Eating the Underworld Read online

  Like my mother, Dad would do anything for us—drive us anywhere, pick up this or that, find ways to pay for anything we wanted. He and I were close companions. He would take me with him on weekends when he had work to deliver to outlying suburbs. Always, we would stop on the way as I caught sight of the wild, purple thistles in bloom by the roadside. Dad would get out and, braving mud and thorns, pick me an armful.

  As a younger sibling, however, there was a counterpoint to all this unquestioning adoration pouring down from above. It came in the person of a sister, much bigger and stronger than I. She must have been furious at my arrival. My mother had been ill in hospital for a few weeks prior to my birth. She came home without me; I had to stay on a little longer. My sister would have been on an emotional roller coaster—first her mother’s disappearance and return; then, only a few weeks later, my home-coming and the realisation that whereas previously she had been the special only child, now there was another to share the attention.

  I lived my life in a peculiar juxtaposition of undiluted love from my parents and the opposite from my sister. It was a juxtaposition I could never understand. I idolised my big sister, ran errands for her, gave her my pocket money, did whatever she asked—all in the hope that she might someday love me. It was a love I dreamed I might somehow earn if I worked hard enough, gave enough, did enough.

  On the other side was the love from my parents that needed no earning at all. That was there regardless, no matter what I did, what I gave or what I didn’t.

  I have often wondered since then, how I would have turned out if I had been the older sister. The stress of our relationship took its toll on me, but in time, it also gave me my strength. And in the context of a family in which children were loved, but over-indulged, being the younger sister of a strong-willed and dominant sibling had the side benefit of teaching me early on how to deal with limits, frustrations and a world that wasn’t mine to command.

  As a psychologist, I now understand the terrible anxiety engendered in children raised without limits and restrictions. The unwitting damage caused in creating and maintaining the child who believes in his or her omnipotence. The child without boundaries or delineations, who is unable to develop a secure and realistic sense of self. The brittle monarch who needs constant attendance, adoration and gratification. And the rage and anxiety which come when these are not given.

  I feel an intense discomfort in writing about my family. The life of an individual is as complex as a maze of reflecting mirrors; the life of a family is even more so. Each person has their own experience, interpretations and memories of it. Each person has their own truths. The difficulties come when these truths are not allowed to co-exist.

  I don’t claim to be the holder of some absolute truth, but am merely the holder of my own experiences. I have pulled back from speaking about these for many reasons: because I was told it was shameful to expose differences. Because I wished to protect people. Because I wanted to remain a private person. Because of the difficult question of who ‘owns’ shared stories. Because I did not want to cause pain. Because of a wish to avoid it all. Because of the impact on others. Because of my concern that if I spoke out, then I would only be doing what I had criticised my sister for. And also, I am not proud to say, because of fear. Because of what happens to those other tellers of truths—whistle-blowers and abused children, the witnesses of difficult or even unbearable experience in which others do not wish to believe. All too often, the bearers of news which bursts bubbles of illusion, idealisation or comfort are themselves turned on; scorned, ridiculed or attacked.

  It has been painful seeing the accounts of my family recounted so publicly by my sister in numerous books, articles and interviews. The family she portrays is a family that feels very different to the one I grew up with. I have had strangers stop me in the street and commiserate with me for having had such a terrible mother. I find myself saying again and again to them, that no, that was not my experience. I have had patients who have come to see me as a psychotherapist because they had abusive mothers and, having read my sister’s books, they ‘knew’ that I had one too, and would understand.

  When someone dies, the final thing they leave behind them is their memory. It is most precious to all of us; the last gift of the dead to the living. The crowning question on interviewers’ lips as they strive to encapsulate a life is invariably, ‘How would you like to be remembered?’

  Those of us who loved my mother have our own private memories of her—a person of rare grace, compassion and love. But there is also another memory of her, one she never expected to have: a public memory. This memory is taken from my sister’s writing and interviews. In this memory, my mother wears a face that is unrecognisable to me. It is clearly the way Lily has chosen to interpret her experience and yet in the minds of many, it has become who my mother actually was. It is how she will be remembered by readers, critics, academics; people who never knew her, even for a second. It is her image set into the stone of words.

  I have been silent for a long time. I thought I had put it all behind me, was leading my own life, separate and apart from my family history. I had thought that silence was a healthy and civilised accommodation to a difficult problem. But, as I am to discover, the experience of facing death also forces you to face life. I have realised that silence may be golden, but it is the gold of that arch-villain of James Bond films—Auric Goldfinger, who painted his victims, brushstroke by brushstroke, in gold, until the final stroke covered the body’s last opening to the world and they suffocated and died, prisoners in their own gilded bodies.

  I have been privileged; my story is still evolving. As a human being and as a psychotherapist, I am endlessly learning about the delicate, subtle and strange convolutions of the human heart. One of the hearts I have also been learning about is that of my family and the shadows it has cast.

  While I had always loved my mother, it was during the months of her illness that I also felt honoured to have known her as a person. During that time, when our roles were reversed and it was my turn to look after her, I was able to understand in a new way what an extraordinary person she was. She met the experience of illness with enormous grace and courage, embracing us, as usual, with her love, determined that she was going to beat the cancer, just as she had beaten so many terrible odds in her life.

  Once, a patient of mine told me that she had been nursing her mother at home in the last months of her illness. I assumed it had been a devastating experience and said something to that effect. She shook her head. No, she said, it had not been like that. It had been a very loving time that she had felt privileged to experience.

  I had not truly understood her experience until I nursed my own mother through the last two months of her life. I realised then what a blessing it was to have that grace-time; to give back some of the love and nourishment that she had given to us over the years. She was bed-ridden and I would spend the days sitting beside her, chatting, reading, writing while she napped. What we did, or even spoke about, was often nothing out of the ordinary. It was the intensity of the love that radiated through the room that was special. Its presence was so palpable that it did not need to be mentioned. It was there—everywhere, in everything. The only thing I can compare it to is the intensity of emotion, of love, that I felt after giving birth to my daughter.

  I would go to my mother’s house to take care of her each morning. I had shifted my patients around so that I could spend till mid-afternoon with her. In the mornings when I set out for my mother’s, I would rush. Not because I was late, but because I wanted to see her, with the kind of impatience usually afforded to lovers. I wanted to be there already, not dawdling on the road. Drawing up to the blue-windowed, pale brick house by the sea, I would hurry to get out of the car. It was like the joyous anticipation of waiting to greet someone loved, who has been overseas. Except that here, it was the reverse. Each day was the greeting of someone beloved who was here now, but might soon be away, on unknown and unreachable waters.


  My mother did not want to believe that this disease would kill her. She wanted to live, to see her grandchildren grow up. To be there for them and for us. I had come prepared to talk about death and dying—the hard subjects. I wasn’t sure what to do when I realised that she didn’t want to enter those areas. I puzzled for a while and then decided that what was important was respecting her needs, her wishes. And in the end, it didn’t matter that we never talked about her death. What mattered was the love. And that was there, regardless of subject matter. Those last two, intensely loving months of looking after her were truly one of the gifts of my life. I am always grateful for them.

  It is strange that the building where the journey of my illness begins is the one where my mother’s ended. I remain aware of it as I enter the building and find my way to the desk where I present myself in the form of a white slip of paper covered with doctor’s scrawl.

  As requested, I sit down to wait. And drink more water. Is that possible? With all this water, I am beginning to feel whale-like. I am also starting to eye the sign that says ‘Ladies’. My bladder and the unknowing ultrasound technician are now in a race for supremacy. The ultrasound technician wins out by a hair. Just as I am about to give up and empty all, she appears in her white coat and beckons me on.

  I am handed the latest in hospital chic—a paper outfit in anaemic green. I do the Clark Kent thing and emerge from the cubicle in my new persona of badly wrapped cabbage roll. On the examination couch, I try not to wince while the technician smears gel, which has come straight from the Antarctic to me, over my abdomen.

  ‘Yes, it is a little chilly,’ she says in response to my twitches, with that wonderful sense of understatement so common to health professionals. She then produces the wand—no fairy dust, just a metal stick—and glides it along my abdomen. The screen comes alight with images of my interior. My abdominal cavity is a TV star.

  The technician keeps up a pleasant chatter as she does her work. After a few neck-straining attempts to view the TV screen—it has been placed just outside my line of sight—I give up and rely on her to be my tour guide.

  ‘It’s definitely not fibroids,’ she says cheerfully. I relax, thinking this is good, it means no surgery. It hasn’t occurred to me yet that if it’s not fibroids, it has to be something else.

  ‘Can’t see the right ovary,’ she says, squinting and shifting the wand from side to side. This still doesn’t disturb me. Benignly, I imagine the ovary playing hide-and-seek behind whatever it is that ovaries play hide-and-seek. It hasn’t yet dawned that ovaries don’t usually play hide-and-seek.

  ‘There, I think I’ve got everything,’ she says. ‘I just have to get the radiologist to okay it all.’

  She exits and returns a few minutes later followed by a slim, sober-looking young man. He examines the picture on the TV screen, his expression fixed. Not a muscle twitches, not a word is spoken and yet suddenly I know that something is very wrong. None of us says anything. Radiologists are supposed to deliver the news to the patient’s doctor, not to the patient. I have the impulse to ask him what he sees, but I know he won’t tell me and I don’t want to plead.

  It is my first encounter with this particular version of the old truth ‘knowledge is power’, and I will meet it time and time again. The power of nurses, receptionists, clerks, radiologists holding papers, letters, notes, pathology results—your future in their hands and refusing to reveal it. ‘Your doctor will tell you,’ they say, discounting the fact that it may take hours or days before you can make contact with your doctor. And that each minute of this waiting is what Dante didn’t describe about hell.

  I go home and ring my new GP.

  ‘It wasn’t a fibroid,’ I say, expecting her to suggest further investigations, more tests, another meeting at her office. Instead, she says she knows; the radiologist has already rung her, and she has taken the liberty of making an emergency appointment for me with a gynaecologist in half an hour from now. Can I be there?

  The question is, of course, rhetorical. I get out my diary and change whatever it was I was supposed to do that day. Martin comes with me; fortuitously he’s not at work today. There are no parking spaces available at the medical rooms when we get to them, so he lets me out while he searches for a spot. I walk into the doctor’s rooms, grateful that I don’t have to be circling and circling looking for somewhere to put the car.

  I am still digesting this new feeling. It’s like the air before a thunderstorm; an aura that says to you: something’s going to change, and it’s going to be big and dangerous. I know I am about to encounter something that will shift my whole life to the edge. I could deduce it rationally, of course—you don’t get sent on emergency appointments to doctors because you have something benign. But my knowing is also beyond the rational. It is not anything I can delineate or dissect. It is just there. And I am certain of it.

  My GP has referred to this new doctor as a gynaecologist. A nice, neutral word. The most traumatic thing I associate with gynaecologists is pap smears. But as I walk into this gynaecologist’s waiting room, I see that we are clearly beyond pap smear territory. An elderly woman is weeping loudly, being comforted by her family. ‘No!’ she is saying. ‘I won’t go in! I won’t go in!’ over and over again. The rest of the waiting room sits quietly, heads bent. The elderly woman in black continues to wail. It is hard to witness such distress and not do anything about it.

  The room has the standardised features of waiting rooms everywhere—neutral-coloured paint on the walls, a coffee-table piled with out-dated magazines, a scattering of utilitarian chairs and couches. I am thrown back to the anonymity of being a patient, a reduced person. Sitting here in this nondescript room knowing that a stranger, to whom I mean nothing, is soon to deliver news that will wrench my world apart, I feel an urgent need, an anxiety almost, to reclaim myself. I don’t want to be an illness. I don’t want to be an anonymous number. If someone is going to do this to me, I want them to do it to me. The intensity of my need surprises me. If someone had asked me what my reactions would be sitting in a doctor’s room waiting to be told I had cancer, this would not have been high on my list.

  I see now, though, that the simple experience of being diagnosed with cancer is such a stripping experience that we need all the sense of self we can get. At a very primitive level, it says: you have lost something, you have been set apart; the weaker impala, singled out from the herd. You are vulnerable. You are not like the others.

  This stripping of identity continues in many ways. In hospital, your clothes—those other skins that you wear as part of your name—are taken from you. In their place is the anonymous sameness of the hospital gown. If you are in for a stay, you are tagged with plastic name bracelets on your wrist and ankle. It is not your name they carry, but that of your doctor’s. As if you are now property, a possession. Secrets about you are collected—the view inside your body, the intricate composition of your hidden blood—and they are kept from you in folders that are not for you to leaf through. The keepers of the secrets hold them; will tell you when they are ready what they think you need to know.

  Half an hour into our wait, Martin’s phone rings. It is the alarm-monitoring company. Our house alarm, usually so well behaved, has gone off and will not stop. It is programmed to shut down after ten minutes, but is refusing to. Its nerve-racking wail will continue for two hours until we finally get home. In all of the years since its instalment, it has never done anything like this. When we do get home, to its klaxon echoing through the streets, I am reminded of a dog, lost and howling at the moon.

  The waiting room is still half-full. It is a busy morning. I have been squeezed into an already overflowing schedule. My mind blinks on and off from the wrinkled women’s magazines in my lap. They are not enough to distract me. I hear the receptionist saying to someone that the doctor was supposed to be in surgery an hour ago. I think of the impatience with which I have waited in doctors’ rooms in the past and wonder if their schedule was delay
ed because of someone like me.

  Every now and then, a footballer in a suit wanders past. I wonder vaguely what he is doing here—accompanying a wife or mother perhaps? Suddenly, with a sense of unnerving incongruity, I remember the last time I sat in a waiting room, speculating about footballers. It was on the other side of the world, a few light years ago, in Washington DC.

  I am in Washington to publicise one of my books. American publishers have developed a wonderful subset of professionals called author’s escorts. They should be cloned immediately and made available to all, regardless of class, gender or profession. All wars would cease, famine would be wiped out, productivity increased and peace on earth would reign.

  The sole purpose in life of an author’s escort is to pamper you, feed you and get you to your work on time. There are two down-sides. One, is that on the typical frenzied schedule of an American book tour, there is precious little time for pampering. The second, is that it is difficult to re-embrace normal life with quite the same fervour, once you’ve experienced an author’s escort.

  I’ve had an author’s escort in all the other cities I’ve been in, but for some reason—possibly the effect of a sunspot flare interfering with normal neural functioning—my publishers have decided that I don’t need one in Washington. ‘No sweat,’ I say. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  Just how fine, I begin to get a glimpse of, when my plane lands at Dulles airport. I am excited because it is only 10 pm and by my calculations, that means I’ll be settled in my credit-card-guaranteed-late-night-arrival room by midnight. That means (oh joy!) that I’ll actually get five hours’ sleep before having to set out on my rounds of TV and radio interviews the next day.