My mother’s best friend is sick with coronavirus. She also suffers from dementia, so she likely won’t know about it or be able to understand what is happening to her – she’s just going to endure a terminal period of painful breathing, agony and frustration, medical isolation: a bodily grief.
Like many people, this woman has suffered enough. I’ve known her since I was seven, we all lived together in the luminous Seventies expatriate community of three- to five-year residents from foreign countries in Jakarta. We used to holiday together, cheaply in a row of bamboo cottages along the coast; I babysat her daughters. In 2016 I was home from Germany to care for Dad before the cancer ate him; as the only Labour and Green voters in the extended family the two of us hopped gleefully in her tiny, scuffed green car and hared off to the polling booth set up under huge spreading fig trees at a local primary school. We voted and felt good about ourselves. She hailed her former comrades handing out how to vote righteously leaflets. Then in the car her manner changed, she grew confused and started pulling out wadded clots of tissues from her bottomless bag. She was unable to explain what she wanted, only saying over and over, I know it’s here somewhere. I began to fear for her ability to drive. She was like a stage magician emptying out his pockets of their meaningless props, unable to produce the rabbit blinking with real life and twitching its nose.
As I digest this difficult news my timeline is clogged with people celebrating Boris Johnson’s identical diagnosis. He too may die in agony. “Karma!” people crow. They sound uncannily undissimilar to Johnson and his cronies, or Trump and his ilk, gnashing their hands in satisfaction when a raped women gets what’s coming to her, or a sexually active teenager falls pregnant, or an entire population of Jewish Germans are rounded up and eliminated because they are less human than Us.
This tyrannical Us. How it bonds us to our best humanity. How it can render us judgemental and pious, mean and censorious, dangerous, cruel. I want to know why people feel justified in celebrating the suffering of a man they despise because he seems, from his comfortable position of Etonian lifelong power, to celebrate others’ sufferings. Of course we are enraged by his deeds. We needn’t spend our time pining for him. All hail our sanity and survival and our ability to detach from those who have done us harm. But let’s not celebrate his – or anyone’s – suffering and painful death. Let’s not become more like what we loathe.
It’s my experience that sociopathic acts get easier for insensitive people the more they get practiced in ignoring cries of pain from their victims. Ordinary Englishwomen and Englishmen don’t have the power over Boris Johnson that he has over their lives. On the other hand, ‘involuntarily celibate’ incels who murder crowds of women invariably feel disempowered and victimised, not powerful. However delusional this feeling on the part of a man wielding an AK-47 or setting a carload of his children on fire, it is still dangerous.
Celebrating the release from bondage which Thatcher’s death brought her populace is very different from being savagely glad she herself is dead. How many rapists and murderers of women are spitefully glad the bitch got what she deserved? I will not allow my heart to become dehumanised, that is, less compassionate, by celebrating the suffering of anyone I abhor. By seeing our commonality I honour and celebrate my very real capacity to distinguish myself from such people.
How do rapists rape women? By dehumanising. How does Boris cut funding to the NHS? By dehumanizing sick people in need. And if you feel offended by the implication that you yourself are in any way comparable to this ‘subhuman piece of trash’ whose diagnosis has so filled you with glee… you are forgetting what he has forgotten. We all have the same capacities for good and for bad. It’s how we choose to use them.
That is, we are each of us *fully and utterly human.* I will never bend on this point, which is exactly what Johnson and his ilk have lost. My mother’s dear friend gave birth in the early 60s and was instantly separated from her child. Shein her seventies courageously chose to announce to her friendship circles that she was a mother to this lost son, and tracked him down, and loved him. Boris Johnson has been directly responsible for the deaths of thousands. If you feel able to separate ‘good’ persons, such as my mother’s friend, who don’t ‘deserve’ suffering, from ‘bad’ persons like Johnson who do, you are treading a most dangerous path. I hope I’ll never go down that road. I hope I will choose to use my humanity, today and forever, whatever the provocation, in the opposite way to how Boris Johnson uses his.
Tag: rape jokes
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best friend’s unacknowledged son
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the littlest love
I lost a baby last year, after a long time trying to conceive. It died inside me early without my knowing about it, so I carried the tiny corpse in my womb a few days, and was its grave. We had chosen our names, for a boy, for a girl. Every child is a girl at this stage. The doctor made his seven-week scan. I strained over his head, trying to see on the dark screen the tiny bean-shaped body for the first time. There was no heartbeat, only my own. The doctor pulled out his dildo-shaped scanner and wiped the condom off it with one movement. The condom he flung over his shoulder into the trash. “I’m afraid you’re not going to be taking home a baby this time,” he said.
Later in his office, when I was dressed, he said airily, “Oh yes – one in two pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Didn’t you know?” I didn’t know. It occurs to me now this is just another way we brush aside the sorrows which affect women. We don’t talk about the griefs women carry. Miscarry. Give stillbirth to. Find dead in the cot. Incest, rape, infertility, assault.
We were so excited going in for the scan. The first glimpse of the most important person in our adult lives; her first communication with us, through the tiny pounding of her heart. I had been watching the daily progress of this infinite darling in the form of diagrams showing the little heart finding its way, the spine beginning to form. These drawings seemed to me the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen on paper. On the screen I could not see anything, however tiny; I looked and looked. My partner held my hand. A sickened feeling of confusion very faintly took hold. The gynaecologist put out both his hands to pull me upright, as though I were an invalid. In such ways do insensitive people convey their empathy. This doctor liked to tell salacious jokes during intimate examination: we were already looking for another doctor, a better doctor, a woman. Earlier he had said, as he reefed the condom over his scanner, “I’m a mountain man. I like mountain women.” I had only just worked out, with a dull, sick feeling, that this was a pun, when he thrust the machine inside me and the scan started and the quiet unmoving bad news came in to rest. It has thus rested ever since. We are still not parents and our child is still unborn. I had not known before this how many of my friends had also suffered miscarriage and the loss of a child. How many still grieved. I had even felt intolerant, judgmental of the seeming sentimentality of these remembrances when they did appear, the candles, the flowers, the bears. Now I found myself applying this same non-compassion to my own grief. This piercing loneliness seared me from the first: after all I am hollow, I am alone in here. Oh how can you mourn something so early, barely a child. With its whole life ahead of it, just growing spine. Meanwhile the little cardboard box with its clot of bloodied fragments that I knelt over on the floor of the shower and howled, that I scooped up and wrapped in tissue paper then could not bring myself to bury, all alone in the cold dark ground, sits on my desk untouched, more than a year later. I have not been ready to let go.