Magical Thinking

Warning: Brevity Ahead:

When I was told of my father’s death I thought I heard a thread snap. The longer you live the more losses we sustain and we develop coping mechanisms to deal with this.  For reasons I find difficult to explain I use magical thinking. So when I viewed my father’s body I found myself thinking  ‘If he is not here, then he must be somewhere else.’  I still cling to that belief.

It was a belief that sustained me throughout the aftermath of my father’s passing.  I did not cry.  I prided myself on my stoicism.  I read aloud during the funeral service and although I was pale and trembling my voice was unwavering.  I received undeserved compliments for this.

But, according to some, I was wrong to react in this way.  I was too cold, too calm.  Later I was told that I had never really grieved properly because I didn’t dissolve into tears every five minutes.  I did not respond because my interlocutor was well meaning. But, deep down, I resented it.  People grieve according to their character. Histrionics aren’t my thing.  And just because I am not an emotional exhibitionist, it doesn’t mean I am not being shredded to pieces inside.

My Late Father

I missed the anniversary of my father’s death. He passed away in July 2013.

I had been sitting here for years waiting for someone to rescue me. A knight in shining armour perhaps. Or maybe a member of anonymous. For two years I waited on this island nation otherwise know as my sofa, surrounded by a sea of red carpet. But nobody came.

And then they told me that my father was dying. He had terminal cancer. But to my eternal shame even this failed to break the spell. I remained unable to tear myself away from the excuse for a life I had created for myself.

(And let me emphasise this: I did this to myself. What I did is widely know as ‘narcissistic withdrawal.)

I only visited my family three times a year and left the burden of caring for my father to my immediate family. They shouldered a heavy responsibility. I have no excuse for letting them do this without me. They spent a large part of their lives on the cancer ward of the general hospital, negotiating with consultants and making my father as comfortable as possible while I sat isolated on my sofa, paralysed by anxiety which sometimes spilled over into sheer terror, rocking backwards and forwards, playing ‘This Too Shall Pass’ on a continuous loop.

My father fought his cancer valiantly to his last breath. But in July 1913 I received the phone call I had been expecting. My father only had ‘He’ll be gone by the morning,; my aunt told me. ‘Come home if you can.

I whispered back, ‘I don’t think I can.’ And then a voice in my head said ‘You must. You will never forgive yourself if you don’t.’

So, in the end I did manage to tear myself away from my tiny  four-walled country. I caught a train for the first time in a decade. I arrived at my father’s bedside at the last minute. The heart was still beating, the motor still running. I kissed him on the forehead and he responded by whispering my name.

They said that he had been waiting for me but the blanket skeptic in me rejects this notion.

A few hours after we returned home from the hospital my aunt kocked on the door of my childhood bedroom to tell me that he had died. ‘He’s gone, Louise’. And her choice of words somehow comforted me. For if he had gone then there was a possibilty that he might come back.

In situations like these magical thinking seems like the only option.

A Little Late Maybe But…

SOS

A recurring memory has taken up residence in my head.  When I was twelve, at the height of summer, my family and I took a vacation to Majorca.  As a child I was a loner and I felt as though I were being slowly suffocated in the hotel room I was sharing with my brother and my cousins.  So, one afternoon I took myself, a book and an  inflatable floating mat down to the beach.  I climbed onto the mat and lay back.  I accompanied the tide on its way out.  And then I fell asleep.

I have no idea how long I was out.  I awoke with a heavy head.  I looked around me.  i was surrounded by the sea.  The beach had disappeared. I was alone. I sat up.  My book had fallen into the water.  At first I panicked.  I was a poor swimmer.  The tide was going out.  I was sure I would drown.  I think I may even have prayed.

By some miracle I managed to doggy-paddle myself back to the shore.  I collapsed, exhausted onto the beach.

I returned to the hotel and never uttered a word of what had happened to anyone.  I told my family that I had fallen asleep on the beach while sunbathing.  And that raised hysteria, so heaven knows what their reaction would have been if I’d told them what really happened.

I was so badly sunburnt that for the next three nights I had to sleep on my stomach.

What is the point, you may ask, of this random anecdote.  I recount it now because I feel now like I did that day.  Floating in an expanse of ocean while the tide carries me further from the shore, praying for some small miracle that will save me from drowning and get me back to the place I started from.

Mother