No, I don’t believe in an afterlife. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes sums it up for me. We come from nothingness and return to nothingness when we die. That is one meaning of the circle beloved of calligraphers in Japan, just a big bold stroke, starting at the beginning and travelling back to it in a round sweep. In my beginning is my end says T. S. Eliot. Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth/Which is already flesh, fur and faeces/Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. When I first read Four Quartets at school it was like a revelation. The world was just as he described it and no other way, a place where beauty and corruption cohabit and are often indistinguishable.
When the Buddhist nun who sometimes visits me asked me if I believed in an afterlife I said I thought we are only remembered for so long, by the people who knew us, and that after friends and family are gone we’re forgotten. I told her about the cemeteries in the Japanese porcelain town Arita, where my husband and I have bought a house. The town officially dates back four hundred years, but presumably there were farmers there before the potters arrived. Way past its heyday, Arita is now host to far more dead than living inhabitants, so that whatever route you take through its narrow, winding streets you soon come upon graveyards packed with monuments to the deceased. It’s easy to tell which of them are remembered, because some graves are beautifully kept and often visited. It’s just as easy to tell which of the dead have been completely forgotten, as their graves are crumbling and overgrown with weeds. In some corners you’ll even find memorial stones jumbled together willynilly, unceremoniously sidelined to make space for newcomers.
I told the nun that Shin, a painter, had decided to move to Arita because he liked the idea of painting on porcelain instead of on perishable materials like paper or canvas. Arita is littered with porcelain shards everywhere you look. All around the old kiln sites you pick up bits of blue and white porcelain plates, cups, teapots. The bed of the river that runs through the town is layered with discarded bits of porcelain, pieces of pots that cracked in the firing or were found wanting in some other way and were simply flung out the windows of the workshops into the water. Shin likes to imagine that four hundred years from now shards of his work might be unearthed and collected by some curious traveller, just as he likes to unearth and collect fragments of work painted by his predecessors. In that way, he says, he will have achieved a degree of immortality. I say that I feel the same way about my work. I like to think that, long after I’m gone, someone somewhere might read a book or essay of mine in a last remaining library or digital archive and be touched in some way.
The nun listens politely to my theories of the afterlife but I can tell she doesn’t agree with me. I get the feeling that for her things are not as simple as I describe them. I don’t pretend to understand her belief system but I imagine it assumes the existence of another place, separate from this one. What else can she mean when she describes the essential spirit departing the body for the ‘ether’? This is where religion gets too cryptic for me, or maybe it’s just that language is inadequate to describe the indescribable.
I’m much more drawn to all of the ordinary ways in which we cheat death. It might be through the evocative power of the objects we leave behind, or it might be in a form of words, a turn of the head, a way of laughing. I was sitting at dinner the other night with some very old friends of ours. They’d met my mother many times, back when she was still herself, before she became ill. The wife looked hard at me for a while.
‘You get more and more like her,’ she said.
It felt for a moment as if my mother had joined us, that us all being together had conjured up her presence at the table. It was only a fleeting thing. But then I can’t imagine an afterlife that consists of anything more than these brief and occasional visits with the living, these memories that come unbidden and out of nowhere, then vanish again into oblivion.
No, my priorities remain the same. Work and family. Nothing else has ever really mattered to me. It might sound odd for a writer with my small output to claim that work has been a lifelong preoccupation, but it’s true. When I wasn’t actually writing I was preparing to write, rehearsing ideas, reading, observing life and character, learning from other writers. As Nora Ephron always said, everything is copy. If I was slower than some at finding success, it isn’t because I wasn’t trying. I was trying and failing all the time. That’s what I’m doing now and I hope failing better. I’ve put off using my death as material for a long time, mainly because I couldn’t find the right tone. I’m not even sure I’ve found it now.
To say that family has been my other chief priority in life is to understate the case. Marriage, children, the whole catastrophe as Zorba called it. To become a mother is to die to oneself in some essential way. After I had children I was no longer an individual separate from other individuals. I leaked into everyone else. I remember going to a movie soon after Nat was born and walking out at the first hint of violence. It was unbearable to think of the damage done. I had never been squeamish in my life before, but now a great deal more was at stake. I had delivered a baby into the world. From now on my only job was to protect and nurture him into adulthood, no matter what it cost me. This wasn’t a choice. It was a law.
That makes it sound like a selfless task, but it wasn’t. I got as much as I gave, and much more. The ordinary pleasures of raising children are not often talked about, because they are unspectacular and leave no lasting trace, but they sustained me for years as our boys grew and flourished, and they continue to sustain me now. I can’t help but take pleasure in the fact that my children are thriving as I decline. It seems only fitting, a sure sign that my job in the world is done. It’s like the day Dan, then in the fourth grade, turned to me twenty yards from the school gate and said, ‘You can go now, Mum.’ I knew then that the days of our companionable walks were over, and that as time went by there would be further signs of my superfluity, just as poignant and necessary as this one.
No, I am not unhappy or depressed, but I am occasionally angry.
Why me? Why now? Dumb questions but that doesn’t stop me from asking them. I was supposed to defy the statistics and beat this disease through sheer willpower. I was supposed to have an extra decade in which to write my best work. I was robbed!
Crazy stuff. As if any of us are in control of anything. Far better for me to accept that I am powerless over my fate, and that for once in my life I am free of the tyranny of choice. That way I waste a lot less time feeling singled out or cheated.
As I told the young psychologist, I rely on friends to divert me from dark thoughts. I don’t have a lot of friends, but the ones I do have are so good to me, so tender and solicitous, it would seem ungrateful to subside into unhappiness or depression. And then there’s Shin, without whom I’d be lost. He’s been so good-humoured and loving; I owe him no less than my sanity. If I’m ever depressed or unhappy, I hide the fact from him as best I can. It’s the least I can do.
No, I’m not likely to take more risks in life, now that I know I’m dying. I’m not about to tackle skydiving or paragliding. I’ve always been physically cautious, preternaturally aware of all the things that can go wrong when one is undertaking a dangerous activity. Paradoxically, it was Dad who taught me to be careful. I don’t think he was temperamentally suited to flying; the risks played unhealthily on his mind and made him fearful, tetchy, depressed. At the same time he was addicted to the thrill of flying and couldn’t give it up.