Sometimes the idea of impossibility surrounds me, blankets me in silence, especially when I have written myself into a corner, into an impossible space. Sometimes it feels impossible to do my son’s story justice, yet equally it is also impossible for me not to try to write it.
The Swiss report had left us with an open finding. A dialogue between me and my husband continues to this day about the nature of our son’s death. My husband is adamant that our son’s death was accidental, and counters the memory of others including myself that are so clouded by his earlier suicide attempts. My son’s crumpled note bears testimony to his own knowledge that his risk-taking was extremely dangerous and liable to be lethal one day.
As evidence, my son’s note and my husband’s account stand before me. It is impossible to talk to my son to check facts. In his lifetime, it was often impossible to get a response from him, to get him to talk to me. Now here I am, dealing with an impossible language of silence, and trying to use it as my data and analysis.
I escape the tight confines of impossibility by remembering Foucault’s saying that in modern psychiatry, there is, now, an absence of a “common language” due to a “broken dialogue” in our talk of mental illness (Foucault, 1988, p. xi). In my
experience, both the psychiatrists and my son in his psychosis seemed to speak an impossible language to me. Their language was spoken to me, at me, not with me, not dialogically.
However, during episodes of psychosis, my son spoke in silence. To that space I now travel, back in time.
In the last year of my son’s life, I lived in silence, in the midst of what I felt was a puzzled incompetence. I was flying blind, after all, but trying to listen, understand. Yet I felt thwarted. What could have broken this silence I learned only recently, from Mary Olson’s paper on the Open Dialogue method. Citing Foucault’s words on a common language in psychiatry, she writes that such a “language” can start from “various chords of resonance: single words, stories, a shared image, a silence, a particular gesture, a situation …” (Foucault, 1988; M. E. Olson, 2015, p. 3).
Chords of resonance.
I realise we were all skilled, in our family, in our own way, at sharing with François in this odd manner. There were chords of resonance between us, not only in the music we shared at that time, echoing through the house – Radiohead. Pearl Jam. Nick Drake. Our chords of resonance echoed in the poolroom, with the loud click of snooker balls. In humour – Bill Hicks. Dr Katz. Spike Milligan.
Living together was not hard. It was not tense, but it was often quiet. Silent. In our family, we had acquired a private pattern of understanding each other, one that was imbued with understatement, irony, humour and a deep respect, but we were not carelessly conversational. To our arsenal of communication strategies we added a pool table in the outside room, to make up for what was lacking in dialogicality. This gave us valuable opportunities for open-ended conversations with François. With everyone working, studying or sleeping at different times it was often only late at night playing pool that we could talk.
Gestures of respectful acknowledgment of each other’s presence were shared among us all as we tried hard to reach out to François.Unknowingly we practised then what Open Dialogue suggests now: “attending to key utterances that visibly
touch the speaker and/or listener and suggest inexpressible or unspeakable dilemmas otherwise embodied in behaviors” (M. E. Olson, 2015, p. 3).
This attending, I believe, was also a kind of tolerance for our son’s dilemmas – not a tolerance of his substance use or behaviours, but of his dilemmas. That kind of tolerance felt very much like holding the thread long enough to endure, so that we could reach him – in order that “the inexpressible [could] be given a voice” (Seikkula & Olson, 2003, p. 410).
Such dialogism, at the heart of the Open Dialogue therapeutic setting, was absent in the kind of silence we were experiencing in so many other ways at that time, but that was a silence that seemed to come at us from the outside.
In a way I am practising a kind of dialogism now, in the absence of my son, as I try to work towards an understanding of him, giving him a voice in his absence, here on these pages.
It is an uncomfortable space to work in, this snowy silence of absence, overshadowed by the spectre of psychosis.
It seems that the idea of the uncomfortable, of being at the uncomfortable edge, is important as it is at that place of discomfort that understandings and solutions to problems are often made. Musicians such as John Cage who work on the margins – and other outliers at the edges of art practice, seem deliberately to seek out the area of the uncomfortable, and there, at the very edge, create their unique art. They are not afraid of the uncomfortable. “To be creative, you have to go to the margins”, states Norwegian psychiatrist Tom Andersen (cited by M. E. Olson, 2015). Working creatively at that uncomfortable edge might equally apply to our research positionings, or to the places we find ourselves in our families.
If we can bear to stay on the uncomfortable edge that is our companioning of those with mental illness, or on the uncomfortable edge in our relationships,