How grief destroys and recreates us all
▶ A woman’s bereavement leads to a mystery that topples her world, writes
Bereavement is a perverse phenomenon. The days immediately following a loss are often characterised by a sadness that is levitational in its purity. Then time goes about its miserable work of presenting you with forced reckonings – with recriminations, regrets, with realisations of total loss.
And the reckonings break you. You wallow and sequester, you keep the curtains drawn and watch terrible television. And then life intrudes, and at the very moment you are both least and best equipped to do so, it asks you to carry on, to begin again, to forge another soul. It is now your job to remake yourself. And you do.
As Laura says, when she attempts to explain to a friend, the reality of losing a relative: “‘The truth is that the loss… of her. It’s just the most painful thing. I’m not the same person as I was before I found her like that.”’ Laura, a London-based freelance writer and journalist in her early-30s, attempts to reconstruct and tell the story of the life of a 51-year-old woman named Katherine, who is her mother. Laura visits her home in Surbiton but finds her dead at the foot of the stairs with a broken neck. She later reflects, in Balham:
And the reckonings break you. You wallow and sequester, you keep the curtains drawn and watch terrible television. And then life intrudes...
“No one cared that she’d died with her tongue caught between her teeth.
But Laura cares. And as the dark buoyancy of those initial stages of grief force her to face death, live with it and attempt to weather it, she becomes preoccupied by her mother’s life and character. Who was Katherine? What were her silent anxieties and private dreams? Why did she consent to an affair between her husband, Richard, and the family’s 17-year-old babysitter, Jenny, for whom Richard would leave her and her children to start a family of his own?
Laura is propelled on this journey – part-thriller, part-mystery, part-metaphysics – by a detail in the coroner’s report that records that, at the time of death, her mother’s body had “a small scar on the left side of her neck”, and that “both earlobes had been pierced, the left torn”. The description of the torn earlobe transports Laura to a morning when, age 6, she saw her mother assaulted at her school by another parent. She recalls Katherine’s “hair was pulled back, quickly and quietly, by Sue Warren,” and she remembers how the strangeness of the event left her unable to cry: “It simply wasn’t an anatomical possibility. I was too astonished by what the woman who looked like Sue was doing to my mother.”
In addition to the recollected shock, Laura dwells on the portentous words of it. “How could you let it happen?”, Sue screams as she attacks Katherine. “Allow Richard to put his filthy hands on my Jenny? She’s a child. Just a child.” That evening, Laura’s father says: “‘Give me a reason to stop and I’ll stop’.” Her mother replies, in a “quiet and firm voice: ‘Never in the house.’”
The coronial description of Katherine’s earlobe, and the memory it generates, is regarded by Laura as “the most obvious physical assault on her in the wake of my father’s affair”. Seeing it recorded so clinically reminds her “how public her humiliation was, not just that day in the playground or even the years afterwards, but now, in her death”. Yet other elements of the coroner’s report, all that “other tissue weighed and fingered”, speak to Laura of a life full of suffering.
Elisa Lodato assembles this biography of trauma by starting each chapter with an extract from her mother’s autopsy report. At times the connections between the scars and mutilations on Katherine’s body and the excruciations a chapter reveals about her life are clear and work effectively. On other occasions they are subtle and oblique, and in these instances too, Lodato’s narrative structure functions suggestively. She is insightful and delicate, and credits the reader with a capacity for inductive reading that, in much contemporary fiction, we are often denied.
Yet she does not always extend to her protagonist the same courtesy. During Laura’s investigation, it becomes clear early on that she is set to happen upon a momentous discovery. It would be remiss to reveal the details of the revelation here, but it is worth noting that, for a novel reliant on suspense, its nature can be deduced almost preposterously early on in the narrative.
By everyone, that is, except Laura – a Cambridge-educated journalist with a talent for human-interest stories, but an apparent inability to recognise what has been slapping the reader around the face for the length of, well, a novel. “We all, I suppose, have our blind spots,” and Lodato reveals blind spots of her own through occasionally inattentive prose: “turned on his heel”; “staring into the middle distance”. But these are slight missteps in a work that can be mesmerically entertaining, empathetic and full of wisdom and intelligence.
Lodato’s prose is often precise and memorable. When Laura looks at her troubled mother, she encounters “standing water in her pale eyes”; and when she writes of the destruction and makings of grief, she does so with enrichingly sensitive obeisance to the perversion of its project. Death both destroys us and creates us. Here is a novel that helps us to understand how.