A love of liberty and unconstrained truth

 

Had a long phone call from a friend in California talking about the new spirit of liberty in the United States and what she called the ‘renewed patriotism without jingoistic belligerence’. We chatted about many things — shoes and ships and sealing wax and whether pigs have wings — and she uttered that old truism: ‘Nobody understands an alcoholic like another alcoholic.’

As she was speaking, a forgotten memory came back to me with the force of a counter-punch. They do, too.

 

About eight or nine years ago I made a trip to Botswana and the Madikwe area of north-eastern South Africa, a work trip. These lonely areas have a harsh and lovely landscape. The trip passed in a blur since I was drinking like a fish. The second day out from Gaberone, heat waves shimmering among the thorn trees, I was suffering a bad hangover and menstrual cramps,  sitting with dark glasses and a wide-brimmed dark blue hat in an open landrover. While others went out to look at wildlife management facilities and crouched in bird hides, I sat alone in the well-equipped landrover and helped myself to gin from the bar fridge at the back. I had some white wine, vodkatinis, a little neat brandy. I filled my tall flask with gin and orange juice and sucked mints. I’m sure this all sounds very familiar.

 

On the way back to the lodge, we had a puncture. No spare tyres. This meant that we all sat for more than an hour  in the blazing desert sun while the puncture was repaired. Everyone else drank copiously from their water flasks. I was scorched with sunburn, my exposed arms reddening, but I dared not touch my flask because almost neat gin and sunstroke do not mix.

Back at the lodge I faced another problem. I had gone off Larium anti-malarial medication in order to drink. And I suspected I had malaria.

 

Because I have grown up in the wilder plains of Africa, I have had malaria more often than I care to recall. It is unpleasant but not often deadly. But this was bad. I finished my gin and drank litres of water, swallowed as much disprin as I dared and went to bed.

When I woke the next morning, I had a killer headache and bad sunburn. But more ominously my teeth were chattering and my urine dark, my temperature raging. We would be leaving for a long day’s drive back to Johannesburg. There wuld be no restrooms, no clinics or hospitals, a long wait at the border post. If I wanted to get medical help I would have to get it before I left the lodge.

So I called the manager, who was annoyed at the inconvenience, but took one look at me and called the nearest doctor. Two hours later he arrived.

 

Dr Xavier P had lived and worked in the bushveld for almost 40 years. He looked thin, jaundiced and tired, but had a quick and intelligent expression. I told him the truth about the drinking. I know what meds can do on top of alcohol withdrawal. He just nodded and then prescribed 48 hours bedrest. I would sweat out the malaria and the hangover  before flying back home. He said flatly that he would not give me any medication that might disgree with further alcohol consumption.

 

I was shocked at this. I had learned my lesson, I explained, and had no intention of drinking again. Dr Xavier looked at me and sighed.

 

‘Did you ever read Lewis Carroll?’ he asked. ‘Alice in Wonderland? What happens when she takes the little bottle labelled “Drink Me”? You drink and you grow enormous within while the outside world shrinks. That is how you manage your painful reality, my dear. You shrink those out there and magnify the tiny inner self. You cannot do without your bottle for very long.’

 

And he was right for a very long time. He understood me perfectly even though I know he was not himself alcoholic.

What has been restored

 

It is a sunlit morning with black clouds massing on the horizon. Trees look wonderful backlit by sun against dark cumulus. I have a cookbook open on the kitchen table and am searching for a recipe for polpettone, Italian meatballs with fresh flat-leaf parsley and a little cumin, a light tomato sauce. The cookbook is an old favourite and has flour buried in the seams and wine glass circles on the recipe for Florentine biftek. But my pleasure in cooking has only been enhanced by sweet sobriety. Restoration knows no half-measures.

 

My small dogs are curled together sleeping off the after-effects of the anaesthetic. Earlier they ran outside to play as usual and were stopped short by pain from their sutured wounds, looking very surprised. As any of us do when the body suddenly fails and pain roots us to destiny.

My younger sister has written to me in despair and rage. She does not want my cousin to inherit anything from my father’s estate, she wants old photographs and mementos. She is afraid my other sister will ’steal’ everything or my cousin throw it all away. She is frantic about my drunken brother’s unhappiness. She feels trapped and helpless and as if she is being victimised. She cannot sleep or eat for fury and heartache.

 

I write back words I hope will bring her comfort. I try to open us both to certain truths. My brother will know no peace until he sobers up. My father left no real inheritance to claim. Photographs cannot substitute for unmade memories or compensate for the brokenness that was our family history,  but she should write and ask for them. I love her and hope she is able to grieve the real loss.  I had so many years when I thought of myself as hostage to a cruel and mercurial wheel of fortune, a victim, an innocent betrayed. Illusion, delusion. She needs to reclaim her own power and only she can do that.

 

Sitting down at my writing desk with a cup of mocha java at dawn this morning, I logged onto a sobriety forum and found that one of the posters was attacking me, a sideways attack of great ugliness. I have no idea why. I don’t think he knew what he was doing. I sat as hot tears filled my eyes and then I took a very deep breath. Sometimes we stay sober despite others. Niceness can be a tyranny for women, the compulsion to excuse others or minimise their sadism or hostility. I sat and read other posts of warmth and sympathy, and felt grateful for those. Then I made a decision to simply move on. To disregard and keep disregarding until the sting has gone. To disengage.

 

And then I brought my tall vase with its rare flowering clivia into the study to brighten the morning and read some poetry and moved attention back where it belongs. Yvor Winters’ translation of the beautiful Spanish prayer poem by Teresa of Avila echoing in me as I get down to work:

 

“Nothing move thee;
Nothing terrify thee;
Everything passes;
God never changes.
Patience be all to thee.
Who trusts in God, he
Never shall be needy.
God alone suffices.”

Memories written in water

 

This morning I took my small dogs along to the travelling vet to have them sterilised. The noise of the other dogs and the hubbub of the village hall terrified them. While I waited for them to come around from the anaesthetic, I sat and let memories of loss just wash over me. Other beloved dogs, the fraught visits to other vets. Friends in hospital and hospice. The young Scotsman who was my father in his early 30s. My mother and father sitting beside the ocean in Mozambique, talking but not meeting one another’s eyes. The turbulent rich messiness of family life that shaped me. How grateful I am for all of it. Letting the memories be carried away in the stream, letting go.

Acceptance. Surrender. As simple as drawing a deep breath and exhaling slowly. It feels impossible at times but it is simple enough. I don’t get to make all the decisions, I don’t get to understand the full story, I don’t get to play more than a bit part. It is enough to just pay attention and trust that it will all come right at the end of the day.

My housemate’s knee is bruised because she slipped and fell. She is waiting to see if it heals itself. I am waiting to see if I need to coax her to get back to the doctor and bully a little if necessary. We have a doctors’ strike here in South Africa because the conditions in which doctors and medics and interns work is intolerable. But the strike means that there are not enough doctors to treat badly injured or very ill patients and the chaos at local hospitals is heartbreaking. Una has so much more to worry about than her knee because nurses have to step into the gap.

 

So I am making a ragu with tomatoes and fresh parsley and grated nutmeg and mincemeat browned in a heavy pan and waiting for Una to get home so she can have a hot meal and rest her leg.  There is a cold wind blowing and I have wrapped rugs and soft blankets around the snoring  dogs. A vagrant at the door is finishing a mug of hot soup.  I am watching over my woozy dogs and writing to a lonesome sober alcoholic in China. Keeping it simple works for me, one day at a time.

face to face with the sky

 

Bitterly cold with wide empty skies. My small chubby pups are off to the vet tomorrow and  I have put on their best collars from Blue Cross in the UK, sent to me by my friend Jan. I have packed their leads,  a travelling rug, a roll of loo paper, a small stainless steel drinking bowl and still mineral water, Chloe’s favourite chewed pillow and their toy Mr Blue. They have no idea they are going anywhere and are lying asleep on their large ergonomic pillow bed. Maybe I shoud take that ergonomic bed along too.

 

Yesterday I went out to the near-Karoo for lunch and left the pups at home with rugs and toys and fresh water. The smart pup Jez climbed up on a chair and hooked my cell phone off the writing table. She and Chloe chewed off a row of numbers so I have had to get a new phone. That was  a trifle inconvenient, but what clever dogs they are!

It was glorious weather yesterday. Poplars grey as ghosts, the white sheaths of arum lilies luminous in ditches, lemon-yellow protea bushes amidst the fynbos, reddening twigs on apple trees. The mountain ranges folded in on themselves like mauve and blue pillows. We had lunch  on a porch sheltered from wind, eating grilled squid/calamari and fresh prawns. Lemony spritzers, slices of country bread with unsalted butter. Afterwards I bought more art supplies, choosing a palette knifewith care, picking out sealed jars of acrylics and tubes of Naples Yellow and Umber oils. Boxed stretched canvases in linen, cotton and jute, masonite board, sketch pads, crayons. Fine camel hair brushes. I check not just the brush tip but the crimping and ferrule. There are red sable hair brushes, weasel, squirrel, mongoose and boar bristle. I could spend hours just learning about the brushes and canvases and types of crackle-glaze and varnish.

 

So now I have my easel set up half-turned towards the light in my study, am ready to prime the canvas and have almost decided what I am going to paint on this new untouched canvas. I feel the same trepidation as I do when faced with the blank opening page of a new  notebook.

Art is a consolation of sorts, a distraction. Moving a wet brush back and forth on canvas, watching the colour spread like a warm glow.

Navigating the labyrinth

 

All night I toss and turn and wake from dreams about my childhood, dreams that vanish as I wake — possibly because I am not yet ready to receive them. My father angry or silent with his face averted, my father elderly and helpless,  my father as a small boy evacuated out of an incendiary Edinburgh during World War II. A lifethat continues in me but so much unspoken, unmended. I feel as if I am finding my way through a dim high-walled labyrinth, trying to write history backwards.

 

My puppies are going to the vet tobe neutered ( is that the right term?) on Thursday and I hope everything goes well. My beloved housemate is recovering well and very gentle and caring towards me because she remembers her own experience of bereavement, her mother dying, as if it were yesterday. Neighbours pop in and offer to do shopping or bake pies for me.

What I want to do is to keep busy and let the deeper feeings surface over time. I feel a little numb and shocked and sad. No great epiphanies, no dramas, just a glimmerng of light as I keep walking through the labyrinth. In bed with coffee this morning I read an extract from the writer JM Coetzee’s new novel, Summertime, a son looking back on his oblique faiedrelationship with a depressed and inaccessible father. The young man walking through a sea city, the streets and plazas of Cape Town 30 or more years ago, a city of palm trees and flat-roofed houses, running down from the slopes of Table Mountain to the wide blue bay.

 

And I am also reading the poetry of Kay Ryan whose life partner Carol Adair died in January. The speechlessness of loss. All that cannot be said.

Ryan:  ‘It’s what we can’t know that interests us.’

The labyrinth is constructed of memories, a kind of necropolis. The small colonial towns of my childhood in central Africa, towns with large parks and  vivid with flamboyant and coral trees. The seaside resorts where our family endured unhappy annual holidays on the Indian Ocean, the glitter of white dunes running between milkwood copses and mangrove swamps. My father fishing out on Tortoise Rock, alone at dawn with tides running high. My imagined glimpses of his Edinburgh in the 1930s. Places and countries that no longer exist. A landscape through which he no longer moves, that red-bearded Scot with his Jekyll and Hyde split, his way with bull terrier dogs, his passion for the ebonywood and teak trees of Africa. His desire to vanish into places where he would not be known, his ways of escape that so often coincide with my own.

And the winding passageways of the labyrinth go on twisting and tunneling into the past. The archeology of sober grief.

 

Shadow and light

Deep heartfelt thanks to all of you for your comments and emails. They have comforted and sustained me.

 

I feel tremendously sad but not disturbed or as if I need to anaesthetise myself, which is a great blessing.

A long-sober AA friend on a private mailing list sent this comment to me and it is something I am holding to right now –

‘Sober, you get to feel all the aspects of his exit, which I’d guess will be an experience that lasts many years.’

Unhindered grieving has a very natural flow — however painful — and I intend to feel all that needs to be felt. The last two years have been the most truly lived years of my adult life and if I had been present to my own reality years ago, the disconnect between my father and myself might have been overcome. I did what I could but always in a fog and amidst the roller coaster of drinking.

I haven’t heard back from my sisters or brother — very much a pattern in my family, the frozen communications, but at least I have the peace of knowing I will be here if they do reach out.

I have a completely unproven and unprovable belief that for those of us who sober up later in life when we do not have decades of sobriety and time to mature ahead of us, there is an enhanced learning curve so that all the truncated or stunted places and feelings blocked by years of alcoholism get freed up in order that we are able to live more fully and usefully. My pet heresy, I suppose.

A peaceful death

 

I just heard that my father, who has been in a coma for more than a year and was recently moved from the US to Zimbabwe, died last night, very peacefully. I am relieved that his suffering is finally at an end.

The fields in sunlight

 

It is a glorious day all buttery and golden with sunshine. I spent a few troubled hours yesterday plucking and degutting a fat young goose and am roasting it with green apples for lunch. I hope the damn thing is edible — if not, the guests will have a medley of roast winter vegetables. In sobriety no challenge is too daunting.

The housemate’s knee is healing but she will not rest. She has been forbidden to drive but tears out to give insulin injections, driving across bumpy farm rads with only one foot on the pedals. I detach with love and gritted teeth.

 

I value the mundane in my life, the sameness, the ordinary. My sister sends me another photo of a tiny yowling baby, my great-nephew Noah. She tells me my alcoholic brother has been jailed twice for threatening his ex-wife. He is adamant that his drinking has nothing to do with his current status as unemployed public nuisance. I admire the tiny yowling baby and grieve over my brother. The poinsettias in the garden are audacious and brilliant this year. There are new luxurious winter sheets on the bed. The origanum and thyme are flourishing in the herb garden.

What was it Auden said? ‘Life remains a blessing/although you cannot bless.’ For years I watched life from the other side of an invisible glass wall,  frozen and stuck. Life was what would happen next week or next year or whenever I stopped drinking. I had a life that did not become.

So I write back to my sister, who is distressed by my brother’s conflicting accounts of his unmanageable life. Dishonesty becomes so habitual that it is as natural to the active alcoholic as breathing. Drunks are always more sinned against than sinning. We identify as victims, there is a series of melodramas, infernal soap operas, in which we are always the misunderstood aggrieved party. We are never at fault. It is always another’s fault and we devote great inner resources to the unsubtle art of blaming.

I love the brother I recall from my childhood — but after two and a half years sober myself, I have no sympathy for his alcoholism. My brother has vanished and in his place there is just the suffering alcoholic trapped in delusion. And oompassion is wasted on anyone who has a life story constructed  around sef-pity and resentment.

So I core green apples and listen to the wagtails singing and whistling in the garden. I want to do a painting of a mysterious griffn for  my tiny great-nephew, a wild bold painting that  might hang in his bedroom. The griffin whirling in the Sahara desert with cloud castles and a pitiless sun, the griffin surrounded by camels and serpents and wonderful talking parrots. In the background there is a ship with full-bellied sails and tall masts and a pirate crew, a sailing ship that soars over the dunes. The painting will be called Noah’s Ark.

Dash of sunshine

 

Just back from a farmers’ market where I met my friend Char for brunch. The sun out and brilliant on the watery green fields and arum lilies pushing up in ditches. Char in a royal blue scarf and cape. She dropped a bombshell on me as I was eating a brioche with quince jam and sipping rooibos tea.  by announcing that she might have sold her house. I was caught off guard and dismayed. Not just because I like having my friends live a street away but because Char needs to put down roots — she is a charming intelligent graceful transient and as we age, the gipsy roaming loses its appeal. Well so I think. She moves from city to country and back again, from village to village, making friends and losing them, single and creating beauty as she goes but at the price of stability and intimacy.

We wrangled a little and I made her cry, then we kissed and made up.  Next to the restaurant there was a large barn with a pregnant black sow and we went to admire the pig snuffling in clean straw. Country life is full of farmyard delights, for those who like farmyards.

Another bombshell when I got home and found that an intruder had broken into the garage where we keep our deep freeze and emptied it of frozen food supplies. This doesn’t just affect us but all those we help to feed. And I dislike knowing the intruder came onto the property in daylight with my housemate sleeping indoors. But nobody was hurt and perhaps his  or her need was greater than ours.

And then another bombshell. In April I wrote about the flamboyantly alcoholic Frieda and her long-suffering husband. She went off to rehab, left after a few days and carried on drinking. She had a bad fall or two, was seen in town  berating shopkeepers with a lopsided bandage around her head. She arrived drunk at the fineral of Lizzie S who died a teetotaller at 98 years of age after a blameless but very annoying life. Frieda sang rude words to the hymns and kept swearing  at the preacher under her breath until her husband bodily dragged her out. He was shaking like a leaf and close to tears. Everyone thought this very funny:  all stories about absurd abusive drunks take on a certain entertaining quality, especially when the loud obnoxious drunk has a meek and ineffectual husband in tow. I had been expecting to hear that Frieda was facing another health crisis or had been arrested. I have phoned and left messages two or three times, but did not expect to hear from her. Recovering types are anathema to drunks.

 

On Wednesday night, with a storm breaking over the village and gale-force winds tearing down from the north, the long-suffering husband  took out and loaded a shotgun, climbed the stairs to his study and blew out his brains. A twist nobody expected, least of all Frieda. Everyone  is very shocked and nobody knows what to say. We all knew he was lonely and heartbroken and at the end of his tether. Nobody went near the house because of the drunken termagant. Everyone was scornful of him for not leaving her. People said he should stand up to her or give her an ultimatum.

Suicide is not only an act of desperation but deeply hostile, a way of leaving behind a burning question and accusation even without any suicide note. It is sometimes called the ultimate revenge.

The house is silent and blinds are drawn. The husband’s little dogs have been taken away and destroyed. There is no news about Frieda, but it is not hard to guess what she must be going through. If she is conscious of what is there to be endured.

In my mind’s eye, I keep seeing ripples spreading out in a dark pond, the way in which alcoholism poisons so many lives,  casts its shadow in so many places.

These things I have shored against my ruin

 

Yesterday was a very tough day for me because my beloved housemate had to have keyhole surgery on her knee and I was tormented with fears all day that she would not come around from the anaesthetic or that the surgeon would find something seriously wrong. She has bad health and is in her late 60s. I realised again how much of my happiness at home centres on her presence and our way of living together in an independent yet connected easy rapport.

Of course the op went well and she is fine. The idea of drinking didn’t cross my mnd because –surrender, surrender — I seem finally to have understood deep within myself that drinking is just a kind of death for me — but the inner anxiety and fleeting  terrors I felt all day were not easy, although I saw friends and called people and talked with other sober people. And blogged and edited and posted on forums. Played with my dogs and made a new kind of leek soup, delicious.

But sometimes when I find myself frightened, somehow edgy and fragile, I do understand why the drinking seemed a solution for so long. A way of escaping myself. I seem to create a tormented and unbearable place within when I am faced with any threat of loss or abandonment, and it is very hard for me to simply endure those passing states. They are passing, fleeting, and I am very lucky in that respect. Regaining equilibrium is simple and quick enough so long as I do not drink.

I have written about this before and I don’t know that many people understand or experience anything similar — but my close friends ‘hold’ my stable and sober self for me, they are my safety and much of my lasting sobriety is bound up with their love and caring. Because they saw the extreme vulnerability  of who I was in very early sobriety, they understand something that work colleagues and newer acquaintances don’t see. When I was in the UK, several sober contacts there said how easy and uncomplicated my sobriety seemed and what a pity I had not chosen to sober up before. Only those who watched me battle day and night for weeks and months to keep steady and not fly apart or self-medicate really understand why staying sober means a great deal to me.

 

Whenever I go through a wobbly time I look hard at the array of self-soothing behaviours and ‘holding’ patterns that help with this surface desperation. This is of course the lived-out and detailed interpretations of the relevant Steps: generalities mean little to me.  I make sure I eat regular meals and spend time with others and keep to the usual routines of meditating and tending the garden, keep hard at work and do creative things, small gestures like painting, arranging flowers around the house, trying new recipes, memorising poetry, listening to music, going for walks or doing t’ai chi.  All of these activities seem to serve as reminders of who I have become in sobriety and what I value so much in my life now. I sometimes feel that in this way I am invoking my ‘witness’ self, the more lucid and calming aspect of myself to watch over the fragmenting and dread-filled self of my past.