loss

Folding Stars – a blog about loss

Tomorrow is a promise to noone

I would do anything for another minute with you because
It’s not getting easier, it’s not getting easier

I hope that you’re folding stars

Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro sang these powerful words about the death of his mother, Eleanor, in the song Folding Stars (I’ve always assumed the title is a reference to her doing patchwork). And this week I’ve been thinking a lot about people who have died myself.

I think it started because I watched the songaminuteman videos and read their facebook page in which a man about my age, Mac, is singing with his 80 year old father, Ted, who has dementia. Mac described on their justgiving page (which has nearly reached £100,000 for the Alzheimer’s Society) how difficult it is for him and his mother to cope with Ted’s aggressive and disoriented behaviour, and how singing has been a great reprise from that. Ted has been a club singer and Butlins host for much of his life. Singing is clearly something he loves and shares with his son. You can see from the videos that as soon as the backing music starts, it is something he immediately connects with, recalling the lyrics of a huge range of songs, and the banter and demeanor that used to accompany it.

That reminded me of my paternal grandfather, Jack, who died in 2009. He was also a talented singer, who had the opportunity to make a professional career from it had he been willing to emigrate to America, although he chose to remain in South Africa and have a more conventional lifestyle, running a shop and later working in commercial real estate. I didn’t ever get to know him very well, as my parents had emigrated to England before I was born, and so we would typically spend two to four weeks per year with my grandparents, alternating visiting them in South Africa with them visiting us in England. After I was twelve and needed an adult seat on the plane, the cost of flights became prohibitive and we only visited South Africa once when I was a teenager, and I can only remember them coming to visit twice more. When I got married in 1997 they were unable to come to the wedding as my grandfather had recently had a stroke, so they sent us the airfare to come and visit them the following year. I took my husband to see South Africa and meet my grandparents, and my parents overlapped with us for a week during the trip to show us some of the places they had grown up. We also visited Cape Town and the Kruger Park.

After that trip I heard about their decline  through my parents. My grandmother sank gradually into Alzheimer’s style dementia, to the point she is now almost non-verbal and needs constant nursing care, and my grandfather had the stepwise decline of multi-infarct dementia, with Lewy body type hallucinations, until his death 7 years ago. I don’t have a very clear sense of Jack as a person from my childhood. I can recall his wry smile, the habitual sequence of cleaning out and restocking his pipe with fresh tobacco and the pungent smell of him smoking it. I can recall the paranoia and acceptance of racism that years of living in South Africa had normalised contrasting with the fact that they had been very much ahead of their time in how they had supported Ben, their black “garden boy”, to have accommodation and paid employment in Johannesburg, rather than having to commute from Soweto (the nearest “township” or black slum). I can recall the taste of sugar coated dried fruit sweets in various colours and flavours, and the enormous avocados that would fall from their tree. I remember trying to explain how to use their new video recorder and remote control. I can picture the pale blue of the air letters he used to send to us regularly, and the way we would all take turns to talk on the phone to them when it was the birthday of any member of the family, long before the internet and skype made the world seem smaller. Overall I remember him being a bit of a grumpy man, who was anxious about single lane country roads, and didn’t like my grandmother’s religious rituals.

I also remember being unkind to him once as a child, and being told off by my parents. The memory is of being quite young and making a den with my cousin out of blankets hung between furniture in my grandparents’ back room. We would have been about seven or eight years old, and we were pretending to be cats. I don’t remember what my grandfather said exactly, but I remember that he said something mean that implied he thought our den was stupid. We wrote him a note that said it didn’t matter what he thought because he was a big rat who wasn’t welcome in our den, and signed it “the two cats”. As a kid it seemed like a fair response in kind, but my parents said that although he was grumpy it was a mean thing to do because he was old and had arthritis, and I remember feeling ashamed. As an adult I gained another layer of empathy, as I learnt about how much happened during my grandfather’s lifetime. How as an infant he had to flee persecution in Eastern Europe with his parents and move to South Africa where they had to learn English as a third language and live in a single room. He used to study by torchlight so as not to wake his father who worked night shifts. As my grandparents reached adulthood and got married, Jack had to do military service, and there is a photograph from when he was a fitness instructor in the army. They lived through the second world war and heard about how two thirds of the Jews in the world were murdered in the holocaust, including 91% of the Yiddish speaking Ashkenzim to which they belonged. They saw the inaction of the world turning a blind eye for far too long. Then after the war, as they became parents, they saw the survivors return to their community with tattooed numbers from concentration camps. Having been brought up as a British atheist I have no idea how that must have felt, but it can’t have been easy.

I heard about my grandfather dying two days before I gave birth to my twin daughters after a very complicated pregnancy, at a time when I had enormous other stressors in my life and I was caught up in a protective bubble. And I just accepted it as a fact and got on with everything that was going on. I don’t think I had cried about it before this week. But I am sad that I didn’t get a chance to ask him more about his life or to hear more of him singing. Nor did I express my thanks for how much he changed the path of my life before I was ever born. It is an impressive achievement to progress in a single generation from being immigrants in a single room learning English as a third language to owning a home and a business and funding your child to complete university and travel to England for postgraduate study. He was probably the reason that my parents were able to choose their own path as London hippies, and therefore a big influence on my sense of identity. I’d like to think he’d appreciate how badly my Dad sat shiva with my much more devout aunt, given his disdain for religious ritual.

I had also lost a colleague and friend who had died unexpectedly a week before the death of my granddad. Phil was someone I had worked closely with for several years, and had great respect for. He was in his fifties and had teenage children. It was a mark of my great trust in him that I had cried twice when talking to him – once about seeing a small deer get run over and killed on my way to work, and once when he told me about the death of a child I had been working with. And yet, like with my granddad, when I heard he was dead and I would never see him again I just processed the news as a fact, and felt no emotional response to it. As with my granddad, it has only been over time that I have been able to mourn his passing. I think of Phil each time I travel to a new country or walk on a beach, because of his habitual request to “bring me back a stone” if you went somewhere far away, and the pile of stones he would bring back from the most northerly beach in Scotland. I have often made stone towers or arches, written his name on a stone and thrown it into the sea or photographed the stones thinking how much he’d have liked them.

Death is an enormous topic to even try to think about, perhaps because it is connected with such painful experiences of loss, but also our own mortality and the inevitable eventual death of all those that we care about. As an atheist, I believe death is the end. Trying to imagine death is like staring into a black hole – somewhere in the uncomfortable abyss between terrifying and impossible to conceptualise. Having children has made me much more aware of my own mortality, and more fearful for theirs. I always text before takeoff whenever I fly for work, and I tell them I love them an extra time every night as they fall asleep, because I’d want them to be sure of that if I ever don’t return. But I remain of the opinion I expressed as a five year old to a babysitter, that even if a butterfly lives only for one day that isn’t a sad thing if the day was a happy day, because all they would have known is happiness. And I feel the same about my life, that I’ve already had a huge measure of happiness from a wonderful family, good friends, and amazing experiences, so even if it were to all be over tomorrow I couldn’t feel short-changed.

My Mum’s father died before she was born, and her mother died when in her late forties, when I was an infant. In my childhood my Mum felt it was likely that she would also die young, and I remember her having life insurance to protect us from the financial repercussions if that was the case. She was the only person I know to be grateful to have greying hair, as it was a marker that she had lived long enough to go grey. She is now retired, with fully grey hair and is thankfully still in good health, but she has been a good role model of appreciating the time you have got. And that is such an important thing, to savour the present. We are taught to invest for the future, in terms of putting our time and energy into long-term plans, focusing on building our careers, saving money, accumulating possessions. But as Alan Watts so neatly explains, we need to make the most of now, and dance while the music is playing. We need to have time for relaxation, creativity and fun. I’m trying to change things around a bit, so I do that more. I’ll give the last word to Biffy Clyro also (from Machines):

Cause I’ve started falling apart I’m not savoring life
I’ve forgotten how good it could be to feel alive

Take the pieces and build them skywards
and
Take the pieces and build them skywards
and
Take the pieces and build them up to the sky.

 

Happily ever after: Some thoughts on trauma in the movies

I watched a romantic drama this evening in which a man and a woman who has a child from her past relationship fall in love. The ex-boyfriend is controlling, threatening and manipulative and tries to sabotage the relationship. He is shown getting drunk and grabbing the woman’s arm tightly to stop her leaving twice, and at another point he threatens the man with a weapon. Towards the end of the film the ex-boyfriend is drunk and upset. He threatens to take the child, who runs away and falls into a river. The ex-boyfriend rescues the child at the cost of his own life, and the mother and child witness him meeting a sudden grizzly death. Then the couple get together, become a family with the child and the film ends, leaving them to live happily ever after.

Having watched a set of characters for an hour and a half that were portrayed sympathetically and realistically enough to feel invested in, this seemed like a weird ending. I was left with this really disconcerting feeling that the writers, producers and large numbers of reviewers of this film (who gave it respectable scores on Amazon and IMDB) thought that this climactic scene tied up the ends neatly and left us with the uplifting moral righteousness of the baddie getting his just deserts, the couple unimpeded in their romance and a perfect nuclear family.

But how could a child who just witnessed his father’s death (and probably felt responsible for it) not have any emotional reaction to that? Would it not be yet another loss of a close male relationship for this young child, who had already lost others as part of the back-story? How could the mother not have complex feelings about the death of a guy who has been emotionally and potentially physically abusing her for five years? Would her relief perhaps be tinged with guilt that her new romance triggered these events, or at being relieved to see the back of him? Would a mother not feel sadness in empathy for her child’s experience of trauma and loss? Would she not feel echoes of the loss of her own father in childhood, or her brother the previous year? Perhaps their different ways of dealing with grief and loss would challenge the romantic relationship? How about our leading man, who was mourning lost friends and showing signs of PTSD at the beginning of the film. Would it not re-awaken all the unresolved grief he is repressing? And what of the ex-boyfriend’s parents and their stoical thanks to those that tried to rescue him? Does nobody cry for this man, who gave his life up to save his child? Was his inept handling of the relationship that resulted from an unplanned pregnancy in his teens so bad that he deserved to die?

Why couldn’t the film have been one that illustrated the reality and complexity of modern family relationships? Surely the alternative was for the father to have shown his priority was the wellbeing of the child, during the rescue scene, but to have survived and been part of a renegotiated family configuration in which the child was able to have both a positive experience of contact with him and to live in the new family unit with Mum and step-Dad? As I often tell children who feel that any affection to foster or adoptive carers is disloyal to their birth family, love is not like a cake where you have a finite amount to share out between all your relationships, love is like candles where using your fire to light others just creates more brightness for everyone. But if the father had to die, then they needed to show the emotional fallout of that. They can’t have one without the other, any more than they could show a person standing in sunshine without showing their shadow.

As it stood, the film profoundly failed to acknowledge the impact of trauma on the different characters. And this film was far from alone in that. So many traumas occur in films and TV shows that it seems they are very much part of the expectation nowadays. In every vampire franchise I’ve seen the head counts of characters close to the main protagonists who die are extraordinary, and yet they briefly mourn and then move on. In Vampire Diaries, an average of 19 characters shown on screen die per episode, and the main character, Elena, has lost almost every living relative and most of her friends, as well as dying herself, twice! Many other shows track medical emergencies, murderers, serious crimes, drug dealing and power battles, yet they are dealt with in an entirely sanitised, emotion-free way. Sure, a pathologist would be well-used to the physical nature of human corpses, but even in the most hardened professionals some cases creep through the cracks into your psyche. The person that looks a little like someone you know, or reminds you of something in your past. The tragic story that becomes apparent from the cause of death, or the untimely demise of a child. We are not robots analysing data, surely we recognise that people are like us and the people we care about?

The latest Star Wars film showed planet-scale genocide without that even being acknowledged by the cast. It’s a really good film otherwise, and I really enjoyed it, but the scriptwriters chose to show genocide as shorthand to make the baddies bad. It could equally have done so through less wide-scale slaughter, or by showing the snatching of children to indoctrinate as stormtroopers or many other plot devices. Including the slaughter of millions of people was a plot choice, and given that the film is part of a historical franchise that is pitched to the whole family and used to market toys to children, that is a pretty weird choice of plot. To then skim over making light of it makes that more disturbing, rather than less, once you think about it. I’m not saying the main characters should have processed the emotional impact there and then; I’m sure if you are busy fighting for your life or have 20 minutes to save the world and see some planets blow up, that isn’t the moment you down tools, lie down and cry. But even an extra second of footage showing sad faces, one person humanising the loss by mention of having lost individuals there, or an additional comment about how awful that loss was, would have given some hint of the emotional connections of all the people whose lives were extinguished in an instant. In the original trilogy when Alderaan was destroyed they used the change in the force to acknowledge how monstrous it was. I still remember the scale and momentousness given by the line “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.” And this is what was missing in The Force Awakens.

But I think this lack of acknowledgement of millions of deaths was also illustrating something very poignant about human processing of events; we identify much more emotionally with death or distress at the individual scale than we do at a population level. Think of how the discovery of the body of young Aylan Kurdi humanised the treatment of Syrian refugees in the news narratives, for example. Prior to that point, they were treated like an invading army of ants, but in the weeks immediately afterwards some individual stories were told and people felt more sympathetic and we were shown footage of refugees being welcomed into various European countries. I think that change in response according to the scale of deaths is part of human nature, as is our ability to shut off from suffering and get on with life, if that is necessary to our survival. At the extreme end, people living through wars or in areas of high risk or conflict are probably coping by living in “survival mode” and using more primitive parts of the brain in favour of the prefrontal cortex, which has reduced activity under threat. It makes sense, logically, as we do have to compartmentalise awful stuff to just keep on going sometimes. I think back to all the life events that happened whilst I was pregnant (including a car accident, my granddad dying, a close colleague dying unexpectedly, my job being placed at risk, my babies being born very prematurely) and think I only coped with everything I couldn’t avoid by going into a psychological bubble and putting all that bad news aside to deal with later.

Maybe these fictional narratives of unacknowledged loss that have become so prevalent in TV and film are using this tendency – our ability to put emotional distance between ourselves and tragedy through various forms of displacement. If something awful happens far away, or it happened in the past, or in a different cultural context, or in fiction, then we are able to distance ourselves from it and deal with it at a purely cognitive level. We think about it but don’t feel it. The shame is that this seems to be how many politicians and decision makers deal with the problems affecting people in our day to day lives. Although it is ‘psychologically expensive’ to allow emotions in, it is only with empathy that we can really make informed decisions. So in real life as well as in fiction, I think a bit more feeling would be a good thing.