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.

A self that touches all edges

 

Which is a line from the sublime Wallace Stevens, whose poetry is all the palm at the end of the mind. And beyond. Poems fill me like cream cakes each morning, touch me with goosebumps, leave me dazed and intoxicated while sober.

My beloved housemate and the only person I really call family, is awaiting keyhole surgery on her knee out at a mediclinic about two hours’ drive away. She says that the sky is bright blue and the mountains all around are completely white with snow. She had her last bite to eat at 6am and is ravenous, wants to come home tomorrow to roast chicken and roast potatoes and cauliflower with cheese sauce and not a leafy green vegetable in sight.

It is pouring with rain here and steadily getting colder. I have taken out an extra quilt for the night and drink steaming mugs of spicy chai, wrapping my fingers around the hot mug for warmth. Bedraggled African ibises crouch on the garage roof. The farmer’s wife who is studying French with me did not turn up this morning and a literacy workshop was cancelled so that people did not have to walk miles in the icy rain and mud.

I am sick with anxiety about Una’s surgery but staying in the moment with routines of work, puppy love and connectivity with much loved friends as well as reaching out to those who woke up hungover and heartsick this mornng.  Contact with the  still suffering alcoholic puts everything in perspective and gives me a chance to be useful.

A tenderly tactful editor in California has asked me to rewrite the ending of a piece of short fiction she likes very much. I sat up rewriting it, labouring over each sentence and then going back through the rest of the story correcting for motivation and talking out the dialogue aloud to myself in the bath, the best place to hear if a sentence has the emphasis or rythmns needed. It sees fine — perhaps even an improvement. But for me the fiction now has two endings and I feel as if I have given birth to twins and must not show favouritism.

And now the rain has begun pouring down my kitchen chimney and I feel like the woodcutter’s daught in a Perrault fairytale, the hearth blackened from waterfalls of soot and freezing rain water turning the kitchen into a deluge while I dash around with a broom and mops and my tiny Cinderella puppies leave trails of paw marks and bark at the roaring ogre up the chimney.  The little toyshop of unavoidable disasters and unpredictable happiness.

The white smile of winter

 

Cold fronts are blasting in from the Atlantic,  snow is falling on mountains and high ground, sub-zero temperatures and high winds are predicted. Beyond my window there is swirling mist, a white grimace. The snowy mountains invisible but the light very bright, dazzling and hard. And gusts of rain blowing into this whiteness  like grey confetti. The two small dogs are balled up tight as cats, dreaming of sunshine. On the stove a pot of red speckled beans is simmering together with leeks, garlic, celery and tomato puree. Twenty litres of soup so that I can feed others later this evening, as the cold intensifies. I have been sitting up in bed wrapped in a duvet reading Angela Carter.

Angela Carter is of course the briliant fabulist who reinvented the modern fairy tale, a wicked, feminist and inventive writer who  ‘put the beautiful at the service of liberty’.  I read and reread her gothic fairy tales, her stories of circuses and the beautiful daughter of the executioner and magic toyshops and sexual politics. Her work was decades ahead of its time; she died too young of cancer at only 51.

We never know when time is about to fold in on us, the evanescent butterfly drifting down from the branch. I hear from a Welsh friend that a young woman, newly sober, is dying of cancer and will leave three small children under the age of five orphaned. Last summer she was tanned, blooming like a peach and speaking of living like a gipsy out near the Black Mountain. A chill runs through me — I hope there will be a grandmother or great-aunt to read fairy tales to those bereft children and help them discover the power of myths to live by.

Myth of course is never ‘out there’: it is at work within us, deep and continuous and illuminating.

 

There is a gritty grey wind tearing through the garden and house, shrivelling my old Crepuscule rose and knocking olive branches together, a rattling misery of a wind. I woke up this morning to discover I have become great-aunt to a tiny puce-faced baby boy in the Antipodes. As always family communication is erratic and ambiguous but I like to think of myself as a y0ungish great-aunt. Perhaps one day this little boy will travel back to the Dark Continent Filled with Light and I shall get to know him, see in his eyes and  smile some traces of my dead brother, my own grandmother, the Scottish kin who came out to Africa so long ago.

And my housemate is overjoyed to find that she does not need a knee replacement, just arthroscopy.  I am getting ready to nurse her after the treatment, searching out tubes of arnica and warming oils and antiseptic herbs. Soft linen dressings and pillows so she can keep her feet up. A glass bowl of flowers on her bedside table, water jugs, hot water bottles, a blue and cream mohair rug. I know quite well that the patient has no intention of resting in bed, that she will be up and limping about, eager to get back to work. But it calms me to sort out salves and fluff up pillows, so I do it all the same.

To celebrate the arrival of a new baby, I am painting a large landscape with wide African skies, blue airy spaces and tumbling cumulus. There is a brown river and a village of shapeshifting sorcerers, hyena magicians, samango monkeys in tall trees, yellow-eyed African crocodiles. My brush technique is not up to any of this magic-making and everything is a little blobby. The sky looks good though.

Sober and a great-aunt, I am ready to try any new adventure. We learn by going/where we have to go.

Poem for love of the alcoholic father

 

 

It is Father’s Day and a time to admit love for the most unlovable of parents, the dearest, the best.

 

My Papa’s Waltz

 

by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

 

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother’s countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

 

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

 

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.