A covering of feathers for the terrors of the night

How to struggle with the burden of other people's suffering.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

Evie S. on Unsplash.

It’s one of the sad facts of life: that many of us at some point will see our parents get old and fade away. Sigh. It doesn’t matter how well prepared you are or how much you’ve thought about it before hand, the reality of a fragile mum or an exhausted dad can break your heart.

I’ve talked to my parents about this for years here and there. We’ve done lots of joking about seeing them off with a pink pill in the sherry, or ‘it’ll be a pillow for you Pa, if you’re too annoying’ – type thing. But when they left after Sunday lunch a couple of weeks ago, I had to clutch my husband. He lost his own mother last year… we’re still fluttering around the gap she’s left in our family. And now there’s my beloved olds too, looking diminished and moth eaten and moving at crepuscular speed. Ask Dad how he is these days, and he says ‘Old, dear’, and won’t elaborate further.

I can cope with this when it’s in short bursts. Visiting them for lunch or taking them out on a trip is OK and manageable, and there is still joy in family occasions. Mum’s birthday was full of love, even though she took all afternoon to open her cards and became hopelessly confused about who’d given her what.

But staying with them… that’s hard. Seeing the dust thick over the spare room; worrying about just how long that bowl of leftovers has been in the fridge. I whip about as unobtrusively as I can, scrubbing the bottom of the washing up bowl or putting their jerseys in a wash. I don’t want to be annoying – they won’t accept help and I’m not going to push – but it makes me sad. In particular I hate that my mum is in constant pain from crumbling bones, and that dementia has stolen her mind. Also, that as a consequence, Dad is irritable with her; he who has always adored her so much.

I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain.

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Since childhood, I have struggled with the burden of other people’s suffering. I sometimes wonder if I’m exaggerating when I think about how much I mind, but I don’t think I am. I can only manage if I’m really ready for it. With my counselling clients that takes the form of very firm boundaries, regular supervision, colleagues to talk to etc… but with family it’s much harder. It’s just your own naked, soft-bodied self-shrinking from all the nettles and thorns – like a hermit crab without a shell.

So when I went down to Mum and Dad’s this time, I felt the need to prepare. ‘Put on the armour of light,’ St Paul says, which sounds just the thing. I hardly slept last time, tossing and wriggling through small-hour horrors with my neck hurting and a feeling of tears not being far away. What to arm myself with though?

The answer came in the form of an ancient poem - Psalm 91. I was listening to a Premier Radio presenter who is a pastor – a big, tattooed fellow with rings in his nose and lip – and he said it was his main defence when his wife was diagnosed with cancer. So, I looked it up, and I loved it. It was all about how the Lord will cover you with his wings and keep you safe from the terrors that visit in the night and the pestilence that stalks by day, or words to that effect.

Malcolm Guite (a poet and priest whose writing I love) says you have to treat Psalm 91 with care: it was the one Satan tempted Christ within the wilderness, challenging him to throw himself from the temple roof and God would send his angels to catch him (as it says in the psalm). It’s not to be taken literally, this psalm: you can’t deliberately put yourself in harm’s way and expect to be immune because you’re a Christian, like some of the vehement anti-vaxxers around the world who think faith alone will protect them from lethal diseases. But the message is that if you put your trust in God, he won’t let you be damaged in any important or lasting way by the evils of the world.

I memorised as much of it as I could. And then when I woke in the night – inevitably – with the dread hovering over me, I kept thinking, ‘The Lord will cover thee with his feathers’. I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain and muddliness and Dad’s frustration and my own fear. They were like malevolent ghosts drifting through the dark, menacing and cruel. But Mum and Dad and I, our actual selves, were curled up safely, warm and hidden with the great wings over us.

And eventually, I was able to go back to sleep.

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Loneliness

2 August 2023

6 min read

Why do we feel so lonely?

Re-reading some classics of English literature leads Graham Tomlin to wonder what lies behind our epidemic of loneliness.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

These days I can’t seem to avoid the spectre of loneliness. Bob Geldof recently described Sinead O’Connor as ‘full of a terrible loneliness’ in the weeks before she died. Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, one of the world’s greatest social networks, was recently described as a cutting a lonely figure. Even more widely, over a quarter of all Londoners say they often or always feel lonely - and that in a city where you can’t get away from people – all 8 million of them.

Loneliness is an epidemic these days. In the UK we even have a Minister for Loneliness and a Department of Government offering ‘Loneliness Engagement Fund’ grants for groups coming up with good ideas to combat it. Loneliness, as Roger Bretherton writes, causes psychological and social damage and is one of the main threats to mental health in contemporary life. I would hazard a guess that if you’re reading this there are times you feel isolated, and would love to have a greater sense of community where you live, or richer friendships. If you don’t, then count yourself fortunate.

Underneath our immediate sense of isolation, our social unease, the ache in the soul that comes with feeling out of connection with others, lies a deeper sense of cosmic loneliness.

During the pandemic, looking around for books that would shed some light on that strange experience of isolation as so many did, I re-read two novels: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe published in 1719, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, published in 1904. In both stories, people get stranded on deserted islands. Somehow lockdown didn’t seem that different.

Everyone knows the story of Robinson Crusoe. You might have thought that being the sole survivor of a shipwreck, alone on a remote island, would lead to a crisis of loneliness and self pity. Well, he does have moments when he reflects on the possibility that he might die in that desolate place, and remarks how ‘the tears would run plentifully down my face when I made these reflections.’ But the self pity doesn't last long. He goes on to ask himself the question of why he alone was saved out of all crew of the ship that foundered. He sees some kind of providential design in this - that he has been saved, not just by chance, but for some wider purpose, which gives him a sense of comfort. In fact, the novel is the tale of a kind of spiritual awakening, as he gradually sees in his story something of the hand of God mysteriously guiding and preserving him through his trials. Seeing this enigmatic hand directing his affairs, and discerning some kind of purpose in his isolation, Crusoe sets about the tasks of building a kind of small civilization on his island, constructing increasingly sophisticated shelters, planting crops, capturing and taming animals, mapping the island, until his final rescue. He is alone (until Man Friday appears of course) but strangely not alone.

In Conrad’s Nostromo, it turns out very different. This is a story of attempts to protect a hoard of silver from revolutionaries in the troubled (and fictional) South American republic of Costaguana. In the course of trying to hide the treasure, alongside Nostromo, the main figure in the story, the politically ambitious and romantic journalist Martin Decoud, also finds himself stranded on a deserted island, albeit with the load of valuable silver for company. His experience however is totally different. He has no such belief in providence and so for him, the isolation bears more heavily: “solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands, without fear, without surprise, without any sort of emotion whatsoever…” Unable to bear the isolation, the aimlessness of his life on the island, and the apparent failure of his plans and projects, he fills his pockets with silver ingots from the treasure, rows in a small dinghy a short way out from the shore, shoots himself with a revolver and falls overboard, sinking slowly to the bottom of the sea. And so, as Conrad describes it, in a cold, yet superb turn of phrase: “the brilliant Don Martin disappeared without a trace, swallowed up in the immense indifference of things.”

Even though they both faced isolation and loneliness, the fates of these two characters are very different. One is a story of spiritual growth, learning, meaningful activity and ultimate rescue. The other is a tragedy of lost hope and potential. It touches the heart, yet remains a tragedy.

Is it surprising that when we tell ourselves that we are alone in the cosmos, that there is no-one there to hear our cries or heartfelt longings, that the aching hole in the universe finds its way into our own hearts?

Of course, both are novels not historical episodes, yet the two books, separated by nearly 200 years, operate in very different frameworks. The first operates in a world which assumes a kind of providential ordering of things. The working of a divine hand of providence is, as Crusoe (and presumably Defoe) realises, hard to discern and difficult to distinguish in any one moment, and so leads many to doubt it is there at all. Belief in providence has always been a choice - an act of faith rather than a scientifically proved theory. And yet the story is framed within the overall belief that in the strange twists and turns of life there is a deeper divine order that leads towards a distinct purpose of good and which makes human activity directed towards that purpose meaningful.

The other story has lost that sense of divine order, and is left only with the “immense indifference of things.” This is a world in which there is nothing beyond what we can see and feel, no objective purpose, direction or goal other than that dreamed up by us. Human activity, in this case, the search for wealth and riches, seems strangely pointless. All that is left is human love and relationship and when that becomes impossible, due to enforced loneliness, there seems little point left to life.

Richard Dawkins famously wrote: ‘the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.’ For the moment I'll leave to one side the question of whether the universe does point in that direction, but either way, if we tell ourselves that story, as we have so often been doing for the last couple of centuries, is it surprising that often we feel dreadfully alone? Is it surprising that when we tell ourselves that we are alone in the cosmos, that there is no-one there to hear our cries or heartfelt longings, that the aching hole in the universe finds its way into our own hearts? It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the ‘immense indifference of things’ leaves a hollowness in the heart of life and the pit of the stomach.

Such a deeper cosmic loneliness might explain why we can still feel alone even in a city, even in a crowd or even sometimes among our friends. It helps us see our loneliness not just as a tragedy but as a pointer towards our need from greater sense of connection than any human being could give.

In Matthew’s gospel, the very last sentence depicts Jesus saying to his perplexed but bewildered disciples, scarcely daring to believe that he has actually risen from the dead: “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” This simple promise is one that has held and sustained Christians for generations, in prison cells, through dangerous voyages, through purges, in times of persecution, misunderstanding and sickness and, yes, times of loneliness in modern western societies. Of course, we need a sense of belonging, and the company of others, as we are made for that. But underneath it we need a deeper connection, a bond with something, or someone at the very heart of things. Such a promise doesn’t remove loneliness, but it makes it bearable, even meaningful.