Frustrated Writer

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”

― François Rabelais

I don’t think I really understand death – despite having had it call at my door. I’ve had crashes in a car and on a push bike which were serious. The last one was two years ago when I lost my balance on a bike and ended up with two broken ankles and fourteen days in hospital.

Fortunately, death wasn’t ready! I let out a loud sigh of relief. It wasn’t my time. I’m always impressed by the stoicism of the bereaved. I will not face the world with a stiff upper lip. I shall wear sackcloth and ashes for at least a year after my wife dies – if she predeceases me. (I do dislike that term. It’s so clinical and remote. Selfishly I want to die first. My wife will cope much better. But I won’t get much say in that.)

I have two abiding images of death. One is my father who had always enjoyed watching a good football match. We went to visit him in his nursing home, where he was “watching” a cup match.  Something he would usually have enjoyed. I say “watching” because anything could have been on, so uninterested was my father. My mother had died six months earlier and my father along with her. The light had gone from his life and all he wanted was to join her. (Which he eventually did, succumbing to a low-level infection which should have responded to anti-biotics. For him death was a welcome friend to reunite him with my mother.)

The other death I saw close to was that of my father-in-law who died shortly before Christmas. The family wondered if we should postpone Christmas that year. Not a bit of it! The family had planned for Christmas and Christmas was happening sprouts and all. I remember being amazed by the way my mother-in-law joined in a game of scrabble – despite the empty chair where her husband usually sat.  She died thirty years later and remains much missed.

Another kind of death is the emotional one.  A case of “Don’t get too close. I might bite”. This death is often seen in women who have been sexually or physically abused by a significant male figure in their life.  Sometimes an “intimate partner” or sibling. They go through their daily life keeping everyone at bay with hostility or emotional coldness. These women – and it almost always seems to be women – seem to epitomise Rabelais’ comment “I go to seek a great Perhaps”. Their hope is “perhaps this one will love me”.

Sadly, they go through life using as a defence what the analyst Donald Winnicott called “the False Self, which is “a defensive facade that a child creates when caregivers fail to adequately respond to their spontaneous needs, forcing the child to comply with environmental expectations to protect their vulnerable True Self”. When translated, Winnicott is saying that some people – often women – develop a way of being that almost always prevents genuine intimacy. The one thing they long for and need they somehow always fail to find. They fail for a number of reasons. One of which is the repeated choice of a partner who will never be able to give them the love and care they desperately want and need. In part because they, too, are unable to love or be genuinely intimate – the prerequisites for a healthy relationship.

The good news is that “spiritual death” can be treated successfully, unlike physical death. Over my years in clinical work, I’ve met many women who had a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). They were challenging because they had been in so many failed relationships so many times. The NHS is not good with these women who need the emotional equivalent of an intensive care bed. The good news is that with the right kind of care, new life can flourish. And they can go on to their own “perhaps”. Which is no small measure of hope.