My patient, Lucy N., a young research scientist, put her coat and scarf on the couch and sat down in the chair opposite me. ‘I don’t want to lie down today, I don’t want therapy.’
She looked at me directly. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t stopped eating. I had dinner last night and some breakfast this morning. I just want to tell you what’s happened.’
This session was at 9 a.m. on a Friday morning. Just after midnight the night before, Lucy had gone to sleep on the sofa in the living room of her parents’ house. Her mother dozed on the other sofa. A nurse was with her father in her parents’ bedroom. A few hours later, at about 4.30, she’d felt her mother leaning over her. She put a hand on Lucy’s pillow and whispered, ‘We need to go into the bedroom now.’
In the bedroom, the nurse had all the lights on. Her mother sat down in a chair. Lucy walked around to the other side of the bed and sat down next to her father. His head was tilted back, his mouth wide open, his breathing very shallow. Lucy touched his forehead and his cheek, and then she took his hand.
When her father let out a strange gasp, her mother made a noise. ‘It sounded like “Eugh”,’ Lucy said. ‘Maybe she was surprised, not disgusted, but it annoyed me. Even the way she was holding his hand annoyed me. She wasn’t holding it. She kept patting it lightly, with her fingertips, saying “There, there – there, there.” I wanted to tell her to stop, but I didn’t. I just tried to stay focused on my father.
‘Then the nurse said, “He’s going.” So I lay down on the bed next to him. I put my head next to his on the pillow. I put my hand on his chest and leaned my forehead against the side of his face. His beard was rough and it reminded me of when I was little and he used to kiss me good morning. I was remembering this when I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder, shaking me, telling me to get up. I didn’t want to, but I did – straight away. I didn’t want to show her up in front of the nurse.
‘As I sat up he opened his eyes for a brief moment. He looked straight ahead at the ceiling. I don’t think he could see anything. And then he closed his eyes and he was gone.’
The nurse left the room and her mother followed her out. A few seconds later, her mother poked her head around the door and told Lucy that she needed her. ‘She wanted to talk to me about what to do next. I told her that I needed just a few minutes alone with Dad.’
The sun was starting to come up. Lucy opened the curtains and turned off the lights. She wanted the room to be the way her father liked it. She sat down on the bed. ‘And then I just talked to him,’ she said.
She told him she was relieved that he wasn’t in pain any more, that he was at peace. ‘I told him I loved him and I said I was sorry for any pain I might have caused him. I told him that he would always be with me. And I kissed him.’
It had been only a few minutes, she said, but his lips felt cool. She sat there silently with him.
After a while, she went into the kitchen, made a pot of tea and telephoned her brother and uncles. And when she’d finished those calls, she went outside – so her mother wouldn’t overhear – and phoned me to say that her father had died, and to ask if I had an extra hour to meet this morning. Then she sat in the kitchen. She felt tired, but she had no desire to sleep.
During the past few days, while her father was dying, she’d often felt on the verge of exploding at her mother; she could feel the resentment building within her. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to snap at her. She was crap at looking after me, and she was crap at looking after my dad, but it won’t do much good to tell her that now.’
Lucy looked at her watch. ‘I know it’s time to stop, but can I tell you one more thing?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
‘I had a dream. I’m worried I’ll forget it. I think I was having it when my mum woke me.’
In the dream, Lucy was travelling on a train with a newborn baby. She knew it wasn’t her baby – how could it be? But there was no one else to look after him, and he was hungry, so she put the baby to her breast and found she had milk. He was soothed and fell asleep. It was then that she realised that the baby was her father. She didn’t know how she knew it was him, but it definitely was. This wasn’t upsetting, just a fact.
‘I don’t have a clue what it’s about,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s so strange about the baby.’
‘Strange in what way?’ I asked.
‘I’ve never dreamed about a baby like this before. This dream felt – different.’
The undertaker was coming at 10.30 and Lucy still had to go back to her own flat for some fresh clothes. ‘Maybe we can talk about the dream next week,’ she said.
But we didn’t talk about the dream the following week. She was overtaken by events – organising her father’s funeral, choosing someone to write his obituary, and coping with her mother’s behaviour after the service. The week after that, there was the matter of her dad’s will. Lucy used her sessions to try and settle these problems, to consider her father’s life and the months leading up to his death – was there anything more she could’ve done? – and to imagine the years ahead without him.
My first intuitions about the dream had to do with the reasons Lucy had come to see me in the first place. Lucy had been referred to me two years earlier, when she was twenty-seven, because she’d had a violent resurgence of her adolescent anorexia. When she was sixteen, she’d been hospitalised and had almost died. At our first meeting, she looked like a waif, malnourished, watery and limp. Her weight was down, and her periods had stopped altogether. Her hair was dull and her skin pallid. Although she had a boyfriend and a cat, her only interest seemed to be her postdoctoral research project. But even in this area, she was struggling with self-doubt. ‘I should’ve stopped at an MSc. Then I’d be working for someone else, carrying out their experiments, not having to devise research ideas of my own. I’m incapable of generating any original ideas.’
The picture she had of the interior of her body was just as barren. More often than not, she felt herself incapable of feeding or caring for herself. The idea of having a baby just didn’t even figure.
But during the last three months of her father’s life, as she cared for him, her own health seemed to improve, perhaps because she was cooking for and feeding him. Having to care for his body was making her more thoughtful about her own. Nevertheless, her dream of nursing an infant to sleep felt faintly menacing to me. For many years, Lucy had struggled with her parents. During our sessions, if she wasn’t attacking herself, she was attacking them. At times, she behaved as if she had to kill her parents to become herself. My first thought was that the dream probably arose from her unconscious feeling that there was something deadly in her that – could she but feed it to her father – would help him to die. But it turned out that I was completely wrong.
Four months after she’d first described the dream to me, Lucy walked into my consulting room and told me that she was pregnant. She sat on the couch and told me about buying the testing kit, peeing on the stick, and watching, in disbelief, as the blue line appeared. She was deeply happy.
She and her boyfriend didn’t use birth control because she was convinced she couldn’t get pregnant, not with her irregular periods. How could this have happened? she wondered, laughing. ‘Obviously I know that the male gamete and the female gamete fused to produce a zygote. But I’m wondering about how I came to be able to be pregnant. Perhaps it was the dream,’ she said.
‘A dream?’ I asked.
‘The dream. The dream I had the night my father died.’
We talked again about her father’s final days. He’d been unable to speak, and she’d had to change his incontinence pants regularly. On some nights, because he was frightened, she’d sat with him until the sun came up. And although we hadn’t yet talked about the dream, Lucy claimed to know what I’d made of it.
‘What did I think?’ I asked.
‘That by looking after my dad, I’d learned that I was capable of looking after a baby. You didn’t say it, but I expected you to say, “Your mum isn’t in the dream. The dream is about you being a mother. You can be a mother, because you’ve discovered you don’t have to be a mother like your mum.” I thought the train we were riding on might represent a new train of thought. The dream was really pretty straightforward.’
Lucy was quiet for a moment, and then she described a colleague at work who’d been unable to conceive, even with IVF. After being approved by an adoption agency, she got pregnant. ‘She needed someone to tell her she’d be a good mother. My dream was like that, I was giving myself approval to get pregnant, don’t you think?’
‘I hadn’t seen it like that at the time,’ I said, ‘but I think you’re right.’ It seemed to me too that Lucy had found her voice – a way of putting her own feelings into her own words – not just with me, but also in spite of me.
For the rest of the session, she talked about the plans she and her boyfriend were making: they would turn the study into a nursery; eventually, when he got a pay rise, they’d be able to afford a bigger place.
As I listened to Lucy, I imagined her with a newborn baby. I saw her sitting in the park with her baby, and then, some years later, walking her child to school. I felt that she was right, she was changed – and that the end of our work had begun.