Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

“Sam, Sam, Sam, please listen, because you look so upset. Know what I was thinking about this morning? Do you remember when Marie Ligget told us…”

Philip found me blacked out on the beach, up near the rickety fence halfway between his and Cynthia’s house and where Elizabeth had stood. “Let’s get you inside,” he said, “and then I’ll ring up Dr. Trellis.”

I WAS UNDER OBSERVATION in Halifax Hospital for thirty days and now am back in my cottage. “Nervous exhaustion, that’s quite the diagnosis,” Philip said. He had picked me up from the hospital and was driving me to Port Medway. “Cynthia said, ‘Well, Philip, you suffer that once a day, but it’s over quickly and you have a drink. But our friend Sam Lattimore’s suffered it for a couple years straight.’ I think she even said ‘without surcease.’ She’s been on a recent kick, though, reading nineteenth-century novels.”

“I feel far less the nervous part,” I said, “but the exhaustion’s something else.”

“Cynthia’s made her famous goulash,” he said. “Dinner’s around six-thirty, okay?”

In my driveway, as I got out of his car, Philip said, “Got your medication?”

“Yes, I do. But I’m not so inclined to take it.”

“It’s meant to help you,” Philip said. “That’s all I’m saying. It’s meant to help you.”

I decided to try the medication. I think maybe Elizabeth’s angry at me for not walking down to the beach and talking with her for all this time (the thought that she saw me and Istvakson still catches me out). Since I returned to my cottage, I’ve been down twenty-eight nights in a row, but no Elizabeth. She could be anywhere; I read in one book that the condition of Bardo “often requires journeys.” I’m certain I’ll have the chance to tell Lizzy where I’ve been and we’ll talk it through.

While I was in hospital, Dr. Nissensen paid me a visit. That was unexpected. Cynthia’s and Philip’s visits, and even the one visit from Derek Budnick, weren’t all that unexpected. But Dr. Nissensen’s was, and when he first came into my room, all I could say was “Our time is up.”

“That’s funny, Sam,” he said. “How are you?”

“My doctor — Dr. Maurrette — diagnosed me as having had a nervous breakdown. ‘Nervous collapse’ is how he put it. It probably won’t surprise you that I disagreed. I said, ‘No, it’s just I’ve always been somebody who reacts strongly to bad news.’”

“You were referring to how Elizabeth described being murdered? You told me in our final session that you were expecting her to tell you soon. Still, I suspect ‘bad news’ may have sounded obtuse to Dr. Maurrette, since he wouldn’t have had a context for it, or did he?”

“Given patient-doctor confidentiality, I can’t reveal that.”

Dr. Nissensen laughed. “Nevertheless, I’ve known Andrew Maurrette for many years. He’s an excellent psychiatrist.”

“He called our sessions ‘counseling.’”

“ I see. Well, rest assured, few are as highly regarded in our field. He telephoned me right away — you must’ve mentioned we’d worked together, Sam. Do you recall mentioning it to him?”

“No, I don’t. Nope.”

“You look well and I wish you all the best. Of course, you know how to contact me.”

“Thank you, Dr. Nissensen. Thank you for dropping by.”

“Oh, almost forgot. I brought something for you. Some reading material.”

He handed me an academic journal.

“Much of it is esoteric gobbledygook, but I’ve marked an article by a British fellow, very insightful. Original thinker, somewhat of a literary bent. It may interest you.”

“I’ve got time to read. As you can see.”

“Well, Dr. Maurrette says you’re to go home in two days.”

“You know, Dr. Nissensen, since I’m not coming to talk with you again, this article gives you the last word.”

“I suppose so. But only if you choose to read it.”

We shook hands and he left. I looked at the title of the article: “The Reprimanding Revenant: Some Thoughts on Hallucination as the Persistence of Grief.”

In that wing of the hospital, I wasn’t allowed coffee. This was wrong, I felt. During my weeks there I often complained about it. However, shortly after Dr. Nissensen’s visit, I asked one of the elderly volunteers for a cup of tea, and she brought me one. I sat down on my bed to read the article. Apart from some impenetrable jargon, I did find it well written. The author, a Dr. Kalderish, based in Dublin, first described her research methods and then stated:

I interviewed two hundred people who had suffered the loss of a loved one, and whose unifying experience was with what fell, in my opinion, into a category first named by Marie-Louise von Franz, a protégée of Carl Jung: the reprimanding revenant. This is a person, deceased for some time, who “comes back” and reprimands the grieving person for small mistakes made in the past, but most often for not being able to protect said apparition from harm. [This was never the case with Elizabeth!] However, based on all solid evidence, each of the two hundred grieving persons could not possibly have intervened at the moment of the revenant’s death. But in the hallucinatory context, the revenant insists on the grieving person’s culpability in her demise. There are antecedents in the literature. Studies of the psychological traumas of trench warfare in World War I provide accounts of men “seeing” their comrades after they had been witnessed being shot or blown apart by land mines; these comrades would in effect “appear” and scream such horrid indictments, they would induce a debilitating guilt and remorse in the survivors. The very terrain of warfare, miles and miles of muddy trenches, was called by one soldier “a labyrinth of wandering souls.”

It must be said that, in my study, the revenant just as often offered “loving and kind words.” In fact, in more than thirty cases, lengthy conversations were conducted between the revenant and the grieving person. “The lack of physical contact was, I’m quite sure, on both of our minds,” one subject said. “But we never spoke of it.”

I finished the article and started thinking of ways to refute many of its assertions. I even took out a notebook. Yet I didn’t have much of a connection with Dr. Kalderish’s results. For a minute or so I rehearsed a conversation I might have with Dr. Nissensen, but said to myself, “That would mean making an appointment — stop!” Then the volunteer brought in a piece of coffee cake, which I hadn’t requested but was grateful for nonetheless.

TODAY IS JANUARY 17, 1974. I had my thirty-seventh birthday yesterday. Philip and Cynthia gave me a little party. It was just the three of us. “Want to watch an old movie with us, Sam?” Cynthia asked, after I’d blown out the candles and we’d had pieces of her delicious lemon cake and they’d given me five pairs of winter socks as a birthday gift. But I was tired and wanted to get back to my cottage. In bed, reading Brian Moore’s latest, I suddenly recalled something Dr. Nissensen said. We’d been discussing my radio writing. “Well, Mr. Keen never had to contend with someone missing because of being in Bardo, did he?” That had made me really laugh at the time.

Acting as a kind of neighborly accountant, Cynthia has kept my modest finances in order. Since my hospitalization, I have got seventy-six pages of Think Gently on Libraries completed somewhat to my satisfaction. I’ve joined the local Naturalists Society, which meets once a month in the Port Medway Library, a group of fifteen people who are on cordial terms with one another, and only a few of them are competitive keepers of life lists. We mainly discuss birds we’ve seen. I don’t otherwise socialize with these people, but the meetings are something I look forward to. So far, no meeting has run more than two hours.