Barack Obama, A Son’s Guilt
How do you live with guilt and grief at the same time? What is it like trying to live with what feels like an inescapable burden that has tethered itself to your soul? How are you supposed to move on, if you see faults in your actions, and know that you can’t bring someone back? Questions familiar to anyone who has lost a loved one. Feeling guilt when processing grief is a common reaction, but it can’t be a solution.
I recently read Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land. It’ll doubtless sell millions, and the political in-crowd will be pouring over his account of his presidency up until 2011 and the killing of Osama bin Laden where the volume, which is the first of two, ends. I thought it was a remarkable book, introspective and revealing. Obama is honest about his record, clear in defence of his actions, open about where he fell short, and he avoids the this-is-my-time-to-tell-the-story tendentiousness that tends to spoil political memoirs. But what stood out to me was how vulnerable Obama seems when he writes about his mother, Ann Dunham. Obama writes movingly about not being there when she died, after she had battled cancer for a number of months. To quote one passage, where Obama talks about scattering her ashes, “I thought about my mother and sister alone in that hospital room, and me not there, so busy with my grand pursuits. I knew I could never get that moment back. On top of my sorrow, I felt a great shame.” These are heartfelt words, written a quarter of a century after the event. Similar reflections surface at other points, and it seems those feelings of guilt still sit with Obama in some form. He also writes poignantly about his efforts to pass healthcare reform, and how his mother’s experiences drove him.
At the time of his mother’s death Obama was a young state legislator in Illinois, on the first of his “grand pursuits”. He had married Michelle a few years earlier and was settled into his Chicago life. Even when she was ill over four thousand miles away in Hawaii, Obama’s mother had encouraged him to throw himself into his political campaigning, something he tells us in the book. But even with these frankly normal realities, it is clear that after so many years, Obama still finds fault in his actions and blames himself for not being there.
Obama was well into his 30s when his mother died. My mother died a bit earlier in my life, when I was 12. Like Obama, my father has never been a fixture in my life. I’m mixed raced as well, so can empathise with the parentless identity journey Obama has been on. I didn’t have the same worries or responsibilities as he did when it happened. But when I think back to my mother, my protector, leaving me that day, the pain was too much to endure. Unjust, too. I didn’t lose my mum; she was taken. The feelings that take hold tend to, to varying degrees, stay with you. Mine was feeling robbed. Obama’s was feeling guilty.
Guilt has an insidious edge to it. It stalks, creeps up, and burrows itself into you, and happily goes to work, feeding those worries and concerns and stopping you from moving forward. Paired up with grief it becomes an almost unbearable strain, and can haunt us for decades, leaving us us forever grappling with the “What if…”, “If only I’d…”, “I should have…” conjectured thoughts. The helplessness makes the situation even harder. We know we can’t bring someone back, so we dig deeper into our own actions before they left us. Time and time again we find ourselves at fault, imagining a different chain of events where we’d behaved differently, where we’d caught the train home that time, or picked up the phone when they called, or put a date in the diary when they asked to see us. We convince ourselves we had control of the bigger picture and could have altered it all.
In October 2019 I lost another close relative, my uncle Liston, who was my mum’s older brother. He was 58 and had suffered with prostate cancer. He also had mental health issues, which made it hard for him to fully engage with medical help. In any family there’s a back story and in mine there is one I probably don’t fully appreciate. My grandparents moved to England from Jamaica in 1961, shortly after Liston was born, leaving him in the care of an aunt until they were settled and able to send for him. That took another 11 years. I’ve heard a few accounts of his life before I knew him, hazily recollected years later by others, whose memories of events have faded and, inevitably, are the subject of several revisions over time, but enough to show there were difficulties. I have my own memories, too, and have occasionally fallen back on them.
In Liston’s final months, before the rapid deterioration took hold, I visited him a couple of times at his place. We always got on and had plenty to talk about. I’m happy I took the time to see him, but as I sit here writing, I still wish I’d learned more from him about his life, who he was, and involved myself more. Instead, I’d wanted to break out of my own difficult circumstances and build a better life for myself, and that became such a dominating focus that I became detached from my roots. On endless nights I’ve not slept, instead occupied by thoughts of doing more when I first heard Liston was unwell, no matter how vague and unspecific ‘doing more’ is. I don’t feel it as intensely today as I did a year ago. I am clear that I have to acknowledge the limits of my actions, and to not feel guilty about not enjoying a stronger bond with someone I looked up to.
Losing a loved one and wondering what might have been is a plainly normal reaction. But feeling guilt, and telling yourself you should have done more, or something different, is a punishing, unliveable burden that nobody, including Barack Obama, should have to live with. Acceptance comes in truly realising there is nothing we could have done. And if we ever did make a mistake, one we never put right, we have to forgive ourselves. Only by understanding and looking forward can we shake those uneasy feelings and live freely, with the happy memories of a loved one always with us.
