How to cope with fear and grief — make a to-do list
THE world divides into those of us who do and those of us who don’t make lists. List makers can’ t understand how non-listmakers can be properly efficient or thorough.
Non-list-makers can’t understand why list-makers don’t just get on and do things, rather than having to write lists first.
I happen to be a non-list-maker, but I found this memoir about a habitual list- maker fascinating as well as moving.
Lulah Ellender came across a small, marbled hardback book of lists kept by her grandmother Elisabeth from her marriage in 1939 to her death of cancer in 1957, at the age of 42.
The lists themselves are almost comically mundane: not the best material, one would think, for a profound psychological study.
There are lists of babies’ clothes, of things to take camping in Spain, of guests invited to parties, of furniture, of numbers of eggs laid by wartime hens, of Christmas presents for children and Nanny.
But Ellender (who has inherited her grandmother’s list-making urge) deduces that the very matter- of- factness of her grandmother’s lists was a vital source of balm for her.
For someone who found the chaos of life hard to cope with, list-making was a way of ordering her universe and controlling the uncontrollable.
The lists are a riveting piece of social history in their own right.
Wedding presents to be thanked for in 1939 included ‘silver muffin tray’, ‘triple mirror’, and ‘six early-morning tea sets’.
‘Things still wanted for the flat’ in that same year included ‘cigarette case’, ‘silver sauce boats’, ‘ hot plate’ and ‘ cork bath mat’. Sandwich ingredients for the diplomatic cocktail party in Beirut in 1946 included ‘margarine’, ‘sardines’ and ‘Spam’.
We glimpse a woman desperate to get everything right in her duties as diplomatic wife. (Spam was clearly an acceptable postwar sandwich filling.)
This was an unsettled life, requiring relocation every two years in bumpy aeroplanes, as she accompanied her husband from Madrid to London to Beirut to Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
Elisabeth prided herself on keeping a tab on all the bed linen, suits and summer frocks, but there was something about the small handwriting, I thought, that suggested a lack of self-confidence.
Ellender doesn’t analyse the handwriting; but she does take us to entries in Elisabeth’s diaries that point to the truth.
After the birth of her first two children, Samuel and Charles, Elisabeth suffered bouts of savage post-natal depression, feeling sick, mad and unable to cope. It being The Olden Days, the nurse who looked after the babies called it ‘the baby blues’ and told her she’d get over it.
In a pile of old papers, Ellender came across one of Elisabeth’s lists from 1943 that didn’t make it into the notebook: a scrap of paper on which she wrote ‘ Things that Worry Me’. Items on that list included ‘My inability to face anything’, ‘The trouble I give everyone’, ‘I don’t want to do anything’, ‘ Not quite sure what I do want’, ‘I seem to have no control over my mind or moods’, ‘Anyway, why should I have what I want?’ and ‘Isn’t it my own fault, and aren’t I letting it all become an attitude of mind?’
Here we see the mind of that well- dressed diplomatic wife revealed as a tangled jungle of chronic anxiety, inertia and guilt: all symptoms of depression.
Even here, Ellender deduces that the reason her grandmother wrote these feelings in lists rather than prose was that lists are ‘helpfully staccato — there’s no room for thoughts to grow’.
Always, Elisabeth wanted to keep her dark thoughts on a tight rein.
More truths emerge. There’s a list of mahogany furniture in the list-book, and I thought at first this was hers; but the list is actually titled ‘Norton’s things’.
Norton was Elisabeth’s brother, who (Ellender deduces) was a repressed homosexual, in despair that the world required him to live a lie.
WHEN Elisabeth was pregnant with her first child, Norton took his own life, climbing into his bath, covering himself with a large overcoat, and taking a huge overdose of sleeping draught.
That’s chilling enough; but I found just as chilling the telegram from Elisabeth and Norton’s parents (her father was Ambassador in Turkey), sent to Elisabeth’s sister Alethea: ‘NORTON DIED SUDDENLY BURIAL MEREVALE DO NOT CHANGE PLANS’.
Norton’s parents didn’t go to their son’s funeral. His father removed all mention of Norton from his Who’s Who entry, and he was hardly spoken of again.
So that list of mahogany furniture, written by the loyal sister who did go to the funeral and dealt with the flat clearance, is freighted with tragedy, and helps to explain some of Elisabeth’s later state of mind.
With poignant irony, while Ellender was researching this book, her own mother (Elisabeth’s third child and only daughter) was diagnosed with inoperable cancer.
So this book, as well as being a meditation on the solace of listkeeping, is also a meditation on the good and the very bad things that run in families.