‘I accept what happened with John... it’s part of my story’
Writing her first novel has proved a cathartic process for Catherine de Courcy, whose husband took his own life, and who moved to France for a new beginning, which involved the renovation of a ruin,
AT a certain point with grief, the question is, where do you go with it? Once you can say, ‘I’m fine, I’m healthy, I’m grand, I’m on earth,’ the question is — ‘now what? Now where do I go with my life?’ ”
For author Catherine de Courcy, who has written 14 non-fiction books, finding an answer to that question — posed, in her life, by the violent death of her husband John — has taken “about 12 years, and this book,” by which she means her first novel, Montsegur, a fascinating exploration of the Cathars and the 13th century Inquisition in Southern France. The book blends a gripping, often moving plot, with fascinating insights into the spiritual side of the Cathar beliefs; the way in which the world — seen and unseen — works together. As such, it is a kind of culmination of Catherine’s efforts to understand her own life story.
Catherine grew up in Ranelagh in Dublin, and had been living in Australia, near Melbourne, with her husband John, when he took his own life in 2000.
They inhabited what sounds like an earthly paradise. “It couldn’t have been more idyllic; 70 acres, with ancient rain forest, an orchard, sheep, a vegetable garden, wallabies, wombats, but in his sleep John had started to unravel,” Catherine says, He was suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder, due to what she believes was a combination of his experiences in the Vietnam war — John was a soldier with the Australian army — and a difficult childhood.
The couple met in Papua New Guinea in the mid 1980s — as for how Catherine got there, more on that later — where John taught Catherine to scuba dive. “He was like nobody I’d ever met before,” she says now. “He was about 10 years my senior; fun, out there, capable of doing anything, a brilliant cook, one of these people who relished life. I had no idea there was this other side to him, a very sad part. About two years before he died, he began to unravel a bit. He had road rage, he’d get unnecessarily angry. Then he said, ‘I want my own place in the country,’ which is a classic symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, so we moved to this beautiful property outside Melbourne, and about six months in, I thought, ‘this isn’t working, if anything, we’ve isolated ourselves …’”
The end, when it came, was terrible and traumatic — John shot himself — but not completely unexpected. Or perhaps Catherine is just particularly gifted with understanding. “For the month before he died, he was literally going out after breakfast with a high-powered rifle, to the top of a mountain and firing it off. And me not knowing, ‘am I supposed to go and look for him now, or what?’ Before he died, I said to him in his sleep — he was crying in his sleep — ‘if you want to go, go.’ ”
And so, she says, although “you never think it will actually happen, when it did, there was kind of an inevitability to it. Suicide is never right, but it was easier to accept the way he died, because of the lead-up to it. Every suicide is different, and in John’s case, he was totally in control. It was his choice. I know why he made the choice, he gave me all the information I needed, which made it easier for me to accept. It didn’t have the high drama of suicide, this was the way his illness ended up.”
“We had,” she stresses, “13 fantastic years.” Today, Catherine, now in her 50s, is so vibrant, so animated by the excitement of life and living, that it seems she has successfully answered the question ‘now what?’.
Even so, putting herself back together was long and difficult, and something she took seriously. “From the very beginning, no matter how I felt, I forced myself to eat properly, to sleep, take exercise.” It was, she says, almost like a job: “I told myself, ‘you’ve got to get through this.’ When it’s your partner, you’re so used to having somebody there; half of you is attached, and it’s been ripped away. You are exposed on every level, physically too. The one thing I could look after was my body. I was by myself in Australia, so I made sure I did look after it.”
Along with a determination to eat, to exercise, Catherine began to explore complementary and holistic therapies, including Reiki, and time with a therapist who claimed she could speak to John — “she could see and chat with John, she was flirting with him. John loved women and loved to flirt”. Much of this she has written about, beautifully, in a previous book, An Adventure in Grief. “Because I was a war widow, I had wonderful medical support. I spent the war widow’s pension entirely on looking after myself. I sought help. I had never sought help like that before.”
Through the meditation and different therapies, Catherine was, she felt, “stepping into a world that doesn’t end in three dimensions.
‘Every suicide is different, and in John’s case, he was totally in control’
I could see John there, happy as a lark. He was a very lively, fun person, and he was now free of all that stuff. I would be sitting at the top of this mountain, the trees were blossoming, the cabbages and peppers that he planted were out, and I would sit there thinking ‘this is lovely…’ and then the phone would ring, and I would be shattered.”
She insists that John “had done absolutely everything he could to avoid killing himself, but he was a man of a certain generation — born in 1947 — a man like him goes to doctors and psychiatrists, and if they don’t work, there’s nothing else to be done.”
And they hadn’t worked? “No. He was still highly functional, but this was killing him, eating him from the inside. It’s like he had left something in hell, there in Vietnam, and he had to go back and get it.”
It took many years, of grieving and exploring beyond the physical boundaries of our world, but finally Catherine felt ready. “I think I was back on earth saying, ‘now what? He’s alright, now I need to reinvent my life, because I’ve got nothing to do.’”
By this time, she had moved back to Dublin — “All my family and friends were here, I was really supported. And I knew I had to do something, my life had completely closed down in Australia. I still worked, I did a couple of books, but my social life, everything had closed down. Most of the friends we had had, vanished. Some of it was my fault, and some of it, to this day I’d be puzzled. There were a few people who were there for me all the way, but there were a few who I thought were really good friends who literally vanished, never to be heard of again.”
She also decided to move away from her work as a librarian. “I decided to throw it up into the air, and see what happens. I took some jobs that I found hard because they were answering-phone-type jobs. Having come from positions in which I could get things done, to having to say, ‘I’m sorry, the truck is in Longford, there’s nothing I can do…’ You go back to being 18, except that you’re a middle-aged single woman… that was a challenge, but you keep going.”
And then, in 2006, a number of things happened. An astrologer Catherine consulted suggested that taking time off to write would be beneficial, and a trip to France, to study Reiki, introduced her to the story of the Cathars, a religious sect, and in particular to the history surrounding Montsegur, a mountain fortress where, on March 16, 1244, attacked by the Roman Catholic Church, 244 people were burned alive rather than renounce their faith.
Over the next few years, Catherine travelled regularly between Dublin and France, learning more, exploring more, until in December 2010 “I spent an hour lying in a hot spring, with snow on the trees and not a soul around. I realised, ‘I’ve made a decision, somewhere along the way. Physically, and every which-way, this feels good.’ ” She continued exploring the story of Montsegur, and almost a year later “this book began to write itself. It was like the Ballet of the Red Shoes; all of a sudden, my fingers were running away. I was looking around, thinking ‘oh my God, have I been possessed?’”
The story, she says, wrote itself, but “it still took six years. As a non-fiction writer, I had to turn it into fiction, which meant developing different skills. But also, these people lived in the 13th century, and it took me six years to step into that world properly so that I could write it. In order to understand how they made their choices on March 16, I needed to be in their world.”
She moved to France, saying now, “this book — it expanded my whole view of the world. Because I don’t have kids, I didn’t have anyone I had to look after. I could go. I decided to take what I could get for my place in Dublin, and buy in France, in a little village an hour south of Carcasonne. For the money I had, I got three walls and a roof.” In fact, the house she finally bought was the first place she saw, and initially rejected. “I had friends living nearby, and
went to visit them, and somebody said ‘there’s a house for sale, have a look.’ It was a ruin, I thought they must be joking!” But two years later, “I knew more,” she says, meaning she had seen what else was on offer, and thought about the potential of the three-walls-and-a-roof. “It was exactly the village I wanted to be in. I had seen other renovations and I knew I could make it work and that it would give me everything I wanted.”
The build, usually a nightmare, turned out to be “a pleasure. The builder was English, but had lived a long time in the local community, and knew all the planning laws.” Catherine herself was heavily involved. “I chose everything,” she says with pride.
As for the language barrier, she arrived, she says with a laugh, with “not very good schoolgirl French. It’s still not very good, and I’m a bit embarrassed about it, but I get by. I have a French friend who gives me lessons. I’d love to make it perfect, but that’s a fantasy. I smile a lot instead, and French people here are very kind and supportive.”
More importantly, the community were welcoming. “It’s a lovely country community,” she says, adding, wisely, “I’m sure there’s all sorts going on, but I don’t understand half of it, so it’s a very easy place to live.”
One of the many things Catherine did to inhabit the world of the 13th century was to stay in a cave for three days (the Cathars used to do this for a year at a time). “I was thrilled with myself,” she laughs. “Every now and again I did come out to go behind a bush, or get warm, because it was bloody cold, even though it was 30 degrees outside. Inside, it was pitch dark. I put a line of stones in the ground, in case my torch rolled away, so that I could still get out if needs be. It was,” she says, “incredible. Time stopped. It went into a different zone. It didn’t feel like three days. I was in an altered space completely.”
As well as a wonderful story, writing this book seems to have been a kind of process of reconciling all the work and learning Catherine did after John’s death, her spiritual and emotional explorations. “All the slightly bonkers stuff over the years, people telling me they were sitting and chatting with my dead husband — it all moved into a very easy place of acceptance,” she says.
In a strange piece of life-mirroring, what brought Catherine to Papua New Guinea, where she met John all those years ago, was also grief. “I left Dublin when I was 26, in 1985, for a variety of reasons. I was working in the National Library, and it was a fabulous job, I loved it, but we were on 15-year-old salaries, and in the 1980s, Ireland was a miserable place. The politics were horrible, the public face of the country was ugly.” Far more than that though, her elder brother had recently died, after an accidental collision on the football pitch — “All of a sudden you’re shocked out of… you think, ‘what am I doing? If I stay in Ireland, I can see my life for the next 45 years, heading for a pension…’” And so, one wet cold night, in a pub with some friends, Catherine changed the course of everything. “I was whinging, and one of them said, ‘well there’s a librarian job in Papua New Guinea, why don’t you go for it?’ I thought, that’s sufficiently bonkers, I will!”
She did. Applied, got the job, and left. Was she terrified? “My brother wasn’t even a year dead. When you’re in that altered state, you don’t argue.” That said, there was, she admits, “a moment on the plane… I had $100, no credit card, no drivers license, I thought, ‘what if no one meets me…?’” But someone did, and in turn Catherine met John.
And now, thanks to time, to the careful healing work Catherine has done, and writing Montsegur, she is somewhere new. “Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t have been enough for me, now it’s in the moment, and lovely. It’s not dramatic, it’s very easy. And I know John would adore where I’m living.”
Clearly, he is still a huge part of her life? “People say ‘have you moved on? Are you over it?’ I was never comfortable with that. The way I see it is, you expand with it; I completely accept what happened with John. It’s part of my story and somehow these are my choices. I may not understand them but they are.”
As for the idea of one day meeting someone else, it is not, Catherine says, a big part of the way she thinks now. “I have a lovely lifestyle, I have lovely friends, a lovely community. I need to find the answers inside myself. There would have been times when I thought, ‘it would be lovely to meet somebody …’ but I know now, that for me, all of the answers are inside myself.
“No matter what you believe, you only have one life at a time, and you have to do the absolute best with what you have.”