Books
Book Review: Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love
Julia Neuberger says this new book answers a need.
October 11, 2018 14:05
Julia Neuberger says this new book answers a need.
October 11, 2018 14:05This book is astonishingly compelling, while sometimes feeling disjointed, episodic, almost incoherent. It is a running reflection on grief and anger combined, the one provoking the other, in a book needed by so many people, bereaved as Lisa Appignanesi was in 2015 when she lost John Forrester, her partner/husband of 32 years, to lymphoma.
He was being treated; his end came suddenly. And, though he had been uncharacteristically loving and tender earlier in his last day, his last words were cruel, insisting Lisa took some foul-smelling, soiled pyjamas home to wash: “That’s all you’re good for…cleaning shit!” “That was the last sentence he uttered to me,” she writes. “It hit me with the force of a body blow. And mired me. Engulfed.”
And so the slow progress began. Overwhelming anger in unexpected corners. Anger at what John had been and not been. Pictures of another lover, none of her. Exploring the desk she did not like. An attempted burglary, where she was convinced John was coming back.
Then the kindness of friends, the endless food brought round, the invitations, the offers of help. But always, the rage, in a person normally not angry at all, combined with the feeling that the object of her rage, John, was gone too soon, so she could not express it. So far so normal — if rage in grief can be described as normal. But set against that is the public raging of the nation, the anger expressed by ordinary people after the Brexit vote. Fellow passengers on the Tube are incoherently abusive; Lisa does not, cannot, take them on. Voices on the street are harsh. There is a cruelty in the air, a xenophobia, an unpleasantness, and all of it meshed with her inner rage. The picture she paints grows darker and more disturbed.
An inveterate reader, she finds she cannot read. She fills in forms and forms, and forms. The bureaucracy after a death is punishment in itself.
She becomes charged with activity, being a good mother or grandmother. She invests actions with a meaning she cannot find. And she reflects on the length of time it takes women to recover from bereavement, with the danger of illness, immunities compromised, defences down and, all the time, an incipient madness.
And yet recovery comes eventually, mainly through her grandchildren, watching them, comforting them, remembering her own childhood. As she reflects on her parents’ survival, their difficulties and sense of self, a new/old Lisa emerges. Her grandchildren give her a new perception of the world. She discusses Freud’s attitude to bereavement and to children facing the birth of a younger sibling — the least satisfactory part of the book — but she then captures her new life with engaging descriptions of little Manny, eating the most sophisticated of foods, child of a “foodie generation”. Having found ordinary satisfactions in life in the nursery and beyond, she is able to say, “that is a great deal.”
It is indeed, and her reflection will help many bereaved women plot their journey, as she has charted hers.
Baroness Julia Neuberger is the Senior Rabbi at West London Synagogue
