Home, pursued by Monsters.

Life and its structures.

My mum was 39 when I was born and I was 35 when she died.  I had always thought of midlife as something that happened in your fifties. Certainly my mum’s most despised section of society, middle-aged men, were the pompous pot bellied 50 somethings who filled the news with beards, thinning hair and fat fingered entitlement. They were stuck, blinkered, swollen tics bloated by nostalgia and slowly sinking into a myopic bubble of short sighted partial deafness. They were all my dad.

But this is not midlife. At least not in my gene pool. My Dad died at 72, my mum at 74, mathematically midlife started for me somewhere between her death and the birth of my first child when I was 38. For my Dad midlife was 36 when my sister was born, for mum it was 37 when her second child was still born. If the middle of the story contains the end, if it is the first time we become what we will eventually be, then what were they?

At 36 my Dad, an architect, was renovating a house in Stockwell the sale of which would buy the basic shell of the house where I was born and he would die. He was not a loquacious man, nor one prone to talk about the past save for a handful of fixed and well worn stories. The monkeys in Malaysia. Baked beans in Germany. My mum’s account of their time in Stockwell, the unexpected middle of his life, was of happy blindness. He was lost in the house project which was his perfect expression of himself in the world but one that often went no further than his head. She’d often say how able he was to imagine something finished without the need for any further actualisation of that. Things would remain half complete for weeks and months and not only did it not bother him, he seemed always able to step back and view the house for what it was going to be. The same was true, on a much larger scale, of the house he slowly pieced together over the rest of his life. The house that would eventually entomb him. The same is also true in the sad comedy of his last lucid moments which were spent urgently sketching out a memorial wetland centre that we were supposed to build in his honour. I tell myself that it didn’t matter that we didn’t build it, that even as he drew it we all had not the slightest intention of even momentarily attempting such an entirely unwanted task, like so much else, he didn’t need it built anywhere except in his head.

After her death I discovered that, in contrast to my father, the inside of mum’s head was far bleaker. Her diaries were a map of her depression, a black log of despair in which even the best things in her life dissolved into nothing. I sometimes think of her midpoint, the story she’d tell of lying on the kitchen floor howling in grief for the loss of her child and my dad, as she put it, just wandering off. His failure, his inability to console her was the wound their relationship never recovered from. From a distance it’s easy to see that there could be no comfort for her but neither that nor his inherent incapacity to deal with the world beyond his head makes the story easier for me to think about. Neither can I shake the awful comprehension in her last days when she began to lose the ability to support her head. Frustrated and propped up on pillows she muttered “it wouldn’t be so bad if only I could just sort this bloody neck out” and suddenly we both realised that of course she never would, that this change in her body was one of the irreversible horrors of leaving it. “If only I could just…” These were the gradients of her end. Markers that ran back years. I feel them now in the morning aches I wake with, the irresolvable todo list that haunts my steps.

They were, or became very different people, often painfully so for each other. Sun and rain. Silence and noise. They both died in the house they had shared, living apart, living inside their heads. That is where the midpoint of their lives speaks to the end, the point where both, in different ways, for better or worse retreated from the world and became bound within the nutshell of their own thoughts. John Yorke, whose theory of the midpoint this relies on, also created my most preferred description of the nature of the difficult 4th act in 5 act structure. Freytag, who originally defined the 5 acts, called it The Falling Action which always feels like a deflation of tension rather than its necessary escalation. Yorke instead describes a story as a journey into the woods, where the fourth act, the part that follows on from the mid point, as being returning home, pursed by monsters.