Reasons to be Cheerful

I had a nasty accident ten days ago.

I was knocked off my bike in town by an unobservant driver, ending up in a dramatic pool of blood in the middle of the road. Broken nose, teardrop fracture to my 7^th cervical vertebra, lots of lacerations and bruises, and a fair bit of post-traumatic stress.....

But also many reasons to be cheerful.

1.     It could all have been so much worse. I’m still here. No brain injury (thank you, crash helmet). No spinal cord damage.

 

2.     The kindness of strangers. I’ve written about this before, and here was living proof of it. Within seconds I was surrounded by passers-by making sure I was alright and got the help I needed. Top of the list of good Samaritans was Tracey Saphier, a nurse on her way home from work, who took charge of the whole scene, making sure I didn’t move, mopping blood out of my eyes, talking to Sue on the phone, checking on ambulance arrival time. Thank you kind people of Liverpool, thank you Tracey. 

3.     Our NHS is great in a crisis. It really is.  Forget the bad press it gets these days.  The ambulance team who got me onto a stretcher and secured my neck; the amazing trauma team in the Royal Liverpool Hospital who checked me out from top to toe in a matter of minutes (while chatting to me about bikes and cycling gear); spinal surgeon Marcus de Matas who took all possible care of my neck fracture; and the staff on Ward 4a who looked after me while I couldn’t move for three days.  I needed their help, and they were there.   

4.      Sue is wonderful in a crisis. She really is. She arrived at the hospital before the ambulance, fed me yoghurt when I couldn’t reach the hospital food, guided me through a psychic meltdown, and now is getting me back on my feet at home. I needed her help, and she was there.  

5.     The love of family and friends. Thank you all for being there, for your kind words and actions, for looking after Sue as well as me.  

6.     My neck brace. My exo-skeleton (non-biologists, google it!) for the next three months. It’s keeping my neck and back safe, and is deeply reassuring.  

7.     Time out. Now I can watch all five seasons of Breaking Bad in one go.  

All of the above (well, maybe not the Breaking Bad bit) are parts of something bigger, something that I haven’t quite worked out but seems profound to me.  For a while there, lying in the road and in hospital, I was in a real mess, completely helpless and utterly dependent on the care of others - something I’m not at all used to. 

And it was OK. In fact more than OK, it was liberating. I didn’t need to try and control my own destiny, it was fine to let go. I could relax.  I felt – no, I knew – that I was in safe hands. 

So, one final reason to be cheerful.

8.     Being alive is wonderful.

 

How long does grief last?

My brother Steve died two months ago. Those of you who’ve been following this blog will know this is a big thing for me, and explains why I haven’t posted for a while.  I’ve been mourning him. Life hasn’t been much fun.  I’ve been trudging through treacle. Sometimes I felt like I was drowning in it. 

But the past couple of weeks are better. An evening in London with Anna and Tom. A long weekend with Sue in Andalucia.  A new grandchild on the horizon. Walking the Bounding Ridge of White Nancy (yes, really – google it) last Saturday. My wellbeing recipes are starting to kick back in. I’m feeling lighter.

So for me, this time round, the worst of my grief lasted six weeks or so.

Which is interesting. The Orthodox Christian tradition is that mourning lasts for 40 days. The soul of the departed is thought to travel around during that time, visiting places of significance in its life. I wonder where Steve’s been visiting: no doubt Dublin, Corbridge, Cambridge and Newport.  I’m sure he’s called in to see us in Liverpool.   

However, as anthropologists tell us, there are many different cultures of mourning. In Victorian Britain, for example, mourning after the death of a sibling was expected to last for 6 months. So maybe I have a while to go yet.

The American Psychiatric Association would have us believe that if grief lasts for more than 2 weeks – that’s not a misprint, not two months or two years but two weeks – then we can be diagnosed with a depressive disorder and offered medical treatment.  So absurd it’s hard to believe, but it’s there in black and white in DSM-5, their current system for classifying mental disorders. 

This is dangerous nonsense.  It may help big pharma to sell more pills, but it stands in the way of realising and accepting our loss. It sanitises sadness. It medicalises this normal part of what it means to be alive, to love.    

A friend’s wife died just over a year ago. He’s beginning to think about going out with other women, but he knows he’s not really ready yet.   Someone told him ‘You should be over your grief by now, you need to see a psychiatrist to sort yourself out’.  He asked me what I thought.

My answer was simple: ‘Absolute rubbish! You’re still grieving. You can’t rush it. Take your time. You’ll know when you’re ready to move on.’

Grief is the price of love.

It drags us down. It drains us of energy. It hurts, physically. As CS Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, time may be a healer but he’s not a very good anaesthetist. We just have to hang on in there, hide under the duvet and let it wash over us.  Grief lasts as long as it lasts. There’s no timetable, no deadline.  

But then, eventually, one day, it starts to get easier. 

If you are grieving now, I hope that day is not too far away.

How light is your heart?

I’m reading Julian Barnes’ beautiful book Levels of Life, about hot air ballooning and the death of his wife.  His link between the two is to do with height. He used the word both physically and metaphorically – rising effortlessly up in the air in a balloon, or crashing down into the depths when grief strikes.

I've been thinking about how we often use physical words to describe our emotions. 

We do talk a lot about height when describing our moods, mainly whether we’re feeling up or feeling down.  Sometimes we think visually, and talk about feeling bright or gloomy.

Another way of looking at our emotional lives is in terms of their weight.  If life is treating us well and there is lots of fun and enjoyment around, we often describe ourselves as ‘light-hearted’. If things are not going so well, we’ve had bad news or are expecting something difficult to happen, then we may talk about doing something or approaching a situation ‘with a heavy heart’. We can be weighed down by the cares of the world. Hopefully, we can sometimes throw off our burdens or share them with other people.  

The word depression contains elements of both height and weight. In physical terms it refers to a hollow, an area that is sunk below its surroundings.  It also refers to a sense of pressure, of being compressed, constrained, pushed down.  

For me, there is a very strong link between my emotional state and my sense of weight. This is nothing to do with my actual weight in kilograms, which could usually do with being a bit lower! 

If life is difficult I feel heavy, tired, sluggish. I find it’s a big, big effort to drag myself around. I’m trudging through treacle.  

But when everything is going well I really do feel lighter, not just in my heart but in my whole being. Sometimes I feel weightless, it’s as if I could take off and fly. 

I love this sense of lightness. It is effortless, floating, breezy - like being in one of Julian Barnes’ hot air balloons, or floating on my back in the Mediterranean with the evening sun (another form of lightness) warming me.  I experienced it yesterday evening in my tai chi class, when my arms floated up and down without any effort at all from me. 

 

Lightness of being.

Yes please. Unlike Milan Kundera, I don’t find it unbearable.
I can see there might be down-sides to lightness. It can suggest not being serious, superficial, unimportant, lacking gravity (another physical term!), as in “he’s a light-weight.” 

But in emotional terms, I think lightness hard to beat.

How light is your heart today?

Second Acts

I’m working my way through the whole of The Wire on a DVD box set. I know, I know, I’m ten years behind the times. But better late than never, and I’m loving it. 

In Season Two, D’Angelo Barksdale is on a long prison sentence for drug dealing. In a reading group discussion he quotes Scott Fitzgerald’s famous statement ‘There are no second acts in American lives’. D’Angelo reckons this means we only get one chance at living our lives[1]. Whatever role we find ourselves in is the role we are stuck with. We can try to change things, to break out and live differently, but we can’t do it. We are trapped. 

There is certainly no second act for D’Angelo, who is killed a few days later.  Nor for most of the characters in The Wire, whether drug dealers, trade unionists or police. Attempts to make big changes are invariably doomed to failure, death or disaster.   

It’s like a classical Greek drama, where human beings are playthings at the mercy of capricious, unpredictable gods.  We have the illusion of free will, but in reality our lives are predetermined, chosen for us and directed by forces beyond our control. So we’d better just accept our lot and make the best of a bad job.

Hang on a minute....

Well no, actually. No way. Absolutely not.

Great TV, great drama, but I refuse to accept this pessimistic view of the world.

We are persons with the capacity to lead our own lives. We are not passive victims of fate or circumstance. We have choices. We can do things differently.  Transformation is possible. Think Nelson Mandela.

Even if we’ve made a complete pig’s ear of our life up to this point, even if we’ve had a very rough deal until now, it is possible to turn things around.  We can have second (and even third and fourth) acts.

Last week Helen (not her real name) came to see me in my surgery. It was the first time we’d met for more than ten years, as she’d move away from our area for a while.  Back then she was dependent on alcohol and heroin, and had problems with hepatitis. She was heading rapidly downhill. But no longer. Helen’s off all that stuff now. She’s back in control of her life, caring for her teenage daughter and half way through a degree in sociology. 

For lots of people retirement is a great time to start over. Second act, third age - it’s the same thing. Once earning our living is no longer necessary we have a chance to try something we’ve always wanted to do. We can reinvent ourselves.

I wonder what I’ll do next.

What do you think?  Are we stuck with what we’ve got, or can we change things around? Have you had a second act?  Or are you planning one?

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[1] You can find the scene on http://biblioklept.org/2012/08/13/dangelo-barksdale-breaks-down-the-great-gatsby-the-wire/

 

Seeking Sanctuary

Where do you go when life gets too much for you?   

When everything’s getting on top of us, when we just can’t take it all any more, we need to escape to somewhere safe.  A refuge, a bolt-hole, an asylum, a shelter - a sanctuary.

In the Middle Ages a sanctuary was a place – often a church or monastery - where safety was guaranteed for people fleeing from arrest or prosecution. By the law of the medieval church, a fugitive from justice or a debtor was immune from arrest. If you’ve ever watched Derek Jacobi in Cadfael (or read Ellis Peters’ stories) you’ll know how that worked.  

If you were seeking sanctuary in those days, getting your hand on the door knocker was enough. You were safe and your pursuers couldn’t touch you. Next time you’re in Durham, grab hold of the sanctuary knocker on the main door (complete with protective gargoyle to ward off evil spirits) and breath a huge sigh of relief.

We don’t always have to go to such extremes. It is good to have our own personal sanctuaries, for those times when we just need to get away from it all.  You might find yours in the shed at the bottom of the garden, or on your allotment. Or jogging round the park, with your favourite tunes on your iPod. Or soaking in a hot bath with music and candles, and the bathroom door firmly locked.

When I was growing up in Dublin, family life was often stressful. To escape from all the hassle, I created a little library for myself in the outside toilet. I loved sitting there and reading. My brother Nick found a different refuge (usually from us older brothers wanting to beat him up!) in the branches of an old apple tree. Going through major life changes in my late 20s, the main place I felt safe was in my car, driving up and down the M6 between Manchester and Worcester.

Sadly, sanctuaries can become prisons. Lots of people use booze or drugs as a means of escape. They work for a while, giving that warm glow of comfort and forgetting. But too much for too long and they cause more problems than they solve.

If things are really, really bad – if you’re experiencing abuse or violence at home and don’t know how to get away from it - you may seek sanctuary inside your own head[1].  You find ways to watch what’s happening to you as if you’re outside the situation. It’s safer and easier than experiencing the pain or terror directly. But you risk losing touch with the rest of the world. As a GP, a lot of people with problems like this find ten minutes of sanctuary in my consulting room.  

How do you find sanctuary, when life gets too much for you?  

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[1] I’ve touched on this before, a year or so ago in a post called What if you don’t feel at home?

A feather on your heart

Here is a message from my friend Mary. She has given me permission to post it. It speaks powerfully to my recent posts. The wonderful image of the feather on your heart will live with me for ever.

Hi Chris,

I hope you and all your family are really well and warm as the winter bites...

I finally got to reading your ‘Day of the Dead’ blog – not a big mystery why it took me a while to ‘go there’, given the loss of my mother in August and the energy one needs to cope and grieve.

Reading about the different celebrations and festivals surrounding the dead, I was very suddenly taken back to the room in my mother’s house where we brought her, after the hospital, after the undertakers, after choosing a coffin and jewellery and her favourite dark pink jacket to wear in farewell. And the astonishment I felt that she looked so like herself, lying there, with that fine delicate skin and those hands that so often held us safe, shaped our worlds, hands that told stories with abandon and sketched love, dismay, anger and longing on the air around us. Astonishment that, in that room in her house, it seemed there was no veil between the living and dead, and yet there was. Astonishment that someone so utterly vibrant could actually die. It’s changed me.

I feel I want to fight harder for a life lived well and vibrantly, because it doesn’t just land on you, you have to choose it and leave other things or people or stuff aside. And perhaps sometimes it does just land, like a feather on your heart. My mother Carmel had an extraordinary ability to take joy in the smallest thing and then she’d tell you all about it, so you got to share in her sense of joy in a world that can surprise, that can waft a feather straight to your heart. Her life was not easy but her spirit was indomitable. She taught me so much, far more than I ever understood or recognised.

On the Day of the Dead here in Ireland, I watched five of Tomas’ great nieces (all of one family) dress up respectively as Snow White, a leopard, a ghost, a ‘scary guy’ and a little red devil. They brimmed with the excitement of becoming something completely different, an unknown quantity, a mystery. The cold air clung to them as they pranced out into the dark and along the very quiet street of their small village, crossing over into a different realm. Maybe then I saw my mother, transformed into something entirely different, a mystery. Finally, they turned for home, rosy with excitement, coming in from the dark. When they hugged us (and can they hug!) they became known again, solid little bodies in our arms, familiar, warm, ours. So my mother. A mystery, but familiar, ours.

Thank you for the blog, and the stories that connect completely unknown people...

Take care

Mary

Beside You

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while you’ll know than I love the music of Van Morrison.  My favourite album of his is Astral Weeks, recorded in New York over two days in 1968 when he was just 23. 

For me the best song on that album – probably my top song ever – is the second track, Beside You.  

You can listen to it here 

 

Here’s the bit that I love the most:

To never never never wonder why at all
To never never never wonder why it's gotta be
It has to be
And I'm beside you
Beside you

It’s the refrain, it weaves amongst the rest of the lyrics, simply supported by flute and acoustic guitar.

The meaning behind Morrison’s songs isn’t always easy to work out, and he is notoriously reluctant to explain himself. So we are left to make our own best interpretations of what he is singing about. 

I think Beside You is a celebration of the direct experience of unconditional love. It’s about loving being with someone just because you can. Because you’re there and they’re there, you’re together and it’s fine. No need for conversation or discussion, no questions asked, no demands made.  No trouble, no fret or worry. Being in this particular moment, with someone you care about, and knowing that this is entirely, totally sufficient.

Being together, in ‘the silence easy’.  

Which sets me thinking about my own Beside You moments.

I am fortunate to have so many people that I can be with, enjoyably, comfortably and without worry, that I am wonderfully spoilt for choice here.  

Here are three recent moments that spring to my mind:

·        On the couch in Mary’s house, with my most recent grand-daughter Florence snugglingly asleep on my left shoulder, watching my other four grandchildren playing on the floor and listening to Mary and Rachel discuss the imminent arrival of number six.

·        On a sun-lounger by the swimming pool in the Gulf Hotel in Bahrain, sipping mint and lemonade, reading Rose Tremain’s Merivel, the afternoon sun warming my skin, Sue dozing peacefully beside me.  

·        In a park in Canberra, pushing my brother Steve along the path in his wheelchair, watching a game of touch rugby, feeling in complete harmony as we share a joke about the game and realising that - whatever happens and whenever it happens – I will always remember this moment with joy.

Go well on your merry way. I hope you have a rich store of Beside You moments, and I wish you many more of them.