He once fantasized that his worries would be stilled if he lived elsewhere, if he attained a few professional goals, if he had a family. But nothing has ever made a difference: he is, he can see, anxious to the core, in his most basic makeup—a frightened, ill-adjusted creature.
There is a photograph he loves in the kitchen, of Kirsten, William, Esther, and himself in a park on an autumn day, throwing leaves at one another from a pile blown together by the wind. Joy and abandon are evident in all their faces, a delight in being able to make a mess without consequence. But he recalls, also, how inwardly troubled he was on that day; there was something at work with an engineering company, he was keen to get home and make some calls to an English client, his credit card was far above its limit. Only when events are over is there really any chance for Rabih to enjoy them.
He is aware that his strong, capable wife is not the best person around whom to have a nervous breakdown. There was a time when he would have felt bitter about this. “Insomnia isn’t glamorous; now just come to bed”—is all Kirsten would say if she woke up now and saw the light on in the den. He’s learnt, over many painful episodes, that his beautiful, intelligent wife doesn’t do reassurance.
But, better than that, he’s started to understand why. She isn’t mean; it’s her experience of men and her defenses against being let down kicking in. It’s just how she processes challenges. It helps to see these things; he is accruing alternatives to vengeance and anger.
Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.
Kirsten’s mother is in hospital. She has been there for two weeks. It started off as something innocuous having to do with her kidneys; now the prognosis is suddenly far graver. Normally so strong, Kirsten is ashen and lost.
They went up to see her on Sunday. She was extremely frail and spoke softly and only to make simple requests: a glass of water, the lamp tilted so there would be a little less light in her eyes. At one point she took Rabih’s hand in hers and gave him a smile: “Look after her, will you,” she said, and then, with the old sharpness, “If she lets you.” A forgiveness, of sorts.
He knows that he never found favor in Mrs. McLelland’s eyes. At first he resented it; now, as a parent himself, he can sympathize. He isn’t looking forward to Esther’s husband, either. How could a parent ever truly approve? How could they possibly be expected, after eighteen or so years of answering to a child’s every need, to react enthusiastically to a new and competing source of love? How could anyone sincerely perform the requisite emotional somersault and not suspect in their heart—and let on as much, through a succession of more or less sour remarks—that their child had mistakenly fallen into the clutches of someone fundamentally unsuited to the complex and unique task of administering to them?
Kirsten cries uncontrollably after their visit in Raigmore Hospital. She sends the children to play with their friends; right now she can’t be a parent—the one who tries never to frighten others by revealing their pain; she needs to be a child again for a while. She can’t overcome the horror of her mother looking sallow and emaciated against the institutional blue sheets. How could this be happening? She is at some level still deeply attached to her impressions, formed in her fifth or sixth year, of her mother as someone strong, capable, and in charge. Kirsten was the little one who could be scooped up into the air and told what needed to happen next. She craved this authority in the years after her father left. The two McLelland women knew how to stick together; they were a team, involved in the best kind of sedition. Now Kirsten is in the corridor quizzing an alarmingly young doctor about how many months there will be left. The world has been upended.
We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love, and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity—and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments.
In those moods when Rabih can at long last break free of his ego, it isn’t just one or two people he feels he can forgive more easily. It may even be, at an extreme, that no human being any longer lies outside the circle of his sympathy.
He sees goodness in unexpected places. He is moved by the benevolence of the office administrator, a widow in her mid-fifties whose son has just gone off to university in Leeds. She is cheerful and strong, an extraordinary accomplishment which she extends over every hour of every working day. She takes care to ask all the staff how they are. She remembers birthdays and fills in idle minutes with reflections that are always encouraging and tender. As a younger man he wouldn’t have taken any notice of such a minor demonstration of grace, but by now he has been humbled enough by life to know to stoop down and pick up the smaller blessings wherever they come. He has without trying, and without pride, become a little nicer.
He is readier to be generous, too, from a sense of how much he needs the charity of others. When others are vindictive, he is more interested in mitigating circumstances, and in any bits of the truth that cast a less moralistic light on viciousness and bad behavior. Cynicism is too easy, and it gets you nowhere.
He becomes aware, for the first time in his life, of the beauty of flowers. He remembers harboring a near hatred of them as an adolescent. It seemed absurd that anyone should take joy in something so small and so temporary when there were surely greater, more permanent things on which to pin ambitions. He himself wanted glory and intensity. To be detained by a flower was a symbol of a dangerous resignation. Now he is beginning to get the point. The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell. But once we realize that the larger dreams are always compromised in some way, with what gratitude we may turn to these minuscule islands of serene perfection and delight.
Held up against certain ideals of success, his life has been a deep disappointment. But he can also see that it is, in the end, no great achievement simply to fixate on failure. There is valor in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one’s life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.
Sometimes he has a hot bath in the middle of the night and takes stock of his body under the bright light. Aging is a bit like looking tired, but in a way that no amount of sleep will repair. Every year it will get a little worse. Today’s so-called bad photograph will be next year’s good one. Nature’s kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don’t get as scared as we should. One day his hands will be liver spotted, like those of the elderly uncles he knew in his childhood. Everything that has happened to others will happen to him, too. No one gets away.