The Metronome Kept Time When I Could Not

The morning everything went soft at the edges

My husband Daniel died on a Tuesday in February, and for a long time afterwards I could not tell you what day of the week it was at all. I am fifty-four. I teach piano, mostly children, a few grown adults who come in the evenings smelling of coffee and apology for not practising. We had been married twenty-nine years. He used to sit in the kitchen while I gave lessons and pretend he was not listening, and when a child finally got a passage right he would knock twice on the wall, softly, so only I would hear it.

The flat is on the third floor of an old building with a stairwell that smells faintly of dust and lemon polish. After the funeral, after the relatives had gone home and the casseroles had been eaten or quietly thrown away, I was left with the quiet. People talk about grief as a weight, and it is, but for me the strangest part was the sound of the place. Or rather the absence of it. No knock on the wall. No kettle going on at odd hours. Just me, and the piano, and a silence so complete it had a kind of ringing to it.

I did not sleep. That was the first thing to go. I would lie in the dark and my heart would do this small frantic thing, like a bird that has flown into a room and cannot find the window. I would get up and stand in the kitchen at three in the morning and not know why I had come in there. Some nights I cried without any warning at all, standing at the sink, and other nights I could not cry even when I wanted to, which was worse.

The children carried me without knowing it

I kept teaching. I do not entirely know how, but I did, and I have since decided it was the children who kept me upright. They did not know Daniel had died, most of them, or if their parents had told them they had the good grace of the young to not mention it. They came on Mondays and Wednesdays and Thursdays with their books and their scuffed shoes and they sat down and played their scales badly and I corrected them and for half an hour at a time I was a piano teacher and not a widow.

There was one little boy, Tomas, seven years old, who was learning a simple arrangement of a folk tune. He played it the same wrong way every week, rushing the third bar, and every week I would set the metronome going and say, listen, let it hold you, and he would sigh the enormous sigh of a small person being asked to be patient. That little brass metronome. It ticked away on top of the piano through all of it, keeping a time that I myself had completely lost. I used to look at it swinging back and forth while Tomas played and think, at least one thing in this room still knows what it is doing.

I did not eat properly. I want to be honest about that because when people tell these stories they tidy them up. I ate toast, standing up, at odd hours. I let the plants on the windowsill go brown. I answered messages from friends with a thumbs up so they would leave me alone, and then felt ashamed, because I did not really want to be left alone, I just did not have the words for what I wanted instead.

The GP, and the thing I did not expect

It was my doctor who first said the word anxiety to me, gently, at an appointment I had made about something else entirely, a pain in my chest that turned out to be nothing physical at all. She was kind about it. She said grief and anxiety often travel together, that the body does not always know the difference between sorrow and fear, that both can set the alarm bell ringing and leave it ringing. She offered me things. Some I tried. Some I could not bring myself to.

A friend of mine, a cellist I had known for years, had gone through her own bad patch after her divorce, and it was she who mentioned that she had seen a neurofeedback therapist during that time and found it steadying. I did not really know what she meant. I pictured something clinical and a little frightening, wires and machines, and I said something noncommittal and changed the subject. But the idea sat with me for weeks, the way ideas do when part of you knows you are going to have to face them eventually.

What finally pushed me was a small thing. I was giving a lesson to one of my adult students, a woman about my age, and halfway through I realised I had been staring at my own hands on the keys and had no idea what we had just played. I had gone somewhere else entirely. She was too polite to say anything but I saw her notice. That evening I sat at the kitchen table and thought, I cannot keep going like this, disappearing in the middle of the one thing that still holds me together.

Sitting in the chair, learning to notice

So I went. I will not pretend it was dramatic, because it was not. It was an ordinary room in an ordinary building, and there was a comfortable chair, and someone explained to me, without any fuss, roughly what we were going to do. They put some small sensors on my scalp, which felt like nothing at all, and I watched a screen, and the whole business was really about learning to notice what my own brain was doing and, very slowly, letting it settle. That was how it was explained to me and that is honestly how it felt.

I was sceptical. I want to say that plainly, because I do not want this to sound like one of those breathless accounts where everything is fixed at once. It was not like that. The first session I sat there half convinced I was wasting my afternoon, thinking about the shopping I still had to do and whether I had left the window open. But there was something about being made to sit still, to attend, to do nothing but be in my own body for a stretch of time, that I had not done in months. I came out oddly tired, the good kind of tired, like after a long walk.

The neurofeedback therapy became a fixed point in my week, and I think at first that was most of what it gave me, the simple fact of somewhere to be on a Thursday afternoon that was about me and not about anyone else. Over the weeks I began to notice small changes, so small I almost distrusted them. I slept through the night once, then twice. The three in the morning bird in my chest came less often. I did not stop grieving Daniel, I want to be clear, I never wanted to stop grieving him, but the panic that had been braided through the grief began, very gradually, to loosen.

The metronome, again

There is a thing I noticed one evening that I keep coming back to. I was teaching Tomas, the rushing-the-third-bar boy, and I set the metronome going as I always did, and this time, instead of watching it swing with that hollow feeling of at least something in here keeps time, I simply listened to it the way you are supposed to. As a support. As a steady thing you can lean your own unsteadiness against until your unsteadiness learns the shape of it. And I thought, without any drama at all, oh. That is what I have been doing on Thursdays.

Later, once I had been going for a while, they set me up to do some of the practice as a bit of neurofeedback at home, which suited me because I am at my most honest in my own flat, in the evenings, with the lamp on. I would sit in Daniel's chair, which I had not been able to sit in for months, and do my twenty minutes, and afterwards I would sometimes play. Not for anyone. Just for the room. Slow things, mostly, pieces I had not touched in years.

I am not going to tell you I am mended, because grief is not a broken thing that gets mended, it is a room you learn to live in. But I water the plants now. I eat sitting down. I text my friends actual sentences. And the other week Tomas got through the whole folk tune without rushing the third bar, holding the time all the way to the end, and I felt Daniel almost knock twice on the wall, and I did not cry, I just smiled, and told the boy he had done beautifully, because he had.