Eating the Underworld Read Free Page A

again and again to them, that no, that was not my experience. I have hadpatients 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—AuricGoldfinger, 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,