Measure of My Days (7 page)

A book of poems I had ordered weeks before arrived as I left for the Nursing Home, and they occupied me during that long evening when I lay waiting for time to pass. Finally the night began when my body belonged to brisk strangers. The ugliness of my age was exposed to trim, fresh women. I was at last sent to have a bath at five in the morning, and then more drugs, and the strangeness of knowing less and less until knowing ceased.

Next day I was told that all was over and all had gone well. I was lost in pain and drugs and that was the only truly bad day. I thought I was screaming with pain, I could feel the screams in my throat, but days later I asked Sister and she said I had not made a sound, that few did. So it was part of the fog I was in. By the third day a sense of achievement came for I was doing my task well, no mistakes so far, and already there was that sense that came six years before when I had a fractured femur. Then I had felt so frail and weary of life that it seemed as though I had met defeat. To learn to walk again seemed beyond
me. Then strength arrived and forced me to recognize that just because this accident had happened I was stronger. Where the strength and the will to use it had come from I could not imagine, but who understands the ebb and flow of energy? At first I did not believe in this new strength, but it was there, vital, mine. Now after the operation some new life was near. I must use it carefully, rest on it, test it. There was not enough yet to feel anything but hope, yet it was in the offing, I recognised it, I must do my work of being a patient with care. This was work that one did by lying still, remembering, judging. Deciding when your discomfort justified asking for help, and when it was the youness of you. I made some mistakes and then I was contrite and very reasonable. Patients must like and dislike as little as possible.

On the fourth, or was it the fifth day I saw the great wound healed for most of its length. If my body could do that then surely I could do all my body wanted of me. Then I began to feel so well that I knew I was in danger of breaking rules.
I must not. I must remember that this new vitality was partly the strength that comes to me when needed, and partly sheer exhilaration, always my undoing. I must be quiet. I would woo each nurse so that rules would slacken a little, and then I would know them as woman to woman. The goodness of most of the nurses was real; some radiated goodness, one had beauty, two used professional virtue to cover bitterness, but bit by bit we blent civility with humanity and liked each other.

Then the rage I knew so well rose in me and threatened all. I heard the animal growl in me when they did all the things it is my precious privacy and independence to do for myself. I hated them while I breathed, “Thank you, nurse”. At last I was allowed a bath in a tub, though with a nurse to direct my every move, and in a burst of naturalness I told her that being ill made me bad tempered, and while they were being kind and caring for me I wanted to say, “Let me alone, I’ll do it myself”, and oh my relief when the dear woman laughed and said,
“You’re the kind that get well quickly. Some want everything done for them, just won’t take themselves on at all”.

More and more I belonged to myself. I hopped from my bed and watered my flowers, careful not to leave a petal where it should not be: On perhaps the seventh or eighth morning I could see that the sun was shining, even the black silk bandage I wore over my eyes showed that, and before anyone had come in, at what seemed an early hour—though I had accepted that time in a Nursing Home was different from other time—I got up, threw back the curtains, opened all four windows—they would not open very wide—and expanded into the blue sky. Or so my whole heart longed to do. I wanted to be out of my body, without limit, I was rejuvenated, young, I wanted a future. I was still eighty-two, they had done nothing about that, and I wanted to scale the sky.

I remembered that yesterday four aircraft had flown in repeating circles, crossing and re-crossing, and I knew that would satisfy me.
A moment more of joy, and I drew the curtains, resumed my black bandage, and sleepily greeted nurse when she entered with the crisp cheer of someone who has been on night duty. Later I noticed the little window in the door through which nurses assure themselves that all is well.

I
was strong enough
on the twelfth day to go to a non-surgical Nursing Home, and there I could look at the sea, the coast, the cliffs, and take two short walks a day. I felt so well that I thought it was the air that was curing me, for now I did everything for myself, even making my bed. Then it seemed the quiet of the scene that steadied me—the cliffs, the sea; I spent hours with a book in my hand but watching gulls and clouds. I was told that the immutable land was always moving, sliding, falling, even the caves rich in fossils almost lost now; so the land was movement, the water was movement, and the wind, mist, sunshine, rain were change, nothing was still.

I
took a day or two
to realize that most of the patients were too old to leave their rooms. One still strong enough to tidy her room daily was a hundred and two. She longed to die, had given up eating as the one permissible way, but became so hungry that she had to begin eating again. I was among people who could not die. How many longed to? Who should? Who can say? We cannot know what dying is. Is there a right moment for each of us? If we have hardly lived at all, it may be much harder to die. We may have to learn that we failed to live our lives. Looking at the old from outside I think—“Let them go, there is no one there. They have already gone, and left their bodies behind. Make a law that is impossible to abuse, and allow release”. But inside the old, who makes the final decision? They are mysteries like everything else.

The nursing was good, homely and warm, natural compassion from country girls and kindly women. One sister was simple virtue, complete as a pearl. I asked, I had to know, was
nursing the old depressing; could nurses do it only for short periods as no cure was possible? They seemed surprised and said that old people were dears, and needed help so much that everyone liked nursing them. I had seen with what grace and gentleness the nurses behaved, so here was a good that life would be poorer without, and my rational reaction was an ugly thing beside it.

Good Friday

I
do not know why
the day on which man denied God should be called good. If Christ, who was both man and God, had to experience man’s refusal of the spirit, man still seems undisturbed by what he did and does. Christ as man knew God. His very being said, “I am man and God, and so it is with each of you”. We struggle to hear that, and understand it and live it, but it slips from us as though it hardly mattered, also as though it can be taken for granted. We do not know what we mean by “God” or “Man” or
“Life” and the drama of its contradiction and resolution is everything. It is also the actual, terrible inclusion of evil, for good would have no meaning without evil, and if man had not crucified Christ, saying by his act, “We do not want the spirit, relieve us of it, we choose our blindness”, we would have lacked this lesson in what evil man can do. We cannot seem to learn evil by living its depths again and again, so how can we learn good? What a blessing that much of the time we live both with no thought of either.

I
am rereading
after fifty years Henry Adams’s
Mont-St.-Michel.
One of the pleasures of age is reading books long forgotten, with only the enlargement they once brought remembered. As Henry Adams tells of that great flowering of trust in the Virgin, of glorious building in her honour, of the consummate artistry and rich humanity that burgeoned on every hand, I was so moved by the abundant beauty that I was almost healed of a wound that has ached in me all
my life; the inferiority of women. It lamed me as a child. I still do not see why men feel such a need to stress it. Their behaviour seems unworthy, as though their superiority was not safe unless our inferiority was proven again and again. We are galled by it, even distorted by it, mortified for them, and forever puzzled. They have gifts and strengths we lack, achievement has been theirs, almost all concrete accomplishment is theirs, so why do they need to give us this flick of pain at our very being, we who are their mates and their mothers?

I was entranced by the Virgin whom Henry Adams deduced. She was loved, loved for her mercy, for her love of beauty and gift of inspiring its creation in others; loved above all for her generosity and power. She both gave and forgave. Then to honour the feminine enhances life. That is an arresting fact, often forgotten. But this great feminine symbol is a pattern that women do not follow, and could we? It is man’s concept, and it is above all an appeal for mercy, and an appeal for bounty.

As long as men had this vision they could project on to her the creative heights in their own natures. They could represent their aspirations and the profound depths of their being in buildings that achieved miracles in stone, solving mathematical problems of weight and balance with the beauty of complete mastery.

It intoxicates, heals and shames me, and very humbly I ask myself what relation can ordinary women have to this divine feminine figure? Can we, should we, even attempt to serve this vision? We try to live her a little, we are expected to, and that is a great honour. We would try to live her more if we could, but the truth is we also execrate, desecrate, and rail at her while we do our chores. There is a smallness in us, a justified resentment perhaps, that makes us tend to reduce life to chores as though to refute this great ideal. It may be the contrast between the ideal and the real that makes so many women hate being women. Here we are caught, and here we struggle.

The selfless, tireless one, the rich giver and
the meek receiver, with life-giving energy flowing like milk from the breast, costing her nothing, is too, too much. Looked at in the grey light of daily living the concept is the demand of the ravening child, and we cannot respond to such a claim in man or child. Our protest at the human enactment of the ideal may be why we are not worshipped, but belittled. Or is man’s scorn a cry for help, and one to be met? Does he need us to be wiser than we are? He well might. Perhaps life needs it too.

We do not often live with the superior side of the man—that is generally expressed in his work—but more habitually with his weak, tired, shadow side. We indulge him, restore him, and though we exploit him (that is a mutual game) it often seems to us our role and fate to deal with his inferiority, and conceal it from him. We may do it with wisdom and grace, but usually we project our faults onto each other, all can be beneath comment, and there are times when only mutual forgiveness makes us fit to face each other once more.

Here is inferiority indeed, but it belongs to both and needs both to deal with it. It demands honesty and mercy, and these are not easy to summon; they may be beyond us, but when they answer our mutual cries of what can be despair, they are good enough to call divine. There can seem no connection between the great impersonal concepts and the problem of living our personal lives. Yet when men and women truly love each other they project their greatest possibilities onto the loved one. When love vanishes for a while the woman does not see the god in the man, he seldom lives it, and if he never sees the goddess in the woman it is never there.

Her failure may be the greater as she is the midwife of the profound forces stirred by love, and it is for her to join the ideal and the human, but she cannot do it alone. The intimacy that exists between men and women can seem the confrontation between good and evil, the place where there is the greatest chance of their being resolved by compassion and insight. It is here that souls are bared. Here in the welter of complete
exposure we meet our glories and our sins, and we can see when we should have accused ourselves not the other: here too we may find the mutual support to enable us to say, “I see myself.”

For small as we each can be we are more than our outer selves. Our potentialities, all those great forces that lie unconscious in our depths, accumulated through the ages, greater than we, mysterious to us, have to be represented to us in some outer form, in some person, in some concept, or we lose touch with them in ourselves, and live them feebly if at all. Or live destructively, which is worse.

Humanity apparently requires a concept of the superhuman in order to rise above the humdrum and the base within us. We need each other to see in seering truth what shame belongs to each, and what grace and goodness we receive from the other. And Oh—there are moments when our prayer to each other is—“Be my superior”.

So I still care! At my age I care to my roots
about the quality of women, and I care because I know how important her quality is.

The hurt that women have borne so long may have immeasurable meaning. We women are the meeting place of the highest and the lowest, and of minutia and riches; it is for us to see, and understand, and have pride in representing ourselves truly. Perhaps we must say to man “You create us when you love us, but you destroy us both when you stress our inferiority. The time may have come for us to forge our own identity, dangerous as that will be.”

Suddenly I see what I did not see before. I have felt all my life exactly as those feel who ask for equality. The real need is for honour, often not deserved, desired the more when not deserved. Our cry sounds as though we had been deameaned, and while we are demanding “Our rights” we are saying, “Do not demean us for our difference, self-shame is hard to bear.”

A
letter has just come
from a woman grieving over the weakness of character shown by her gifted husband. The secret inferiority of the man who in public is her superior can paralyse a woman’s capacity to think, and make her refuse to feel. But human beings are not easily shattered. They continue to love, marry and wreck each other, in fact they dare to live. If they were not mostly blind to the effects of their behaviour how could the world go on?

I
f love unites opposites
and overcomes law, then women have been given a role so great that it is strange we only sense it dimly. Was it clearer to us earlier, in the thirteenth century say when the Queen of Heaven reigned?