I don’t say it, and I won’t say it, but there’s more to my intuition than April’s insistent hints. It was the thing that Lev said as well. And Axelsen. And Wikipedia.
I’ve been in shock for most of my life. I’ve ticked almost every symptom box. Indeed, if you think of my Cotard’s as being simply the most extreme, the most extravagant form of depersonalization going, then you could argue that I’ve also suffered from the most extreme, the most extravagant form of shock around. When it comes to my mental life, I’ve seldom done things by halves.
The only problem with the Lev-Axelsen-Wikipedia hypothesis was the single box left unticked. The one box that absolutely had to have been ticked. The event. The terrifying or traumatic event. The event that never happened.
What I said to Lev was true. I know that my family was safe. No physical or sexual abuse. No alcoholism. No hint of divorce. Very few marital arguments. No threat from outside. No dodgy uncles. No assaults on me from strangers. No family in Wales could have been safer. Dad’s money, his energy, his reputation were walls thicker than concrete. Any hypothetical evildoers would have preferred to mess with any other family in Cardiff sooner than make an enemy of my dad. All my life, I’ve been as safe as anyone can wish to be.
All my life, for as long as I can remember.
But traumatic events can reach far back into the past. Further than childhood. Further than memory. What happened in the first year or two of my life? Why can I recall my childhood only through a fog of forgetting? Why did my Cotard’s stalk out of nowhere to ruin my teenage years? Why do I sometimes wake with night terrors so strong that I am drenched in sweat and lie, lights on, awake and shaking, through the rest of the night, sooner than risk going back to whatever it was that visited me in my dreams?
I don’t say these things out loud, and I will never say them to these two people who have loved me so dearly, but it is time for answers and they know it.
They look across the table at each other. Dad puts his hand on Mam’s and rubs it briefly. Then he gets up, says “One moment, love,” and leaves the room.
Mam and I are alone with the ticking clock.
A ticking clock in a silent room.
She smiles at me. A brave, uncertain smile. I smile back at her. I feel okay. The anticipation I felt before has quietened down. I’m not quite sure what I feel now. Or to be precise, I’m in touch with the feeling, I just don’t have a word for it. It’s like a melting inside. A liquefying of something solid. It’s not a bad feeling. I don’t mind it. I just don’t know what it is. I don’t think that even my doctors could give this one a name.
Dad returns to the room.
He’s carrying some things. A photo and an old plastic shopping bag.
He sits at the table. Smiles at me, at Mam, back at me.
The clock ticks too loudly in the silence.
We’re all nervous. It’s as though the room itself, the empty space, the entire house is in a state of anticipation. The doctors would probably scold me for saying that. They’d say that empty space can’t have feelings. But they’ve never sat here as I am doing now. They’ve never known what it’s like for the whole of your life to sit trembling on the cusp.
Dad shows me the photo, passes it over.
It’s of me age two or three. Pink dress. White bow. Tidy hair. Shy smile. A small white teddy bear. I’ve never seen this photo before, but I recognize the car I’m sitting in. It’s Dad’s old green Jaguar XJ-S convertible. The roof is down. The day looks reasonably sunny. I can’t see enough of the street to tell where it is. I’ve got no reason to think there is anything odd about the photo at all.
I look at Dad.
“Fiona, love. That photo was taken on the fifteenth of June 1986. It was taken by this camera here.”
He takes it from the bag and passes it across the table. A small brown camera in a leather case, with a leather neck strap attached. The camera looks older than 1986. Maybe a lot older.
“We found this camera the same day as we found you. We’d just gone to chapel—your mam still had me going in those days—and when we came out, there was the car, just as we’d left it, only with a little miracle inside. You. We came out and there you were. Sitting in our car with this camera round your neck. When we had the film inside the camera developed, there was just this one photo. A photo of you. There was no note, no nothing. Just this amazing little girl in the back of our car.”
I hear all this. It makes no sense at all and it makes perfect sense at one and the same time. It’s like that moment in a theater when one stage set is revolving in from the left as the last one is disappearing on the right. You see both things at the same time. See them in their entirety. Understand them. But you also know that one thing is replacing the other. That the thing you thought was your world is about to disappear, never to show itself again.
“You found me?” I say. “You just came out and you found me?”
“Yes. Your mam and I had wanted children. We love the little bleeders, don’t we, Kath? But we’d had troubles conceiving. I don’t know why. The two girls upstairs both arrived in the ordinary manner. But anyway. We came out of chapel. We’d have been praying about it. We always did. And there you were. Thank you, Jesus. The answer to our prayers. Honestly. Our own little miracle. And not even the crying, puking sort. The good Lord had got you through all that, sent you to us clean and sweet and nice to meet. Even your own little teddy bear.”
“Of course … ,” Mam says, uncomfortable with Dad’s implication that they just drove off with me.
“Yes. Your mam’s right. We had to tell someone, so we did. If your real mam and dad had shown up, we’d have handed you over. We wouldn’t have liked it. Wouldn’t have wanted to. We fell in love with you straightaway. I mean, that very instant. But we’d have done right by you. If your mam and dad had come looking for you, we’d have handed you straight back.”
Mam then starts to tell more. The adoption process. How it was “you know, a bit complicated, what with your father and all.” An understatement, I should think. The late eighties were, as far as I can tell, Dad’s reprehensible heyday. I remember, when I was five or six, sitting at table and Dad roaring with laughter to his friends about how he was the most innocent man in South Wales. Five prosecutions and no convictions. I should think that the adoption authorities were loath to hand a child over to someone who seemed certain to end up in jail, and any police reports they required would hardly have been flattering, but then again, when my dad wants something, he generally manages to get it. By hook or by crook.
I listen to Mam talking, but I’m not interested in the adoption process. I’m interested in me.
“How old was I?”
Dad shrugs. “No one knows. At the time we guessed two, maybe two and a half. Just going by height we were. But you’ve never been the tallest lass, have you, love, so maybe we were a bit off. Perhaps you were older.”
“Didn’t you ask me?”
“Oh, love. We asked you everything. Where your mam and dad were. Where you lived. What your name was. How old you were. Everything.”
“And?”
“Nothing. You wouldn’t speak. For—what was it, Kath?—eighteen months you wouldn’t speak. You understood things all right. You were a sharp little thing even then. And we had you tested and poked at and all. They couldn’t find anything wrong with you. Not a thing. And then one day, you just started speaking. You said, “Mam, can I have some more cheese, please?’ Isn’t that right, Kath?”
Mam says yes, and she echoes him. “Mam, can I have some more cheese, please?”
I echo her echo.
Mam, can I have some more cheese, please?
Something inside me has changed. The scene shift is complete. I can’t see or feel the old world anymore. This new world is now mine. It makes no sense. It raises a million questions. About who I was, where I came from, how I came to be in Dad’s car, why I couldn’t speak or wouldn’t. About those missing two or three years. About what happened in that time that stored up such trouble for my future life.
And yet all of that doesn’t matter, or not this minute it doesn’t.
Dad has the last few things out of his bag. The pink dress with the white bow. The teddy bear. A barrette. A pair of shiny black shoes with some white socks tucked into them. He passes them over the table to me.
My past. My mysterious past. The only clues I have.
And even as I bury my head in the pink fabric to smell the dress, I know that these things don’t matter either. What matters now is what is happening inside me. The thing that was liquefying before has melted completely. An old barrier has gone. Vanished. It’s been extinguished.
I feel strange and something strange is happening.
I pull my head up and away from the dress. I put my hands to my face and they come away wet. Something very strange is happening. A feeling I don’t recognize. I am leaking from somewhere.
And then I do know. I know what is happening.
These are tears and I am crying.
It is not a painful sensation, as I always thought it must be. It feels like the purest expression of feeling that it is possible to have. And the feeling mixes everything up together. Happiness. Sadness. Relief. Sorrow. Love. A mixture of things no psychiatrist ever felt. It is the most wonderful mixture in the world.
I put my hands to my face again and again. Tears are coursing down my cheeks, splashing off my chin, tickling the sides of my nose, running off my hands.
These are tears and I am crying. I am Fiona Griffiths. Citizen of Planet Normal.
Cotard’s Syndrome
Cotard’s syndrome is a rare but genuine condition. Jules Cotard, a late Victorian French psychiatrist, gave his name to it and also came up with the phrase
le délire de négation,
a pithier and more accurate description of the illness than anything in use today.
The condition is an exceptionally serious one. Its core ingredients are depression and psychosis. Modern psychiatrists would probably argue that it wasn’t a disease in its own right, more an extreme manifestation of depersonalization; the most extreme form of it, in fact. Some patients report “seeing” their flesh decompose and crawl with maggots. Early childhood trauma is implicated in nearly every well-documented case of the syndrome.
Full recovery is uncommon. The suicides of patients with the condition are, alas, all too frequent. Indeed, my wife, who works as a neurofeedback practitioner, worked with a Cotard’s patient who ended up taking her own life.
Talking to the Dead
is written, in part, to honor that patient’s courage.
Fiona Griffiths’s own state of mind is, of course, a fictional rendering of a complex illness. I have not aimed to achieve clinical precision. Nevertheless, the broad strokes of Fiona’s account of her condition would be largely familiar to anyone acquainted with it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TK
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