Flesh and Blood by Stephen McGann

Author:Stephen McGann [McGann, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

The doctor said, ‘Your husband suffers from anxiety neurosis. This behaviour is due to his past experiences. He’s putting you down because it makes him feel better – more in control. In reality, your husband feels the pressure and responsibility of married life very heavily.’

This was a revelation to her. An answer at last. Her husband was suffering, damaged, kicking out like a wounded animal against the trauma and the pain he’d felt. He’d had a visit to a psychiatrist just after the war but had never told her, despite her own later depression. He’d kept everything hidden.

Clare was suddenly overwhelmed with compassion for her husband. She raced home to my dad and told him what the doctor had said. She offered suggestions for how she might help lift some of the stresses of his life from his shoulders, so that they could work together to fix it. My mother smiles and shakes her head at her naivety. ‘Of course he hit the roof. He was absolutely furious that the doctor had dared to reveal what was on his record. We never talked about it after that. Not ever.’

From that moment my mother and father followed divergent paths; together for many years to come, but increasingly estranged by their separate responses to their suffering. My mother learned to grow from the pains she endured. My father never could. Many years later and on his deathbed, my father took my mother by the hand and offered her the single acknowledgement that she’d spent a lifetime waiting to hear.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘It’s all right, Joe,’ she replied.

But it wasn’t. Not quite. Not yet. There was still something she had to do.

* * *

Following my dad’s death, my mum, now in her fifties, decided to become a bereavement counsellor. It was typical of her – turning her loss into a useful benefit for others. The training involved an induction course on various aspects of bereavement. On one particular night, the subject was neonatal death. ‘I was sitting listening to the counsellor talking about coping with the loss of an infant, when suddenly I began to cry uncontrollably. I just couldn’t stop.’

The counsellor took her to one side, and Mum tried to explain herself between sobs.

The twins. Her lost twins, all those years ago. With the mention of neonatal death, the pain of it had suddenly roared back into her mind like a blow to the head. She was overwhelmed by the force of it – the unresolved grief suddenly released from its long suppression by her husband’s death. ‘ “You’ve never grieved for them,” said the counsellor. “Nobody told me I could,” I replied.’

That night she couldn’t get the twins out of her mind. They were out there somewhere, huddled in an unknown grave. Lost. By morning she knew what she had to do. She had to find them. Call them by their names. Make them hers again.

Over the next weeks my mother did a remarkable thing. She set about finding her lost children.

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