I was woken the other morning by the insistent electronic warbling of my phone. It was just after 8am, and I found myself instinctively preparing for bad news. The last time the phone rang before 9am it was a “come home son, your father’s in hospital” sort of call, years ago. As I stumbled in the dark towards the phone in the living room, I fuzzily went through a checklist of whether my Visa had enough credit to get to Dublin, what clients I had that day, and who could feed the cats.

“Hello?”
“I want to talk to my husband, I want to know if it’s right that I should kill myself, and join him in heaven, will God punish me? I want to die. But I’m afraid if I do it myself I won’t see him ever again.” Her voice was slurred, indistinct. Not young. She was crying, singing the boozy poor-me song.
There are some times when I wish that life could have a pause button. Time out, gather your wits, think what’s best, and then press “Start” when you’re ready. This was one of those moments. The little boy in me was whimpering: “Daddy, that wave’s too big, I’ll drown!!!” I needed coffee, badly. I needed to pee. (I needed a cigarette and then I made myself not-think that need, the way I’ve been doing for 20 emancipated, empty months. And counting.) My cats were under my feet, semi-annoyed, miaowing, urging me to finish the journey to their food bowl. I needed to wake up.
I quelled the desire to be brutally rude.
The psychic punch of the suicidal – rage and hate and manipulation – is one I’ve been hit by before, in more ways than one. I want to hit back. The affront of it – when someone decides that you are going to be the one to deal with their despair, the one to parent them through their panic, to think, to reason, to challenge. You must pass their vicious, crucial test: they pummel you repeatedly with unarguable evidence that life is cruel, and you must still disagree and argue for life. And if you don’t play the role of Persuader-for-Life on command, will their blood be on your hands? Your free will is kidnapped – you cannot say what you really feel because they may hang up and die on you. But you can’t bullshit either – someone on the edge like that has had enough fakery and hypocrisy. You negotiate with the kidnapper, appease the bully, rescue the victim. This is what you must do, if you believe in anything that connects human beings, if you believe that we are more than individuals in isolation, groping for contact and meaning in a pitiless, soulless world.
She rang me by mistake, she got the wrong person, which is why I feel free to write about her here, and normal rules of client confidentiality don’t apply. She was looking for someone who was mentioned in a tabloid article that also included my details, and she got me confused with a guy who described himself as a “medium” who had “high-level guides” who speak to him in voices through his ear. I was being given a crash-course in the sort of lament that those who claim to be familiar with the spirit world must deal with all the time – the yearning to make contact with the dead, to ease the grief and loss that is the shadow of love and attachment.
She was nearly 60, lived on her own in a village in the middle of nowhere with her 22-year-old cat, who was dying. She described herself as a recluse. Her beloved husband had died eight years ago, and her best friend had only died six weeks previously. He was someone who had brought her out of herself as a widow, had cheered her up, got her out to do things. He wanted more than friendship, and she felt appallingly guilty that she had been “mean” to him and not gone further. She didn’t want to betray her husband. Now he was gone, unexpectedly, and her cat had looked at her in farewell the night before. She had taken to the bottle, and drunk all night, terrified at losing the last living connection to her husband, to when she had a role, to when she last loved.
It took me half an hour to feel safe enough to extract myself from the phone call. I told her instead of a medium she’d found a cranky counsellor, who had to go to work. She kept on apologising for ringing me, for existing, really – and I wondered what sort of a bully her late husband was, to leave his wife so mouse-like. Or had his loss shaken her faith in life so much that her confidence was shattered?
When someone is at that level of despair, depression has taken a firm grip, and “normal” rationality is replaced by a darker, narrower version, where lateral thinking all but disappears, and it feels like there is no way out. What is longed for is certainty, an end to the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Reality is too painful. The appeal of spiritualism lies in the comfort of a different reality, on the “other side”.
What concerns me about those who are professional mediums is not that they are fraudulent – they may have stunning insights and they may indeed have a real gift – it’s whether in the long run what they offer helps or hinders the person in distress. It may be incredibly soothing to believe you are hearing from a dead lover. But what’s being avoided is the reality principle – and for a healthy enough life we need to grasp what’s real and deal with it. The whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contemptuous treatment, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, and the insolence of office. That old shit. When we’re depressed we flee from it. When we’re not, we’re coping with it. It’s not very glamorous. It’s not very transcendent or hopeful. But there isn’t a way out of sidestepping it, if we want to choose life.
Before filing this, I gave her a quick ring, a week afer her call. She sounded better, trying to avoid drinking, and she’s admitting she’s depressed, which to my ears is always a good start. She’s looking forward to bending the ear of the nice woman who’s on The Samaritans duty roster for Friday evenings. Her cat hasn’t died yet. But the builders are in next door building an extension and she has to keep the curtains drawn to stop them peering in her window. She misses her friend. She’s Eleanor Rigby.
All the lonely people. Where do they all belong? b