Archives for posts with tag: Sadness

A grieving year…

January 28, 2014 //
2

Today is the first anniversary of my sister’s death. I am not so sure about formal remembrances and rituals. However, I do feel like sharing some of my thoughts from 2013, my first year without my sister.

Mostly, the past months have surprised me. Little has been how I might have predicted it, echoing the experience of Joan Didion following her husband’s death:

‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it’

The initial period was relatively easy to manoeuvre. I got on with my life as if on autopilot. I remember being grateful that I was alive, and resolutely determined to make the most of my own living. My sister’s death also reminded me of my mother’s grief when her mother and her sister died in relatively quick succession. I was a teenager at the time, the youngest of five children, and the only one still living at home. I was thus unrelentingly exposed to my mother’s ‘decline’, as sadness and doom enveloped her and those around her. I did not want a similar experience for my own teenage daughter, who was herself traumatised by her aunt’s death. Instead, I worked on negotiating a path where we could keep my sister’s loss a presence in our lives, but one that would not destroy us.

To some extent we managed this. However, how we respond to loss cannot be completely controlled and contained. When I have experienced loss previously in my life, I have noticed how delayed my personal response to the trauma of the experience can be. So it was on this occasion. As the acute distress around the dying period and the death itself eased, the loss that evolved from the death manifested itself acutely. Yet the clichés are also true. Life does go on, and passing time does facilitate a living with loss that is manageable. I have not experienced anger at any point. Regret, yes. Guilt, some. Mostly, my emotional volcanoes consist of random and unpredictable moments of acute pain, which are so cataclysmic that every time I feel they will overwhelm and destroy me. But of course they do not. Reassuringly or fatalistically, you continue getting on with your life in the ‘club of the left-over living’.

My sister is buried in another country. I am sad about this. Her graveside is a place I would like to spend time. Yet, for the memorial mass today, I chose not to attend. My other sisters did. The experience of loss has been different for all of us, and not one we have easily been able to share.

What has surprised me most of all, is how much I miss my sister. Living in different countries, we communicated infrequently, and spent time together just a few times a year. Yet, as time goes on, the fact that we will never have those times again fills me with a sadness that is as infinite as her loss.

My sister was older than I am, and so, until this past year, she had always been in my life.

I miss the fact of her, her living and energetic being. I miss how much she used (sometimes) to annoy me. I miss her loyalty and absolute support. I miss her reckless generosity.

I miss.

CQ

Tags , , , ,
Categories Death and Dying, Loss, Sadness

Stoner…

December 16, 2013 //
0

This book was an unexpected delight.

‘Delight’ may not be the best descriptor, as John William’s Stoner is a profoundly sad, at times even bleak read. Yet I felt enriched by the experience. It is truly one of those must-reads.

The title refers to the main protagonist, William Stoner, and the book chronicles his life. We are introduced to Stoner after his death, and from the outset we begin to have a sense of the man and of his life:

‘An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question…his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.’

An only child, Stoner’s parents were farmers. A solitary and mostly silent childhood was spent toiling the physical world of soil and land. Later, he left to study agriculture at university. A required element of the curriculum was English literature, which opened up a previously unknown world to him, one that filled him with wonder and awe. While studying, he dutifully returned home during the holidays to work on the farm. His relationship with his parents remained a largely unspoken one, and Stoner never shared his ‘other world’ with them.

‘He thought of his parents, and they were nearly as strange as the child they had borne; he felt a mixed pity for them and a distant love.’

Discovering a love for teaching, he remained at the university for the remainder of his life, although he struggled to successfully communicate the wonder he himself experienced within, with his students.

The solitary condition of his childhood persisted during his university years:

‘He had no friends, and for the first time in his life he became aware of loneliness.’

However, for a time he did have two friends, one of who commented:

‘You have the lean and hungry look, sure enough. You’re doomed.’

It was a prescient observation, as Stoner’s life proceeded to a succession of tragic episodes, and to a life defined by sadness, an inescapable sadness that he was born into. When his parents died, Stoner reflected:

‘He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been—a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.’

Any relief that Stoner did occasionally experience from the relentless doom that enveloped his life was short-lived. He married, but it was a failure on every level. They had one daughter, Grace, with whom he was initially very close, but this later evaporated. Having briefly found friendship, his closest friend was killed in the war. He had a lover with whom he had many moments of happiness, but this was poignantly relinquished.

As a result of his life experiences, Stoner mostly lived on the periphery, becoming increasingly detached, dislocated, and numb:

‘…at will, he seemed able to remove his consciousness from the body that contained it, and he observed himself as if he were an oddly familiar stranger…’

‘He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something—even pain—to pierce him, to bring him alive.’

The final section of the book, when Stoner is dying, is the most introspective and self-reflective:

‘Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be.’

Intensely self-critical, and by then utterly defeated by life, he answered his own question on why his life became what it ended up being:

‘What did you expect? he asked himself.’

He is as detached from the fact of his own dying as he has learnt to be about most things in his life:

‘He had no wish to die; but there were moments, after Grace left, when he looked forward impatiently, as one might look to the moment of a journey that one does not particularly want to take.’

The sadness that clings to Stoner’s life is almost palpable. Although unremitting – the reader is never left off the sadness hook – it is impossible to resist reading Stoner. Seduced by the prose and by William’s way of telling, the reader is willingly drawn into a life story that speaks to a universal sadness within all of us.

CQ

Tags , ,
Categories Cancer, Death and Dying, Families, Fiction, Literature, Melancholy, Sadness, Stories, Suffering

Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side

March 14, 2013 //
0

I really enjoyed Barry’s earlier novel The Secret Scripture, although I was a little taken aback by the final denouement, which felt a little contrived, and unnecessary. The book had been magical up to that point.

Nonetheless, I eagerly began On Canaan’s Side this week, and finished it within very few days. Barry’s prose is seductive and addictive, creating a narrative that you do not want to leave.

Similar to The Secret Scripture, On Canaan’s Side has an elderly Irish woman as the main protagonist. In both, she looks back and tells her story. There the similarities pretty much end, and I did not feel that Barry was regurgitating a trope.

Like Colm Toibin (particularly in Brooklyn), Barry writes so sympathetically and impressively from a female perspective.

On Canaan’s Side opens with:

‘What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking? It might not be much more than silence, and certainly a small slight sound.’

Lilly’s story is that of a life beset and consumed by tragedy, and there is little in terms of redemption or relief from sadness throughout. As such, it is very much an ‘Irish book’. We are good at tragedy, and On Canaan’s Side does feel authentic, from this, but not only this, perspective.

Barry writes beautifully, and there are very many sentences and phrases throughout that make you stop, and consider:

‘Tears have a better character cried alone.’

Tragedy begins early for Lilly, as she remembers events from almost 80 years earlier, when growing up in Ireland:

‘The grief at first sat in us, and then leaked out into the chairs, and at last into the very walls and sat in the mortar.’

The memories of those times, the almost palpable grief, never leave Lilly, shadowing her life throughout:

‘We may be immune to typhoid, tetanus, chicken-pox, diphtheria, but never memory. There is no inoculation against that.’

I was intrigued by Lilly’s assessment of her doctor, Dr Earnshaw. This is a discussion for another day, perhaps:

‘But he is very austere, and depressed-looking, and he never smiles. You can have confidence in a man like that, though, in the manner of doctoring.’

Lilly leaves Ireland, settling in America, where she initially spends much time lost and alone ‘a prisoner in the open asylum of the world.’ Her best possession at that point, she reflects, was her youth, ‘but that of course was invisible to me.’

Despite the tragedy and sorrow that follow Lilly throughout her long life, this is not a book of sadness. Uplifting perhaps not, but very real and believable, and in its own way life affirming. Similar to The Secret Scripture, I was unsure about the denouement. But I had already loved the book, and Lilly, at that point, and there was no going back. It is more of a mild niggle…

Life, loss, love, grief, tragedy, remembering and memory are all the stuff of life, and so it seems of Barry’s fiction-yet-real novels:

‘To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness.’

CQ

Tags , , , , , , , ,
Categories Families, Literature, Loss, Sadness, Suffering

Tove Jansson and The Summer Book…

December 20, 2012 //
2

I had been meaning to read this book for some time, and only just got round to it this week. Timely, as a BBC documentary on the author’s life will be screened over the Christmas period.

Jansson was already famous for her Moonintroll cartoon strips and children’s books before The Summer Book appeared in 1972.

The narrative focuses on the relationship between 6 year old Sophia and her grandmother, who live on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland. The child’s father is also there, but is very much a silent presence in the background. To some extent the book was a response to the death of Janssen’s beloved mother in 1971, and is based on ‘real’ people from the author’s life, her own mother represented by the grandmother, and Sophia the author’s niece. The location also reflects Jansson’s personal history, with the setting based on a house that she and her brother built on a remote island off Finland in 1947.

Although the (short) book predominantly follows the companions as they spend time together, exploring, talking, swimming and foraging, there are also other threads running through the narrative, particularly the grandmother’s musings on ageing and death. Deceptively straightforward sounding chapters such as ‘The Morning Swim’, ‘Moonlight’ and ‘The Magic Forest’ contain much more than is apparent at first glance. In the latter chapter, for example, the forest itself becomes a metaphor for living and dying:

‘This forest was called “the magic forest”. It had shaped itself with slow and laborious care, and the balance between survival and extinction was so delicate that even the smallest change was unthinkable.” (p.27)

The notion of death is introduced early, when Sophia asks her grandmother directly, with an endearing frankness and openness that only the very young can engender:

‘When are you going to die?’ (p.22)

Shortly afterwards, we learn that Sophia’s mother has died:

‘Sophia woke and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead.’ (p.25)

The book is about imagination, in both the old and in the young, and it is also about wisdom that similarly transcends generations. What is particularly impressive, is Jansson’s ability to portray a dual perspective, the simultaneously believable voices of both a child and an elderly woman.

It is thus not only 6 year old Sophia who bubbles with imagination, but her grandmother also displays impressive imaginative ingenuity. When Sophia’s friend Berenice comes to stay, and is bored and tiresome, the grandmother suggests that she draws something:

‘”Draw a picture,” she said.

“I don’t know anything to draw,” the child said.

“Draw something awful,” Grandmother said, for she was really tired now. “Draw the awfullest thing you can think of, and take as much time as you possibly can.”‘ (p.45)

Death features again in Sophia’s questions about heaven, and in the grandmother’s internal reflections on the euphemisms for death:

‘It was too bad that you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.’ (p.135)

The grandmother struggles with the process of ageing, as she becomes aware that her memory for recent events is slipping (p.56), and how much she hates the chamberpot under her bed, a ‘symbol of helplessness’ (p.170). At times, she seems weighed down by sadness, and by an almost palpable sense of loss:

‘A very long time ago, Grandmother had wanted to tell about all the things they did, but no one had bothered to ask. And now she had lost the urge.’ (p.90).

She also feels that she cannot describe things anymore, the words have somehow been lost to her, and so, it will all die with her death:

‘And unless I tell it because I want to, it’s as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it’s lost.’ (p.90)

But, just as she is there for Sophia, listening and reassuring during her many tantrums, so too is the little girl there for her grandmother. She attends to the older woman’s outburst:

‘But now I have the feeling everything’s gliding away from me, and I don’t remember, and I don’t care, and yet now is right when I need it!’ (p.93)

And so, on a night when she was unable to sleep due to ‘thinking about sad things, the grandmother shared her anxieties with the attentive child, thereafter sleeping soundly…

The relationship between the older and the younger companion is very moving. Even when they quarrel, it is with love:

‘One evening, Sophia wrote a letter and stuck it under the door. It said, “I hate you. With warm personal wishes, Sophia.”‘

The prose is just delightful, for example the tree trunks ‘formed a tangled mass of stubborn resignation’ (p.27), and when the pair quarrelled, they ‘quarrelled the wrong way.’ (p.111).

The Summer Book has never been out of print in Scandinavia. I am not surprised. It is a truly magical work, which can tell us much about humanness, but perhaps especially about relationships, and how being there for the other can enhance, and even make sense of, the whole business of being.

CQ

Tags , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Fiction, Kindness, Literature, Loss, Melancholy, Memory, Sadness, Suffering

Stephen Dunn – Poetry (2)…

November 26, 2012 //
0

The more I read of Stephen Dunn’s poetry, the more I love, and gain.

I think I most love his pragmatism, his way of saying things as they are, unembellished, direct and authentic.

From his poem Sadness (Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, Neil Astley (ed), Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2005, p.120):

‘I told my friend who courted it

not to suffer

on purpose, not to fall in love

with sadness

because it would be naturally theirs

without assistance’

 

Honest, and true, and encapsulates it all, with the merest of words…

CQ

Tags , , , ,
Categories Literature, Loss, Poetry, Sadness, Suffering

Michael Rosen’s Sad Book…

November 19, 2012 //
0

Hearing about the imminent arrival of a new meningitis vaccine, I thought immediately of one of the best books I have ever read.

I bought Michael Rosen’s Sad Book (Michael Rosen & Quentin Blake, London: Walker Books, 2004) a few years ago, mainly as a way of exploring the meaning and expression (and alrightness) of sadness with my daughter.

Re-reading it now, I am again struck by its wonderfulness, by Rosen’s ability to convey sadness so meaningfully in few words, and which is so imaginatively enhanced by Blake’s drawings.

The book arose from Rosen’s grief following the sudden death of his 18 year old son Eddie from meningitis in 1999. Primarily about his sadness over the loss of Eddie, it also includes the loss of his mother, as well as loss in general as part of all our lives.

Rosen challenges pre-conceptions. The very first image is that of a grinning Rosen. Below the picture he writes:

‘This is me being sad.’

‘…pretending I’m being happy.

I’m doing that because I think people won’t

like me if I look sad.’

On page 3 we are introduced to Eddie:

‘What makes me most sad is when I think

about my son Eddie. He died.’

We see images of Eddie as a child, playing and happy, and then a blank panel, where Eddie should be:

‘…he’s not there any more.’

Although a hugely personal book, there is much here that is generalisable:

Sad is ‘anywhere’, ‘any time’, ‘anyone’:

‘It comes along and finds you.’

And much that is positive:

‘Every night I try to do one thing I can be proud of.’

‘I’m sad, not bad.’

‘Everyday I do one thing that means

I have a good time.’

Rosen also remembers the good times, and shows the power of memory to make loss bearable, and the act of remembering even potentially joyful.

An absolute gem of a book, on a topic that is corporate and universal and touches all our lives.

CQ

Tags , , , , , , , ,
Categories Art & Suffering, Death and Dying, Loss, Memory, Suffering

Monsieur Linh and His Child…

October 1, 2012 //
0

One of those books that I want everyone to read…

Philippe Claudel’s work (Monsieur Linh and His Child. Philippe Claudel (Author) and Euan Cameron (Translator). Maclehose Press, 2012) is almost palpably sad, and deeply moving, a portrayal of humanness at the sharpest edge of suffering, yet also about how affecting and critical real friendship can be. Cliched it may sound, but the kindness of others truly has the power to transform the experience of suffering.

The novel is about the elderly Mr Linh, who we meet as he leaves his homeland with his baby granddaughter, his only remaining family:

‘The old man’s name is Monsieur Linh. He is the only one who knows this is his name because all those who knew it are dead.’

The child is just six weeks old, and Monsieur Linh’s only goal in life is to care for her and to keep her safe:

‘Nothing else matters but his little girl. He wants to look after her in the best possible way.’

Which he does. She is also his link with his past, his homeland, and his dead family. Her eyes:

‘…are the eyes of his son, they are the eyes of his son’s wife, and they are the eyes of his son’s mother, his dearly beloved wife’

In a strange country and city where he does not speak the language, Monsieur Linh is overwhelmed by people, strangers, and anonymity. He has come from a village with just one street, where everyone knows everyone. Now, he is lost, and bewildered by the strangeness of this new world, where ‘nothing is like anything he knows.’

His epiphany comes when he meets the recently widowed Monsieur Bark. Also lonely, the men strike up a friendship, although neither speaks the other’s language. The friendship grows through gestures and acts of kindness. Language is not essential for understanding the sadness of others, for appreciating a depth of melancholy that is beyond words.

The friendship with Monsieur Bark becomes pivotal to Monsieur Linh’s life and survival. Inevitably, the relationship is threatened by external monsters – the city, beaurocracy, and strangers who fail to consider and to understand Monsieur Linh’s plight. However, just as he unwaveringly devotes all his energy and attention to his beloved grand-daughter, so now he turns his attention to his friend and to the friendship that means so much. Kindness wins out in the end.

A parable of sorts, this short narrative is never cloyingly sentimental. Rather, it leaves you with the belief and the hope that we humans can truly help one another, and make a difference to the suffering of others. This may sound pious, and the book, like many parables, is a work of fiction. Yet, this matters not.

Read it, weep, and consider…

CQ

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Fiction, Kindness, Literature, Loss, Suffering