The elephant goes where it wants

Ciara Lawn

“I think that in the heart of the book is a kind of a story of grief, a story of letting mammy go. And I think that I hadn’t done that,” explains Cavan writer Michael Harding of his new memoir, Hanging with the Elephants.
Last year Staring At Lakes became a best seller and just a year later Michael’s returned to this most personal of forms which he regards as an extension of his weekly column in The Irish Times, and “really like novels except that they’re the truth”.
When his wife departed, and left him alone he remonstrated with the death of his mother. Why had this come to mind, and subsequently became the truth behind this latest book?
“Once you’re left alone, what comes into your mind is not necessarily what you want to come into your mind. What comes into your mind is what’s really being suppressed and what you’re trying to ignore. And that’s where the whole idea of the elephant comes in, as the mind is a very uncontrollable animal. It goes where it wants.
“And the first thing that came into my mind was that single image of the fact that when she was dying I didn’t really hold her and I thought, God, maybe I didn’t do enough there. And that led to looking back on her life and feeling how little I had done, maybe in her old age, and how I had missed seeing the beautiful woman, the young woman, the woman who had adored her husband and loved her children and danced in the golf club.
“And I suppose in that way the whole book, the whole story probably becomes, like it’s my story but it’s your story and other people’s story as well.”
The death of a loved one is something that everyone will endure at some point and in Hanging with the Elephants, Harding confronts that grief, allowing himself to experience it and embrace it. He said that this “ordinary human feeling” of grief “became its own meditation”.
“That’s the irony, even though that’s not where I wanted to go in my contemplation, that was the best place to go, because by thinking of one person’s life and how we can be enthusiastic and in love and full of joy when we’re young, the reality is we do start to walk slower, have hip problems and prostate problems and this is the nature of life. It passes, it changes, you get old, you get grey and you die and so it did accidentally become, not just a grief for the mother, but a kind of meditation on death and I think that’s why people who do grieve are doing something deeply healthy.”

Waken up
The solitary six weeks charted in his memoir have, for Harding, a message within them. It was the departure of his wife that triggered thoughts of his mother, and after coming to terms with his grief, he had a renewed appreciation for his wife upon her return.
“What you waken up to at the end of it is like, and this is just the story of the book, I’m glad to see her coming home. You get excited and that is the truth about everybody as well, couples who live for a long time together they need a break, and they go away for a night, a weekend, two weeks three weeks on their own doing something else. One of the great things about having a break is that you really realise the value of the company, the value of the other person.”
Early in the memoir, Harding is told by his psychiatrist that he needs to find some meaning in his life. Much of the narrative focuses on the life of Harding’s mother through both his recollections of her and the memories sparked from items he finds in her house after her death - diaries, photographs and keepsakes. Did Harding’s reflection on the life and death of his mother over the course of his spell of solitude helped him discover the meaning in his own life?
“I found comedy instead of meaning. I think my conclusion is the attempt to find meaning doesn’t work. It’ll make you unhappy. Whereas if you just let go of that struggle, you might find out that you were happy anyway.
“There’s a lot of Buddhist fellas say that point, like Thích Nhat Hanh. They say that you’re actually happy already and so the attempt to get happiness or get meaning is really the thing you have to give up. People are in a job because they think - well that’ll make me happy, or give me meaning in life, or they want to live in a certain place or whatever. And in actual fact it’s giving up all those struggles and just being present or where you are, you realise - I’m happy anyway.”
Harding personifies the threat of depression as a Dracula figure ‘still lurking somewhere at the end of the garden’. And though Dracula continues to lurk in the depths of his psyche throughout the memoir, constantly threatening to descend upon him again, Harding often writes humorously, allowing the reader comic relief from the book’s heavier themes.
In fact, the humour Harding employs is an important factor in understanding depression and dispelling many of the myths and stigmas surrounding an illness often misunderstood by those fortunate enough to have escaped its fangs. He shows that having depression is not continuously being in the doldrums:
“I think in fact all comedy is underwritten by depression, if you think of all the comedians, there isn’t a comedian that ever lived, I’d say, who hasn’t suffered from depression. And they’ll all say that...
“Samuel Beckett, the great writer, once said that ‘there’s nothing as funny as complete misery’ and it’s that sense that sometimes comedy is actually the release of depression.

Absurdly comic
“Even when you’re an ordinary person that’s feeling pretty down and bleak, if you can find how utterly absurdly comic your situation is, it really is the key to releasing the depression. Depression to a great extent is a sense of self-clinging. It’s a sense of overemphasising the ‘I’, the ‘ego’. If you think about your ego too much, you think about your absolute self, your isolated, absolute self in the universe it’s a very depressing thought. So nearly the only way out of it is to stop thinking about yourself. And look at the comedy of that.”
Does Harding feel he has a better understanding of death as a result of coming to terms with his grief?
“No, I definitely don’t have a better understanding of death, and I’m not less afraid of it, except maybe in the tiniest way, I don’t think you come to some sort of ease about all this human experience. You don’t come to some moment of enlightenment or, ‘I now understand everything about death’. The more you look into the hole, the more mysterious the hole is. The more you contemplate the grave or contemplate the existential nature of being human, the more frightening it is.”
He concludes that the best path to contentedness and inner peace is through accepting the now.
“When you’re struggling to try and get the answers, you’re on the wrong road. When you actually say; ‘well, there is no answer to this. There is no answer to the great mystery of human existence and death’ …when you let go of everything and just sit where you are and stop the struggle, then you stop being afraid because you realise it’s natural; we all grow like the trees grow old and everything in the universe changes and grows old so there’s nothing unnatural happening to you.
“You’re living a very natural life and if you just sit and – I don’t mean do nothing – but I mean, psychologically do nothing. Don’t live with a clenched fist, live with an open hand. Sit by the fire and doze. And don’t give yourself a hard time because you fell asleep. Open your eyes and say ‘I was dozing’.
“It’s about the best thing you could do in life.”