Our wedding day
1 From a poem by Christopher Reid.
What is a soul?
each living instance
Rosa was only five when they died, Grandpa and Grandma, in the same year. 1992 cast a little shadow across her life that is perhaps still there today; the ghost of a shadow, the knowledge of death. In the ‘Autobiography’ her secondary school encouraged her to write, aged thirteen, she wrote a chapter called ‘The Year of Tragedies’.
Of course you have to say goodbye to the past. But that year, we also said goodbye to the future.
The year began with a lost child. No funeral, no body, just a burying of dreams. I miscarried on my father’s birthday, February 14, a Saturday, at nine or ten weeks. Not my last miscarriage, my second. I was almost used to it, knew it from before, a gathering dread that things weren’t going right — the sickness lessening (for sickness is a good sign), the dull return of normality, my breasts no longer throbbing: the failure to transform. Another D and C. Forcing the anaesthetist to acknowledge my grief, for he had been laughing with me (in kindness) on the way to the ward, as the needle slipped into a vein on my wrist I said to him clearly and urgently, feeling it must be recorded or whoever had been precariously alive would twice die, ‘I want you to know that I wanted this baby.’
The first time it happened is the clearest in my mind. Long hoped for, already much loved; the silver and black ghostliness of the scan we thought would be routine, but which showed no life, nothing, no heartbeat, no more hope. 1989. Poor Nick, who was late after parking the car, or else they sent me in early, knocking harder and harder on the door of the ultrasound room at the hospital to get in; that was worse than the pain for myself, having to tell him, strangled with tears, ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘so sorry.’ Knowing how blindly and deeply it would hurt him.
It hurt Rosa too. She was only three; people said, ‘too young to understand’, but they were wrong. She both understood, and misunderstood in ways that might have poisoned our whole relationship insidiously had she not had the genius to enact what was in her mind.
At first she felt, or showed, only sorrow, and pity for me. I still have the thing she made to console me. Unbelievably, she drew a baby on kitchen paper, about the size a newborn baby would be, but with short arms that made the whole thing like a cross with a heavy head, came through and laid it in my arms as I lay in bed in our bedroom with its windows opening over the grass, the greenness, the pointless blank and the blue: ‘Here’s a baby for you, Mummy.’ And then as the days went on she became strange and evasive and did not want to be near me. When Nick went out she ran after him, clinging and crying. It was almost as if she was afraid of me, but that could not be so. Could it?
Then she showed me what was tormenting her by taking her toys, one after another, and hanging them from her upper bunk with scarves. I took them down and asked her why she was doing it. ‘I just wanted to see what it was like,’ she said, but she still wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘What was it like?’
She thought I was killing the babies who died. Oddly, art helped, or symbolism did, at this bleakest of junctures, where nothing, you would think, could help. By a kindness of fate, or the pity of God, for surely only God could have such perfect pity — or because my longing was so deep and raw that it called forth what was needed from the universe, in which case the universe itself is God, which is what I mostly, most deeply, believe — the book opened, that evening, at bedtime, at a story we had never read, ‘What Happened to the Unicorn?’ by Jenny Koralek. I read it to Rosa, not knowing where it would take us, in much the same way as the child in the story, who has lost something and needs solace, wanders into a green wood. I cannot remember the details now, but I do remember there was a unicorn among the trees — that the child talked to it, and loved it — but the unicorn, magical as it was, was only here on a visit, could not stay. I think Rosa and I both knew, without words for the thing we knew, that the unicorn was a soul. The soul we longed for which had slipped away. The soul, the well-spring of loss and sorrow. And we were both crying as the story ended, tears which mended things; because Rosa was learning afresh that I mourned what might have been. I think from then on she was no longer afraid.
For us, someone living had died, though in each case the babies were less than three months. I support women’s right to abortion as a very poor second to contraception, but I cannot accept that no one is killed. I don’t buy the claim that the child in the womb is any less alive than the child outside. It would simply be more convenient for us if we didn’t have to think of what we kill as living.
I have friends, atheist scientist friends, who stop still and physically stiffen if I inadvertently, in their presence, say something about the soul or the spirit. There’s a war on, at present, between science and religion, only partly because of the advance of creationists. My generation took it for granted that the theory of evolution was true: who could really believe that, as the Bible says, the earth was made in only six days?
Yet can’t scientists make a distinction between private and public kinds of knowledge? Do they feel, when someone near to them dies, that only something material is lost? Is one beloved dog the same as another?
I don’t find it easy to define a soul, which is why I have left it till nearly last. In a way my own formal beliefs are not useful, because they exist in a different space. I was confirmed into the Church of England. What do I cling on to, of those beliefs? I think Jesus Christ is a perfect modeclass="underline" of kindness, empathy, lack of pride. His parables speak to the artist in me, as do the beauty of the hymns and the psalms. My father’s love for ‘Morning has broken/Like the first morning,’ is everyone’s love of, and longing for, renewal; his desire for a new self is my own. I am moved by Matthew Fox’s version of the faith, where the anawim, the humble and excluded, are always at the core of it. The first shall be last. Be as little children. A mirror reversal of the world we know, quietly radical, the gentlest miracle. An image, an otherworld that hangs there, beckoning, beyond the hills of hurt and worry. I take communion, though rarely; I kneel with others to say we are linked, this is the face of the faith I grew up in. I sit, grateful to be welcomed.
Catching the light
But since I was sixteen, and ‘lost my faith’, I cannot literally believe in a paradise with God and Jesus and the saints: where would it be? is my problem. Where am I to imagine them? It falls apart, it turns to cardboard. More seriously, for this means that most Christians might see me as inimical, I cannot believe that there is only one God who happens to focus on our planet, our species, one species among so many species, one tiny planet in this vast universe of galaxies and stars and countless planets which surely, certainly harbour other life-forms. Why would that wide glory of light, space, matter, have a God centred on our little earth? Our Christian God looks suspiciously like us. If God exists, he must have many faces, so everyone can find their own face. Besides, as I learn about other faiths, I see they have aspects of the same beauty, speak to the same needs and longings. It isn’t only Christians who value compassion, love, forgiveness, charity. Who speak to the best in us, and face the worst.
I think of the Thai pendant I wore on the night when I felt I was saved by an answer to prayer, when the conscript threatened to rape and kill me. At the time, I had no idea what it meant, whose image it was. I bought it as fashion. Only writing this book have I realised that I wore on my breast that fateful night the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion, Kuan Yin, who is described as ‘an incarnation of Mary’, whose person embodies loving kindness. Kuan Yin hears the cries of the suffering; her name means ‘she who hears the sounds of the world’. She is said to have refused to enter heaven when the cries of the living came to her ears. Which compassion saved me? Kuan Yin’s, or Jesus’s? I would say, compassion in the universe; though in another universe, perhaps I was killed, in the universe I live in now, I was saved. But behind that larger claim there are real, small facts: compassion from the French boys who worried about me, who came and interrupted what was happening; my own compassion for myself, which made me hold on and hold off my attacker; even some buried restraint or pity in him which stopped him raping me straightaway. (But think also of those who are not saved, who are cruelly killed, tortured, murdered, who suffer for years, with no remission, who pray in terror and are not answered.)