THE BOYS ARE BACK - SIMON CARR
I want to die and be with Mummy: A new film tells the story of how a father and his sons faced up to ultimate loss
'Did Mummy die last night?' It's a question which for me has suddenly acquired a new life.
It was asked of me once before by a five-year-old boy, and there it is in front of me again, 15 years later, very like it was the first time - except this time it's on a big screen in a preview theatre in Soho.
And it has come back with an appalling power.
In 1994, my wife Susie died after a hard-fought battle with cancer, leaving me to raise our son - as well as my older son from a previous marriage - alone.
I wrote a book, The Boys Are Back In Town, about us, how three males learned to live in a household robbed of a loving mother.
And now the book is a film. Seeing ourselves on the big screen is peculiar - not least because my character is played by handsome Clive Owen.
('It's what I look like on the inside,' I say, when asked.) But it's also harrowing to watch - not to put too fine a point on it, it turned us all inside out.
Susie was an exuberant redhead ('Not red, auburn!' she would tell you) who ran her own physiotherapy business.
She was endowed with beauty, rowdiness, sympathy, sex appeal, energy and, as it later turned out, cancer.
We had been married for two years, having moved to London, and our son Alexander was just one when she began to suffer from gripping abdominal pains, diagnosed as stress.
At 35, the doctor had told her she was far too young to have anything sinister.
But the cramps got worse, until one day she collapsed in the street and an ambulance took her to Westminster Hospital, where she was wheeled straight in for emergency surgery.
They found tumours, lots of tumours - two in her intestine and four in her liver. It was terminal, the doctors said calmly, and within a year if it was left untreated, but possibly another one with their latest technique.
There was no possibility of an error in their diagnosis, they said.
But we hoped. We moved back to her home country of New Zealand and pursued an aggressive alternative health programme for her.
But the doctors were right. She had two clear years before the cancer began to mobilise, and then it started in earnest.
She became weak - moving into a new phase of the illness. Whereas homes should revolve around five-year-olds, in ours, Alexander was moved out of the centre while we wrestled with an incommunicable sense of disaster.
As the end neared, the hospice varied Susie's medication to control her breathing. She went into a soporific condition, confused, absent.
Her body had been taken by illness; her face had collapsed around her now with enormous eyes, her arms had gone, her glorious flame was guttering.
On her last Sunday, I told her that I was not going back to work that day, as usual. She looked at me in a particular way: 'Are you worried I'm going to die?'
Did Mummy die last night? he asked with dead-eyed brightness
Evasively, I said: 'I've been worried about that for four years, darling.' But she knew, now; she knew what was happening.
Later, I led her on the three-step journey to her wheelchair. She stopped halfway there and said: 'Give me a cuddle.' These are the last words I remember her saying to me. That and 'f***ing doctors'.
We stood there together, holding each other, on the edge of the world. Shortly afterwards, she went to bed and lay down with her arms beside her, over the blankets, her head slightly to the right. And her lights went gently down.
The next day, Alexander came back from school, running along the path, through the dappled light of the garden, looking for me.
He started to say something, but stopped when he saw my expression. He stood very still.
I said: 'You know how Mummy's been getting more and more tired because she's been so ill?
We think she's gone into a very deep sleep now and it's so deep we don't think she's going to wake up.'
He was looking at me without saying anything. I took a deep breath and came out with it: 'In fact, we think she's going to die.'
I can still see the green grass and the river winding away beyond the poplars, and Alexander's red hair and green eyes, his mother's vivid colouring.
He said, more brightly than I'd expected: 'Is Mummy going to die? When?' It was impossible for me to say, so he produced some alternatives.
'Will she die by dinner time? Will she die by bedtime? Will she die by breakfast?'
I thought of her in our bed, propped up among the pillows, and couldn't say anything.
In the morning, he came into the bedroom where his mother and I had been all night.
She was wearing a mysterious smile that had developed in the night. It looked like a smile. It felt like a smile. It was a smile.
'Did Mummy die last night?' he asked with a curious sort of dead-eyed brightness. I said: 'Yes, little one, I'm sorry to say she did.'
Everyone grieves differently. For weeks, Alexander compartmentalised his emotions in a way that you hear is particularly male.
He would play happily and affectionately talk about his mother in Heaven. But then, every day, there would come a point when he would collapse into a sort of coma.
He'd sink to the floor in slow-motion and lie there, not crying, eyes open, registering nothing.
After an hour in this state, he'd come to and continue with his day. The appearance of grief was unpredictable. 'I want to die!' he'd say cheerfully, 'so I can be with Mummy. But don't worry, Daddy, I'll stay here with you for now.'
People say life goes on. And, to some extent, people are right.
It wasn't clear to me that I'd even be allowed to keep Alexander. A father alone with a five-year-old son - did social services allow it?
Little children need the tenderness of a mother's touch, don't they?
Children need a routine and constant attention, and a certain level of intrusion into their emotional life.
They need to be kept clean and ordered, and tended in the way that mothers generally, stereotypically do. Isn't that what children need?
My answer to that is simple. It's yes. Did that happen with my boys? That answer is also simple.
Little children need the tenderness of a mother's touch, don't they?
It's no. Has it damaged them? And before I start in with the justifications and evasions, I would say probably.
Having said that, an all-male household does have its upside. So much so that my elder son Hugo from a previous marriage, who was living with his mother, came to live with us as well.
He was 12. He came to live with us in Auckland, 250 miles away from his mother back in Taupo.
So there we were, two boys and a father, home alone. We lived among pizza boxes, videos, newspapers, takeaway cartons, toys and machines. But to our minds we were not slobs. We were too athletic, too active.
There was the 40-foot swing in the garden that made mothers tremble. The football in the hall. The running around outside at night playing the screaming game (with me grinning 'Come here, little boy!' and them fleeing in mock horror).
It was a world of sudden ecstatic bursts of unconstrained energy, and infused with the sense that we could do anything we liked.
There developed around us a 'Just Say Yes' culture. It is true that, generally, mothers do the 'No' thing. It's why the human race has survived, I agree, but it easily gets out of hand.
Can I ride my bike in the hall? Can we go in the surf at night? Can I ride on the bonnet of the car? Mothers say no to these questions. And so do most fathers, but only because they've had mothers.
So we had in one sense an exhilarating time. But there is a downside to undiluted testosterone. There's a lack of care in it. There can be closeness, both physical and emotional, there is contact, support, love.
But it tends to be implicit. Unspoken. Or, just as easily, misunderstood.
The lack of a female presence permeated our lives. When Susie was alive, she used to say that a tidy house created a force field.
You walked into her well-ordered environment and you got a charge off it.
The plumped cushions, the magazines squared off on the table, everything in its place.
You were energised by what had been prepared for you. If you wanted to do something, there was nothing else you had to do first.
But after she died, that secure homeliness disappeared. Hugo, Alexander and I were two sons and a father living in a household without women.
We were like an experience free of normal influences (such as guilt, bleach and sock drawers).
Despite all this, death - I felt at the time - was both easier and harder to cope with than divorce.
Divorce is a wound that stays open. Death is final; it's an end in itself. Death is short, divorce is long.
That's what I thought then. But I don't think that now. Those grieving stages - you don't go through them automatically. Boys need help.
And seeing the film of our lives played out in front of me has made that clearer than ever. We were shown on screen how we lived - and I realise some of the things I could have done better.
Above all, I see now that children need two parents. Nothing is clearer than that. However inadequate, two are better than one.
Divorce is a wound that stays open. Death is final
For while Hugo and Alexander have turned out brilliantly - Hugo, 26, is doing a PhD at Imperial College in London, and Alex, who's 20, is taking the summer off before starting his degree at Brighton University - there's no doubt that they would have had an easier ride if Susie had stayed in all our lives.
In a way, it has been deeply cathartic for me to watch this film because it has helped me to understand the impact Susie's death had on all of us.
What I saw in the film matches what I remember of those days and months leading up to Susie's death and the terrible aftermath.
How do I get through this, I asked myself every day. And the answer was: 'One foot in front of the other.'
Visiting the film set was unsettling. They were filming on Paddington Station. The child playing Alexander-at five years old came up and looked at me. It sent a tremor through my soul.
'Simon Carr,' I said holding out my hand. 'How are you?'
He looked back with an objective look and, with breathtaking precocity, said: 'Yes, you're not bad for a Simon Carr.'
I looked at him a little more intently. If we hadn't been in public, if he hadn't been a film star, I wouldn't have let go of his hand. I would have leaned in and I would have said something.
The real Alexander didn't do that. When this boy made the same confident approach, Alexander laughingly picked him up and turned him through 360 degrees like a propeller.
The child made a quick decision to enjoy the treatment and squealed and made faces.
He has dash like that, Alex has. He has valour. His mother would be proud of that, for sure.
Above all, watching this film has made me realise that however much we tried, and however much we told ourselves we had got over Susie's death, we haven't.
But that's the thing: people don't get over tragedies like that. Maybe that's what character is, how we deal with the things we don't get over.
Once, 14 years ago, I made some toast for Alexander. He was four. I had cut the crusts off and he sank to the floor with a despairing cry.
He lay face down, whimpering.
It wasn't any sense of impending disaster, it was the fact that he liked toast with the crusts on, and I didn't know.
Little boys live with a tape rolling in front of them five or ten seconds into the future. If something unexpected happens, the tape breaks and the world collapses.
The only solution is to go back and fix it. I went back, made more toast, and didn't cut the crusts off. The world was restored. It wasn't easy, but we did it. That was the way we lived our whole lives.
The trouble is that when a mother dies, the world is ruptured in a way that we can't go back and fix. And that's what we have had to live with - and without.
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Happy Days - At Year's End, Three Writers examine Our Ties to Friends, Family, and Tradition.
September 17, 2009, 9:30 pm
The Referendum
By Tim Kreider
Recently an editor asked me for an essay about arrested adolescence, joking: “Of course, I thought of you.”
It is worth mentioning that this editor is an old college friend; we’ve driven across the country, been pantsless in several nonsexual contexts, and accidentally hospitalized each other in good fun. He is now a respectable homeowner and family man; I am not. So I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something condescending about this assignment? Does he consider me some sort of amusing and feckless manchild instead of a respected cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, who’s been in a committed relationship for 15 years with the same cat?
My weird touchiness on this issue — taking offense at someone offering to pay me money for my work — is symptomatic of a more widespread syndrome I call “The Referendum.”
To my friends with children, the obscene wealth of free time at my command must seem unimaginably exotic, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.
Drawing by Tim KreiderTim Kreider
It’s especially conspicuous among friends from youth. Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities immutably set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before becoming their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.
I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.
What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to just sit and stare at the emptiness at the center of your life. But I’m sure that to them this problem seems as pitiable as morbid obesity would to the victims of famine.
A lot of my married friends take a vicarious interest in my personal life. It’s usually just nosy, prurient fun, but sometimes smacks of the sort of moralism that H.G. Wells called “jealousy with a halo.” Sometimes it seems sort of starved, like audiences in the Great Depression watching musicals about the glitterati. It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences. Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating.
We only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control.
I regard their more conventional domestic lives with the same sort of ambivalence. Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within 12 hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. [Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.] Though one of those friends cautioned me against idealizing: “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.”
Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.
I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people’s children, not to yours.] But there are also moments when some part of me wonders whether I am not only missing the biological boat but something I cannot even begin to imagine — an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like a flatlander scoffing at the theoretical concept of sky.
But I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind’s eye can see. Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer, “Although I would never wish I hadn’t had them and I can’t imagine life without them,” I can’t help but wonder whether they don’t have to repress precisely these thoughts on a daily basis.
Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.
The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.
A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”
One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.
The Joy of LessPico Iyer“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.
I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park
In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.
So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.
I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who
Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.
have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.
Pico Iyer’s most recent book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” is just out in paperback.
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