Citing death: the last draft of feminist memoir

Abstract

This article reflects on the final draft of a feminist memoir written by my grandmother, who decided to end her life at the age of 92. Barbara's unpublished writing, which she wanted others to read, charts her life story through broader philosophical and ecological questions. My intimate reading encounter suggests that the fierceness of the human condition prevails beyond death, and that the desire for a better world rests upon, and shapes, the words we inherit.

Much of the feminist writing I have fallen towards has paused at the image of the circle. Ann Quin, Gertrude Stein: some who have offered some continuum in lieu of an ending. Perhaps it set me up for disappointment when faced with inevitable cessations and closures and full stops. And none could seem quite so strange as the sudden chosen end to a life. So, here, at the precipice, I introduce an ending. Citing death is an awkward manoeuvre, and grappling between ‘suicide’ and ‘chose to die’ and ‘died on her own terms’ is a strange semantic procedure that resists a smooth conclusion. Nevertheless, it is a fact that my grandmother – known to us as Granny B, short for Barbara – chose to die in the spring of 2023, when she was 92 and her garden was showy with greenery. Her celebration of life in place of a funeral had the feeling of a garden party: a sloping marquee was pushed upwards by a fan of hands; the house was hoovered, lavender gathered and books left out for visitors to take home; confectionary baked, and photographs strung up. In the days running up to this one, my dad had asked us which books we wanted to take for our own bookshelves. For mine: a deteriorating copy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and a book on women and power. The ephemera: a summing up at the very last stretch of a long life.

A memoir is an arrangement of a life's ambient objects, and Barbara left behind a draft. She had spent years crafting it, typing slowly even when her hearing began to fail and bouts of fatigue shortened her waking hours. I was given a copy to read and edit, which came as a fat ream of paper noisily arriving through my letterbox. I circled things in pencil. She named her manuscript Slouching Towards a New Version of Reality, after the final couplet in Yeats’ poem. Her deeply held sense of the earth as a living being is clear from her introduction, when she insists that ‘the old ways of thinking about Gods and the Earth will have to change’ (Hill, n.d.: 13) after becoming engrossed with James Lovelock's writing from the 1970s. The word ‘entropy’ recurred in day-to-day conversations as a gesture to the laws of thermodynamics both in the world at large and her ageing body, which she accepted as a prerequisite for living: ‘energy begins to leave us, disordering our feelings and minds as our bodies age, until eventually we die’ (Hill, n.d.: 14). In her writing, this takes her back to the bitter winters and harsh farming practices of Northern England in the 1930s, but also her fondness for horses and a strong, intuitive pull towards the direction of home when she became lost. She also recounts the time of meeting my grandfather, of heartbreak and cold hearths and subsequent illness. She wrote about the obliterating force of a lonely marriage and the suffocating expectations of her as a young woman, and of not being able to have children biologically.

She was well aware of the kinds of violence enacted against women, and she attentively read Germaine Greer, Eva Figes and Kate Millett. Enrolling in a further education college with two young children felt like ‘waking up after a long sleep’ (Hill, n.d.: 43). But alongside conduits to freedom, there were also significant moments of hardship; she talks candidly about being sexually assaulted and the ensuing shame, of being prescribed diazepam and becoming manic. She recounts the polychromatic brilliance of the inside of an ambulance as she was sectioned for mental illness: ‘what came into my mind was an image of a snake with its tail in its mouth that seemed to be connected with the ambulance man accompanying me on the journey’ (Hill, n.d.: 146), understanding that she ‘was obviously very “high” and really quite ill’ (Hill, n.d.: 147). Illness was an influential factor in Barbara's early life, from when her burst appendix affected her reproductive organs, to bouts of tonsillitis, anxiety and depression. When she was employed as a Liberal Studies lecturer in January 1974, exhaustion and frantic existential questioning emerged, and sedatives were, once again, prescribed. When she went for another psychological assessment, she asked the psychiatrists if they could ‘think about “God” as simply everything?’ (Hill, n.d.: 150), which they interpreted as her lack of recovery.

It was many years later when Barbara would hear about the concept of ‘self-deliverance’ and buy a book on different ways of ending her life. She writes: ‘I carry a valid advance directive that is still in my purse, having paid in advance for my funeral, and also for a natural burial place in the countryside’ (Hill, n.d.: 165). She bought a cardboard coffin and added shelves so that it could hold books until it was needed, and, some time later, my siblings and I would place flowers and feathers on it as it was lowered into the ground. She made it clear that planning her own death supported her acceptance of it, and hitherto ‘strengthened [her] immune system’ (Hill, n.d.: 165) and improved her health. Sitting in her garden one day, ‘an extraordinary sense of being part of everything passed through [her] – the ground the air the plants the birds the faint sound of distant traffic – all were part of [her] body and mind without any sense of separation’ (Hill, n.d.: 167). I find elation in this passage, with its punctuation mostly removed. In her last draft, the font changes abruptly in some places, motioning to sudden additions in her compost of thoughts: ‘finding meaning is what makes us human’ (Hill, n.d.: 53) – an earnest germination amid paragraphs upon paragraphs of interpretations of evolutionary theory, power relations and the origins of language. It is not exactly easy reading, jumping from axon and dendrite connections in early ancestors to cruel advertising agendas in the 1970s. And yet the tangle of personal history and the long view of the earth exemplifies Barbara's prevailing feeling that there were discernible connections across everything.

Death leaves us questioning; the lack of answers is a permutation of loss. As a reader, I am not distanced by time and relation, and the charge of familial closeness weighs heavily on the reading encounter. In the final pages, Barbara confesses that she has ‘always wanted a better world’ (Hill, n.d.: 194), and that ‘this political desire may have affected [her] writing …’ (Hill, n.d.: 194), the ellipsis marking a pause that feels alive in its reflexivity. It was later edited out, but I feel closer to the messier prose because it reflects a material truth that, by the time she began writing, her hair ‘had already turned white’ (Hill, n.d.: 209), her body losing height under the ‘pressure of gravity’ (Hill, n.d.: 209). At the age of 90, she writes, ‘this work has to end for old age is taking over my life and there is nothing I can do about it’ (Hill, n.d.: 209). She admits that it is ‘not the conclusion [she] intended for there were a few more sections about feminism and women's lives that [she] wanted to comment on’ (Hill, n.d.: 209), but that ageing has brought with it ‘an experience of deterioration’ (Hill, n.d.: 194) and fatigue on a ‘journey that will end with death’ (Hill, n.d.: 194). The word ‘woman’ changes from ‘wimyn’ to ‘wimmin’, and Barbara settles on the imperative that we ‘need to learn humility towards this interacting, interconnecting and interrelating “Whole”’ (Hill, n.d.: 205) following a passage from Gibran's The Prophet. I want to do the draft justice, and to distil it into something like a manifesto for future living, but there is so much to chart in the fleeting topography between Barbara's circular thoughts and my own.

Gibran (1926: 94) writes: ‘for what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun?’. To cite death is to acknowledge its presence in a life, and to return to it as an idea, circling back even as it brings suffering to those who wade through its papers and hand-me-downs. This also involves giving gratitude to it as a shaping force across borrowed time. It is clear that death remained a spectre, perhaps a friend, watching events amass on the stage of Barbara's life; her writing formed under its pressure. My dad read out the conclusion of Barbara's final draft when family and friends gathered to acknowledge her life. The flowers she had planted responded to the lilting air with peaceful indifference. We leaned closer to the words.