Memento Mori

Grief is the culmination of our deepest fears, but it can make us better

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“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.”

-       Seneca, Consolation to Helvia, Dialogues and Letters

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When I was four or five, my mother took a watercolour painting class. It was a rare indulgence on her part and, it’s clear to me now, evidence of a desire for some autonomy that she generally quashed. One evening a week, she would walk to a local school and paint something which she would later quietly, gently berate to herself and find fault with. There were landscapes, a pair of brown rabbits, a starling that never quite left the canvas the way she’d have liked it to. The results of her endeavour nonetheless decorated the walls of various rooms in our house until its sale after her terminal cancer diagnosis twenty-one years later. Her favourite of these creations hangs in my home now. A rotund chicken worries at the earth outside a cottage door while a frenzy of summer blooms beckons you through to the cool gloom of the other side. The door stands temptingly ajar – an escape.

One night, my mother went to her painting class and left us at home with our father. This was a rarity. There was the heavy reverberation of the old front door shutting a while after, and I ran to the window to watch my father walking away from our house and down our street. I shouted. Maybe aloud. I couldn’t open the window to carry my reedy voice to him. He didn’t hear, or he didn’t care. There was an intense understanding that something was dreadfully wrong; that he was doing something frightening and forbidden, that he had created a problem beyond my capacity to solve. He’d gone to the pub. He had promised her that he wouldn’t. My mother came home from her class to find me sitting alone on the stairs while my brother slept in his room. What I felt then remains the most profound aloneness I have ever felt. Her face – grey – comes back in anguished flashes. Rage at my father. Guilt, probably. I buried my own face in the silken green and gold of the thick patterned scarf around her neck, memorising her scent as though I could grip it in my fist. The painting stopped after that.

It might have been this one incident (that would certainly make a nice, cohesive Freudian story, but life doesn’t work that way), but I became unhealthily attached to my mother around this time. Memories of my early childhood are marred by the terror I felt whenever she left me. I was always sure that she wouldn’t come back, and she always did. In adulthood, I’ve often questioned why she made that choice. While she was gone, I would sometimes sit on the stairs the way I did the night I realised that the house – which constituted the universe as I then understood it – was empty, wrapped in my own small arms and waiting for her to come back. Much of life’s waiting seems to happen on stairs, in that liminal space between up and down. It is a comfortably noncommittal place to seat oneself when the path forward isn’t yet clear. I felt like that once more the day we were told that my mother had a year to live, and again one day five months later when my legs carried me into her hospice room at half past six one bleak and gnawing November morning to find that she really had gone this time. There were no stairs where she might find me again. No coming back. It was a strange primal fear returned from childhood. It had not gained sophistication or rationality in the meantime. It was the realisation of that fear – a sudden, cosmic aloneness.

I was in my mid-twenties when she died, and under no illusions about the fact that I still needed her. There were things I didn’t know. Things like the person my mother had been outside my relationship to her. I viewed her through the lens of her role as my parent, but I didn’t really know her as a distinct and relatable, flawed human being, one who chose my brother and I every time it would have been more advantageous to think about herself first. One who dated boys before my father, who was abused by her own mother. One who somehow managed to figure out that such abuse is wrong despite a total absence of moral guidance to lead her to this conclusion.

I consider that sometimes, now that I’m older than she was when I was born. I’ve lived long enough to recognise the extraordinary miracle in electing not to recreate the behaviour you grew up around, and without someone to model yourself after. My mother’s fate was to become her own mother. Abusive, full of rage and confusion weaponised and aimed outward, but my mother resisted that. She was gentle. She blamed herself that night my father left us alone, as though it was her fault. The obvious conclusion of daring to take a few hours alone once a week to create something of benefit only to herself.

The day after she died, I awoke to a world without her in it. The grief had begun months earlier when I began to nurse a fear that she was seriously ill, and then when she was told she was going to die while we sat in in livid orange plastic chairs with an apathetic doctor. There are very few limits on pain medication in palliative care. As the pain gets worse, the doses get higher. I had known methadone as a drug for people managing heroin addiction, but if you are dying of cancer in a hospice, it’s pretty effective. I was shocked the first time I saw her take it from the outstretched hand of a nurse; a livid green liquid in a tiny plastic cup. She swallowed it tentatively like a shot of absinthe or some other lurid alcohol callow teenagers drink so that they can cope with the demands of a situation for which they are naturally ill-equipped.

With pain, illness and fear of death, the person you know is eroded. You lose some of them while they remain alive, and the anticipated fact that you’ll lose the rest of them in time is just as material a grief as the kind you feel when, one day, the act of dying transforms them in moments from person to memory. Then, you sit in the wreckage of the life you had and the one you planned for, and you think about what it might take to stand up and shuffle into a life that is not just unknown, but unwanted. Grief is a wound we cannot reconcile. It changes us indelibly. It is the process of teaching ourselves to value, and ultimately to want, the new life that was the sum of all our fears. A life without that person we loved. It is not tolerating our new life, or merely bearing it, but embracing it fully. This is the Stoic conception of which Nietzsche was so fond. Amor Fati – love of fate.

This is one of many ways in which grief can make us better if we run face-first into it rather than trying to oil ourselves with substances, activity or denial in the hope that it might just effortlessly slide off. You don’t want the people you love to die, especially prematurely or in ways that seem especially unjust, unkind or tragic, but they can. They do, and when they do there is a period of mere survival as though we are reborn after the death of a part of ourselves. Seneca describes this excellently -- “…every great and overpowering grief must take away the capacity to choose words, since it often stifles the voice itself.” For a while, there is only pain and the small energy that you have is channelled into the newly alien activity of basic function. Early grief offers no reprieve though, so soon after, a process begins which forces us to remake ourselves. It feels easier in the short term to try to avoid or mitigate the pain, but in the long run this traps us in stasis.

Seneca, who is my favourite philosopher on grief, advocates working to understand grief as a means of conquering it. By ‘conquering’ it he does not mean negating the feeling that comes with grief or becoming calloused. He does not mean dumping grief like a burden that you can leave behind you. He means working to understand our grief so that we might learn to adjust to the life we have now and develop sufficient mental clarity to be grateful for having known and loved someone rather than dwelling tortuously on what we have lost. For Seneca, it is the difference between working through our lives to learn from suffering and enhance ourselves or consenting to be permanently diminished by it. When he writes to his mother Helvia that “All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched”, Seneca is not chastising her, but pointing out that she has suffered before and survived. Each time our worst fears come to pass; we forget how robust we are. We forget that we have endured suffering before. We lose faith in our own ability to conquer overwhelming emotions by allowing them to exist within us and not be conquered by them. We know how to suffer, and that we can adapt – even to circumstances that we never wanted to find ourselves in.

“It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed for ever. I am not therefore going to prescribe for you those remedies which I know many people have used, that you divert or cheer yourself by a long or pleasant journey abroad … or constantly be involved in some new activity. All those things help only for a short time; they do not cure grief but hinder it.”

Our fear is that if we do not mitigate grief, it will overwhelm us irrevocably. However, one of grief’s small gifts is that the worst has already happened. You no longer have to fear it. You just have to do what is better for you rather than what is easier. It’s hard, but it’s simple, and there is a superhuman power in witnessing yourself adapt. You can teach yourself to be truly grateful for the life you do have rather than keeping one foot in the life you have lost at the cost of your ability to live fully now. Grief does not end – it only changes – but it bestows a profound understanding of life’s ultimate fragility, the malleability of human beings and the power in all of us to choose how we respond to the fate that rises up – or drops down – to meet us. Seneca said that while we don’t always choose what we have to bear, we can always choose how we bear it.

My mother’s birthday fell yesterday. It is the seventh since she died and somehow that felt more painful than some of the last few. It marks a widening space since I knew her. More of the texture of who she was falls from my memory and into that space with every year that passes. Her voice is leaving me. I am very different from the frightened girl who was tasked with navigating a world with no home to return to and no person who would always help me when I needed it. Time has carried me away from the version of me who hugged her the night before she died, and that knowledge registers as another loss. Yesterday, I missed my mother dreadfully as I sometimes do, so before I went to sleep, I pulled out Seneca’s consolation letter to Lucilius, in which he gently chastises those who allow grief to blind them to their good fortune. He writes

“Has it then all been for nothing that you have had such a friend? During so many years, amid such close associations, after such intimate communion of personal interests, has nothing been accomplished? Do you bury friendship along with a friend? And why lament having lost him, if it be of no avail to have possessed him? Believe me, a great part of those we have loved, though chance has removed their persons, still abides with us. The past is ours, and there is nothing more secure for us than that which has been.”

I read these words again as I do whenever I feel the lack of a parental presence in my life, and felt lucky. I am lucky. To have known her. To still be guided by what she taught me. To have sat on the stairs and watched her come back through the door every time but one. She always came back, until she couldn’t. That is a gift that even her death does not take from me. It cannot. I have not let it.