howlin’ Wolf is doing Goin’ Down Slow.
I have had my fun
If I never get well no more
[…] Whoa, my health is fadin’
Oh yes, I’m goin’ down slow
“This is where the soul of man never dies,” said the genius Sun Records producer Sam Phillips. Quite.
“Awopbamaloobopawopbamboom!” shrieks Little Richard. The quasar of rock. One can only concur. I first heard this when I was 12. It’s never let me down. It trashes all louche morbidity. It cancels all sorrow. Sometimes I put on the flash 40s suit and dance very badly as if nobody’s there. They’re not – though the postman was puzzled when I bopped to the door. Sometimes I pretend I’m in the Village Vanguard club checking out Billie and Lester or in the Mean Fiddler getting wrecked with Shane and the Pogues or in the 100 Club watching Jill Lindy Hopping. There she goes. There she went. Onwards.
A little daytime TV? Nope. It’s emetic, especially those happy shiny people flogging care homes, twilight zones, eternal youth, cut-price crematoriums, cheap-rate funerals, erectile dysfunction, cruises up fjords. That stroke advert is most dispiriting, that melting gargoyle could give you one.
There are minimal variations on this day. My moods can include the ephemeral, evanescent, bored, lonely, absurd, blissed out, angry, fed up, fatalistic, scared, haunted, amused, blessed, bereft, tough, glum. Switchback. There’s a present fashion to deny these things. I’m urged to go on journeys, to seek daft closures, to embrace positivity. This all seems doomed. Meretricious. Morris dancing isn’t going to solve a thing. I need stronger stuff, more nourishing – like poetry, blues, rock’n’roll and the ancient wisdoms. These voices might just be in the ascendant. They might just be trumping the quotidian carnage. The panics have lessened. I do feel more calm, more still. Even, whisper it, a bit Zen. What’s the word we’re looking for? “Beat”? That’s it. Kerouac. Silly, immature, sentimental Jack. On The Road was another early passion. Kerouac relished those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”.
I hear Jill’s giggle. My goodness, I miss your giggle. “Dreadful stuff. Pure self-regarding male bollix.” Well, there is that. Jill was more a Jane Austen fan. Oh well, back to bed and unquiet slumbers. Back to rendering into Subterranean Home Sick Blues. There we go… the phone rings. “How you doing?”
Jill? Of course it isn’t. It’s my younger daughter. Every evening she calls from New York. “So what have you been doing today?” Erm…
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