What If It Doesn’t Work Out?

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

There is a photo taken of me last Saturday. I am standing in my kitchen, holding a copy of a book called ‘Everything I Know About Leaving’. In fact, I am clasping it, tightly. Just out of shot are seven boxes. These packages have been travelling round Ireland for a week, and I have been chasing them. I am torn between minor amusement and major despair because I have come this far and now my paperbacks, all 200 of them, are running away from me. A digit, it turns out, is missing from my house number and so each day, they’ve left a depot in a van and returned again later, address insufficient. I need them to stay somewhere long enough to be captured. And so, on a weekend morning, early, just after the hockey drop-off, my husband stands at a counter and asks for them. He crosses his fingers on his wife’s behalf. “They’re here,” he texts. Double identification is required, his and mine. Our driving licences are produced. He brings them home. They remain unopened on my worktop for three hours.

In this photo taken of me last Saturday, I am wearing a coat. It is a winter one, formal, bottle green, stifling. I haven’t had a chance to take it off. I have a narrow window to record this moment before the next pick-up. But it seems wrong to feel anything, to consider a celebratory sharing as I take a penknife and slice through the tape that seals box one of seven. I have been to a funeral, a thanksgiving service for a young woman. Her courage, her husband’s courage, her family’s courage, their dignity, their faith, their witness, their acceptance is astounding. I am ashamed. I find it hard to move past the injustice. This isn’t how it was supposed to work out. I sit beside another mother. We use no words. We look into each other’s eyes, and we grieve. I have written a book about leaving but I know nothing about this type of leaving. I make a video as I cut through the packaging and lift out some orange covers. “This is what you’re meant to do,” I say to the camera. “Too cringe,” my daughters say. I declare that this footage will never be made public.

“Promise me you’ll live, Bridget,” says her dad as he lies in a hospital bed. A photo is taken of them. A moment in time. They are looking into each other’s eyes. “It’s not enough to survive, you’ve got to live,” he tells her. But Bridget is a widow. She’s solo parenting. It hasn’t worked out as planned. Survival may be her only option. I cry as much during my second viewing of Mad About the Boy as I did during the first. There is at least one weeping bit I have missed first time round because martinis are a diuretic and the queue for the toilet is long. A boy is talking to his science teacher about his dead dad. Mr Wallaker does gate duty and field trips and parents’ evenings and the Christmas concert with no sign of any other staff to help him. He considers heaven nothing more than a “religious construct”. He tells Billy to remember that his father is all around him. He lives on in him and his sister. On Valentine’s Day, I post an image of my cinema booking on Instagram. “I did not expect this to be a study of grief,” I say. On 21 February, I say, “I did it again. It wasn’t any easier”.

I have mulled over this film for a couple of weeks now. It has lingered on in my system and I conclude it is a manifesto for a generation. It is for us, Generation X, as we navigate the compounding griefs of aging parents and letting our children go, our unfulfilling careers and our unfulfilled dreams, our decline and our regrets. How should we live? We watch Daniel Cleaver, former playboy, reflect on his life in the aftermath of a suspected heart attack. “I have no kin, Jones,” he says. Talitha, reduced to co-hosting a daytime TV show called Better Women, says, “I used to be on the cover of Vogue wearing a flak jacket. Now I’m on the front of Good Housekeeping holding a pavlova”. There is a scene where Bridget and her friends meet in a bar. They are drinking blue cocktails, a nostalgic nod to their twenties. Shazzer has a podcast. Tom is a life coach. Jude is a CEO, but she still rings them crying from the ladies’ toilets. They are discussing the grief cycle, debating how many stages there are, four, five, seven. Regardless, they agree, the cycle moves towards acceptance. There is a pause. They are holding their glasses. It’s clear what they’re thinking. They’re getting older, grieving the passing of time. But this is life. This is how it worked out.

I read two articles in The Times on the same day. Giles Coren¹ is reviewing a restaurant in North Yorkshire. It’s in the middle of nowhere, not a taxi in sight when he arrives in Northallerton. He hitches a lift to a 16^thcentury house. It does eighteen covers for lunch. Ruth runs it. Her husband drives him back to the station. It’s not special treatment, admits Giles. “Anyone who has the tasting menu plus wine pairing gets driven home. Anywhere up to 12 miles”. Mark has a job in London. “Yet he will pick up and take home an entire roomful of diners at his wife’s restaurant to make it work,” says Giles. Mark tells him Ruth does everything on her own, the cooking, the prepping, the washing-up, the bookings, the till, the deliveries and the payroll. “She’s happier than I’ve ever seen her,” he says.

“And to make sure it all adds up,” writes Giles, “Mark drives and drives and drives, so that Ruth’s restaurant is full. Why are you not crying? I’m crying. Would you do that for your wife, to make her dreams come true?”

Then there’s Eilidh². In 2022, she looked at the joyless, shapeless contraption covering her toddler’s pushchair and decided she would start a business selling pram sleep covers. She found a patternmaker, sourced materials and began to develop her product. There were prototypes and redesigns and aesthetically pleasing colour combinations. She did safety tests. She went “feral with photoshoots”. She invested thousands. She did it all on her own. After ten months, she was ready to sell. She announced it to her followers, contacted influencers, marketed on social media, went through two rounds of Dragon’s Den interviews. She did everything the Internet told her to, yet after a year, she’d sold just seven covers.

“It’s hard to convey the full depths of quiet humiliation that you endure when you realise that something you’ve spent so much time, energy and money on has, completely and unequivocally, failed,” she said. She had boxes of covers in her attic. “Like an ex’s possessions, they sit there taunting me about my unsuccessful undertaking, waiting for me to make a decision about what to do with them,” she said. Acceptance, understanding that failure would ultimately always be easier than regret, would take time, it seemed.

After the photo is taken of me last Saturday, I let the publisher know I have tracked down the books. “Are you happy with them?” she asks. I don’t tell her I haven’t really looked at them yet, that I carried the boxes into the garage, left them there, closed the door until I can face them. There is a vulnerability. I don’t know how this will work out. But I’m glad. I’m definitely glad. Glad seems like a good word for now.

I talked to another woman this week about a leap she’d like to take, a leaving of sorts, a dream she wanted to follow. It would mean relinquishing security. It would mean an investment. We discussed Bridget, the promise me you’ll live. What did it mean? It touched us. It was a call. Yet we couldn’t quite articulate why. I thought of Mr Wallaker. “Remember to open your eyes and look around you,” he said. “We all get it eventually,” I reckoned, “We know what our living means”.

Sneak preview…

1. The Times

2. The Times