“The sister of your father or mother; the wife of your uncle.”

After 92 years and some months, it took only one Saturday to do her in.

Oh, you could say it was lifestyle choices along the way. Alcohol here, butter there, the wrong generation to drink water or take exercise. But 92 years is no small thing. She seemed of indomitable spirit. We fell into believing she would always be there.

You could also say Saturday’s entire chunk of 24 hours were not needed.

So she got up, we all got up at different times and places, on Saturday morning. Had breakfast and a cuppa or two of choice, and maybe a shower. Perhaps sighed a little about the lock-down, missed the taken for granted weekend opportunities for brunches, shopping, a hair style or a movie. What to do, what to do?

What my auntie did was have a heart attack. A very big one.

We stayed with her and our uncle more often than you might expect when we were small children. Our mother had TB and was in a sanatorium for nine months, our father worked, so people -mostly family, on both sides – took care of us. This aunt and uncle didn’t have children of their own yet. Sometimes the boy they fostered would be there, the aunt’s mother and the family’s dog always were.

It was the first dog I had much to do with and its exuberance frightened me at first. I remember running along the hallway and into a front room. I remember leaping onto the back of a couch, and the dog trying, repeatedly, to reach me. I didn’t understand it was being playful. I just felt the length of time before somebody came to find me. I felt such fear.

One late afternoon at their place, plans were made for visiting some friends. We were dressed in pajamas, dressing gowns & slippers when we got into the back seat of the car. It might be a late night, we were told.

After a while we found ourselves in a queue of cars, moving slowly along.  From the front seat our auntie and uncle began talking quite loudly, about this queue. We were going the wrong way! We couldn’t get out! We were stuck!

Oh well, they agreed, we’d have to stay here and go wherever the other cars were going.

What?

The other cars were going to the drive in movie! So that’s where we’d go too. We were so little, and hailed from a car less household. Perhaps we knew of such places, but we would never imagined ourselves at one. I’m pretty sure we’d never been to a cinema at that stage of our lives. Our parents weren’t much for taking us out in the nighttime really. Anyway, at home, we had a baby sister.

So there we were, allowed out at night, in our bedtime gear. Our auntie and uncle took us out of the car to the toilets, to the fast food shop even though we had food packed from home in the car. I’m not sure of this, but my memory lets there be a playground, too, and there were other children flapping about in their slippers.

I have trouble remembering the film itself, projected onto that huge screen, the sound coming to us from a speaker hooked onto the car window which gave our uncle some aggravation before it was to everyone’s satisfaction. A girl, a horse race against the odds. Was it National Velvet, or something from Disney? At the time, it was simply fabulous and to be relived and re-enacted for many a day.

I heard she died three times on that Saturday, before she allowed herself to be taken. She raged, raged, against the dying of the light. And then she went gently*.

She was unconscious. She was tested for COVID19. She was put on life support. She was sure to have quite major brain damage. Incredibly, the unthinkable came into our lives.

It was only a matter of time.

The day dragged through the afternoon hours. The phone ran hot. We were shocked, we were stunned, we were remembering.

And as I put one foot in front of the other during that time I thought of all the goodness in this one particular woman. The times she helped our family and her friends, when she would just be there when someone was needed, bringing food, washing dishes, minding children, dispensing hospitality, sharing laughter, mopping tears, making room, organising treats. It will take me a long time to stop myself from phoning her, just for a catch up. A goss.

I think my first memories of her date back to the era of the drive in visit. Our first time ever & it was magic, just magic.

I was an adult before I realised they’d taken us there on purpose.

*Borrowed from Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night, 1937.

Don’t come any closer.

Yesterday, when we were not long into our walk, I put my hand into my pocket and the phone wasn’t there. I tried the other pocket – the wrong pocket for it – and there was no phone there, either.

I walked back to the car, head down, scanning the ground. The dog, perhaps bewildered, got tangled in his lead. I knew I’d looked at the phone when we’d gotten out of the car. I always do. It’s the any-messages-what’s-the-time-turn-the volume-down look. When we reached the car I looked around it and in it and under it. Nothing.

I locked the dog in the car and tried to squash my panic down. I tried very hard even when I heard myself whimpering. Come on! I urged myself. It’s only a phone! It must be here somewhere!

Win-win.

There was a woman a little way away from me in the centre of a swirl of dogs. I called out to her that I’d lost my phone, as if responding to a question she’s asked. She called back that she’d ring the number for me, an offer I gratefully accepted because I’d forgotten I’d turned it down.

“What’s your number?” she shouted and I moved one step towards her, still a distance away but hoping not to give my number to all and sundry. “STOP!” It was quite a yell now. “Don’t come any closer!”

For just one tiny moment I wanted to laugh, it sounded so much like a movie scene. The sentence from a cowboy, the police, a villain, when the gun is produced.

The moment passed and I was left feeling humiliated, as if I was either ignorant of,  or beastly careless about, my social distancing obligations. I didn’t know how to regain myself in her company. It didn’t help that she rang my number three times while I ran around like a demented blow fly before I remembered I’d muted the phone.

I saw it when I rushed to look under some trees. Flat on the ground, unscathed. Almost at the spot where I’d realised it was missing. I called out and thanked the woman too many times. She had her back to me now, and seemed to be fussing with the dogs.

I didn’t mention how I knew about the distances; how vigilant I am, how many times a day I wash or sanitize my hands; how walking my dog is the only time I leave the house these days.

I thought about the encounter as we exercised, my dog and I. Such a kind, helpful woman, but, like most of us, on guard and so afraid. An unseen virus, unwittingly transmitted by humans. You can’t even trust yourself.

And I wondered if it would come back, afterwards?

The trust, I mean.

 

 

 

 

Try to remember.

We are 6 years old, in our second year of school. Maybe I’ve turned 7. Our class teacher, a nun, is talking to us about the communists coming. They will come down from Queensland, hordes of them, and, as we already know, they hate Catholics. And we must not fail when they ask us if we believe in God.

“Don’t be surprised,” Sister tells us, “if when you get home from school one day you’ll find your mother dead on the kitchen floor and your baby dead in its cot!”

My very best friend and next door neighbour, Anne, and I walk to and from school together. We always dawdle, swinging on the bars on one corner, trying to jump the gate gap in the low brick fence of the next. We collect leaves or stones or seeds, we tease the barking dog at one house and annoy the cat at another.

This day, after we hear about the communists, we don’t muck around as we walk home. We talk a little about the situation, which seems to have got much worse since we were instructed to practise declaring our love for God while these wicked communists torture and probably kill us. Anne and I sometimes sit on the blue stone gutter and scratch at our arms with stones, aiming but never quite managing to draw blood, chanting our belief in God. We want to be ready.

We get to our corner in record time. As we round it, we begin to run. We don’t speak, but I know we’re afraid of what we’ll find at home. We slow for a moment because we can see her front yard. The tap is on full bore. Again, we don’t talk. We know this means the communists have been, maybe still are, here.

We gallop.

My heart is banging when I’m up the back steps and opening the door.
And there’s my mum, at the kitchen bench, probably getting tea organised. She looks up, smiles and says, “Goodness! You’re home early.”

It is a scenario I always remember. Not what happened before, or after, or between. Just the nun addressing us and the walk home and my arrival at my back door. It always shocks me when it comes to mind. Suffer the little children.

Fast forward all the years. At the wake following my sister’s funeral, when I’d rather be anywhere else in the wide world, I find myself talking with Anne after many years. I introduce her to another friend, who’s heard The Story and makes the connection. Anne looks bewildered, an awkward smile slow upon her face. She doesn’t remember this.

I am deeply grieving my sister’s death, but I find a space in me to feel shock. How could she not remember? This is a pivotal story from my life, my education, Catholicism, the nuns. I share this memory with her. I’ve taken the liberty of imagining we’re thinking alike, both on the day and afterwards.

Some time later I fact check my own story and it passes the test. I cannot let it go, but I am cautious now when I prod and poke it.

Memory is such a complicated business.

The other day I was in the back yard with my daughter and my grandson. He was in excellent spirits, especially pleased we were there together. His Mum had gathered some of his things to make him his very own obstacle race and he was running about in excitement. The sun was shining. It was that time of afternoon for mellow autumn light. Almost hazy. I felt the melancholy upon me and I thought that this moment was a memory, that after this time had passed we would remember it as a good day. Someone could say, “Remember that day in the lock down when we made the obstacle course outside, it was a beautiful day ..”

But maybe my grandson was too little to hold the moment. Maybe his Mummy was too busy.

Could I be trusted to keep it safely? Would I be here to tell it?

Wave.

Well. That certainly escalated quickly, as they say.

Whether or not you can absorb it into your reality, there’s a virus out there, self- multiplying. Positively raging. From the time I last posted, just a few weeks ago, until right now, life has been upended, shaken, and flung backwards in a different, often unrecognizable shape.The virus is coming! is here! no, there! watch out!

Across the world people are locked in, hiding out, masked up, keeping their distance, washing their hands, washing their groceries, disinfecting their steering wheels, cancelling their parties, home-schooling their children, sanitizing their hands, cancelling appointments, making bread.

I’m aware now that COVID-19 is being talked of as a wave. That the diagnosed number of cases are nothing compared to what the wave will bring, that it will be tidal in its proportions. That we need to be afraid.

I’m afraid. Not all my waking hours, because there’s different things to feel. Disbelief, for one, I still can’t come to grips with the notion that the government is telling us we must stay home and that there are a growing list of things we can no longer do, even if once upon a time we took them for granted. It is real life but it is unreal. Surreal.

Every day I walk with my dog. We take a frisbee sometimes now, for his added enjoyment. I’m allowed to exercise my dog. I’m allowed to exercise myself, too. It also becomes of vital importance to get out of the house for a part of the day.. We drive to the river and and find different starting points, different tracks. We walk around sporting ovals and under huge old trees. Across green green grass and through puddles. Always mindful of keeping a goodly distance from anyone else we come across exercising too.

There are views, there are skies, there are moments of beauty, of permanence, of wow! Maybe I notice them more. It makes it a ridiculous notion that you are now not allowed to leave your home unless for what the government designates an essential service; that you cannot meet with friends, visit, see a movie, get your hair done, go to the library or sit in a cafe.

Some people live lives where these things are never possible.

So we watch, we wait, we wonder.  Most of us obey the rules, hopefully slowing the virus down and saving lives. I wonder if other people feel the fear and terror sometimes, if they find themselves at an edge, touching the possible losses but wanting to cloak and protect the loved ones until it passes.

Because they say there’s a wave coming. And we need to stay on dry land.

Who’s the bogeyman?

I just got flung, or flung myself, out of Twitter.

Accidentally, of course.

I was trying to access it from my laptop, something I so rarely do I had to fill out my login details first. I’d forgotten them, and instead of simply using my phone app., which automatically keeps me logged in, something possessed me to forget that too.

So Twitter jumped into action to show me its might. Was I me, or was I someone else? If I was me I could relax and wait it out, but if I was someone else, something else would happen to apprehend a scoundrel.

It got sorted. I wrote down another username and password.

But in those brief moments of uncertainty, I wondered if it wasn’t for the best, if it wasn’t an omen to stop scrolling my phone screen reading tweets and feeling submerged in the worst of life. News and comment and opinion from a world gone very wrong, a world that’s just not doing joy and light anymore.

What I was looking for on laptop Twitter was a link to an essay I’d read that threw up all sorts of practical and moral issues about Coronavirus. What to do, what to do, while it was rampaging and the hospitals were filling up and staff and facilities were being stretched beyond capacity and there were all the other patients, with all their other needs and illnesses, to accommodate? There were a lot of what-ifs, a lot of worst-case scenarios, a lot of thought and decision making called for.

It was a harrowing read, sometimes terrifying. I won’t link it, but you can imagine it if you want more gloom in your life right now. Or you can just check in with your Social Media accounts, read a newspaper, watch some news.

A woman behind me in the supermarket queue yesterday was holding forth about this very same issue to the hapless staff member on the scanner,

“I blame the media for this,” she informed us all. “They have no business causing all this fear and trouble.”

I’m still wondering if, in her search for a bogeyman, she’s pointing her finger in the right direction. Or not. Because, who’s the bogeyman?

I’m still wondering if, when my brain space starts clearing, I’ll have time to think about it.

I’m still hoping, a year or so down the track, with all the gifts that hindsight brings, we’ll all be so much the wiser.

For next time.

“I don’t envy Adrian his death, but I envy him the clarity of his life.”*

I joined a book group some time ago now, when I was putting myself back together again at the house near the beach.

It was no mean feat. The first few times I went, I chanted a mantra on the way there. I was basically encouraging, or perhaps more entreating, myself. Do not blab, do not blab, do not blab. I was in the habit, you see. We’re going great guns now. I’ve ticked the box for meeting new people, and the one for reading books I would normally not even come across. Reading, and discussing. Not too much blabbing on my part either, I add hopefully.

I’m lucky. I enjoy my time with the other women.

So this month the book is Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. It’s a slim but weighty work of fiction. For what it is worth it won the Man Booker Prize in 2011.

I’ve been reading it with mixed reactions. Partly because some of that reading happens at bedtime and I’m tired and a bit crabby as well and can find myself thinking the conversations are a bit precious for boys that age, or that it’s a bit self-indulgent, or that the tangents employed confuse me and unnecessarily hold the narrative up.

Could be me, could be the story.

Because on the other hand, I’m loving it. An older man reflecting on a period of time, a story, from the long ago in his life, which has him then looking at a much larger slab of his years. And then facing what became of him and exploring his belief that it is too late now for change,

It’s a book about memory: how we remember, what we remember, why we remember. How we interpret the memories and how and why we forget.

That’s why I love it the most.

Memory fascinates me. It is so tricky really. So much can be based on it but we don’t always get it right or straight or true. We would swear by some memories and yet, and yet, factually they don’t stack up. And the things we forget!! How can someone else hold a vivid memory of which you are a part and you can’t, with all the effort you are capable of, recall a second of it.

Were you there if you can’t remember?

The book is worth reading. I probably haven’t given it the words or the space it deserves. But I will give you this quote to ponder. Julian Barnes does say it better than I ever could.

“When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later ….. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories, Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. ….”

 

*Title & quote, Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending, 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Woof woof.

So.

Maybe I’ll just write about the living of a life past retirement age. No great advice, no great wisdom, no great insights, no great answers. Just gentle tales, a beach at low-tide with such small waves lapping onto the sand. Some people are mesmerized, some people stop for a look,  some people walk through without looking down, eyes focused somewhere else altogether, far ahead.

Thoughts of the beach come easily to me. I am not long passed living near some beaches, beautiful spaces. We were spoiled for choice, my dog and I, with the daily decision of where we would walk. Eventually a favourite emerged. The only drawback was the short drive to get there. Not because of the drive itself, but because my dog, after an hour or so of running on sand and leaping into the water after the Frisbee and climbing over rocks and playing with other dogs met always got back into the car and made more mess. I could never manage a clean re-entry for him into the space, where he shook off sea water and sand and dismantled the coverings all the way home.

What a great opportunity now to segue into a story of dogs and aging owners older than me. Diana Athill, who I mentioned last post, opens her memoir Somewhere Towards the End with a sad story about her loss of the dream of owning a pug dog. She had always wanted one but “…now I can’t have one, because buying a puppy when you are too old to take it for walks is unfair.” She knows there are dog-walkers  to be hired at a price, but writes, “the best part of owning a dog is walking with it, enjoying its delight when it detects the signs that a walk is imminent, and its glee when its lead is unsnapped and it can bound off over the grass, casting cheerful looks back at you from time to time to make sure that you are still in touch….”

When I was some 30 years younger than Diana Athill was when she wrote this, I rescued a pup that became my dog of today. He has been – directly or indirectly – responsible for my breaking my ankle in three places, dislocating my shoulder where then a bone slipped that required surgery to correct, and a lump following a fall that briefly suggested a cancer. And I have been – directly or indirectly – responsible for him needing surgery after swallowing a grass seed and, prior to the Frisbee era, because a stick pierced the back of his throat. (The photo precedes that incident, and harks back to a time of gay abandon.) Also, of course, there was the new puppy that gets underfoot all day long and is up and at ’em at all hours of the night.

A man once, uninvited, wrote out pages of foolscap for me on dog training for another dog which lived with me. His marriage had come adrift and he told me that his wife had said she thought he would leave the country and return “home” as a consequence. He was incensed. “Look,” he raged, “I’d just got my pup, and everyone knows you must commit to a dog for 15 years!”

A sobering thought as you age. But life without a dog is fairly sobering too.

 

So here we are then.

It’s like breaking a record really. A how many years can you go between blog posts sort of record.

I might have started a new blog of course, now that I feel ready to hit the keyboard again. I thought about it. But then, trying to find my own blog with a search engine, I realised (finally, finally,) how appalling a title I’d given it way back then.  Although this blog was quite separate from what I discovered the mainstream use of the r word to be, we were both sullied by comparison.

The endgame I considered came to back to me from a book title. I hunted for it via the late Diana Athill’s work before I remembered it was the late May Sarton I needed. I had long ago read these women’s words about the latter years of their lives. I don’t suppose to plunk myself beside their ages, their beautiful words or their respective bodies of work. I just like the notion of exploring the lives of elders among us.

I wonder, what’s the plan – if any – when you pass by the age you’re expected to work for a living, raise a family, study medicine, invent a machine, open a childcare centre. You can theoretically do anything of course. But what?

My days go past, one foot in front of the other, doing this and doing that.

In my working life,I once had a boss who regularly cried out, “But what does it all mean, I hear you ask!”

I wasn’t then. But I am now.

That time I almost didn’t cry.

The room was still and quiet. My sister was dozing again, or maybe just closing her eyes against me so she could think. I felt the tears spill out and their tracks down my cheeks. I felt them drop silently off my face and wet my neck. I turned my head towards the window and the view which was no longer spectacular.

I hadn’t cried.

I hadn’t cried when I’d arrived and seen my sister, gaunt and stretched, three days out from yet another major surgery.

I hadn’t cried at her voice, weak and soft, as she told me the latest health news and then said let’s not talk about it anymore now.

I hadn’t cried when the oncologist came to see her. I didn’t know how rarely he visited these days, that now other specialists and surgeons trekked to her bedside and inside her body. I didn’t feel the alarm that she must have felt. We were introduced, I stepped out of the room.

I hadn’t cried while I waited outside.

I hadn’t cried when the oncologist came out the door and instead of leaving, asked me into the room.

I hadn’t cried when he suggested I sit in that nice comfy chair there, although a bolt of terror ripped through me as I did what I was told.

I hadn’t cried as he told me what he had just told my sister, that the cancer was back, that it was everywhere, that there was nothing they could do, that she only had few weeks left. I felt the blows as if I were laying on the ground in some television show and my head was being kicked again and again and again.

I hadn’t cried when my sister said no, she didn’t want me to hold her hand and the oncologist said to her ahh, you’re the tough one, she’s the softie, before he left us.

I hadn’t cried as I sat there listening to my sister’s first thoughts, random thoughts, questions, as she lay there trying to absorb the news. Dozing, waking, talking. Her telling me she would wait for her husband to come after work as usual and not ring him. Me saying I was staying, I wouldn’t leave her.

I hadn’t cried when I stepped outside while nurses did the wound dressings and began inexplicably to photograph the view from a small waiting area. I hadn’t cried when a woman came up to me and offered to take a photo for me so I could be in it.

I hadn’t cried when the nurses said they were so sorry to my sister and later, in the hallway, to me, offering hugs. When they asked me if there was anything I needed and I asked for a cup of tea.

I hadn’t cried when my sister woke, pointed a finger at me and said, don’t you dare put my birth date in the death notice.

I hadn’t cried when the questions began to crash around in my brain. What does a few weeks even mean? Why had they kept saying the cancer was gone and now it was suddenly everywhere? Where was everywhere anyway? How could this be happening to us, to my beautiful baby sister?

I hadn’t cried when I thought of her family, each of them going about their day unaware of the tsunami that was heading towards them. My brother-in-law, my niece, my nephew. At work, at school, doing normal for the last time. I had almost forgotten to breathe, but I hadn’t cried.

But now, tears were falling. Streaming, soaking.

I heard a noise behind me and when I turned and looked, my sister was pushing a box of tissues towards me.

 

Have you been waiting long?

You look away and it’s just for a minute, really that’s what it seems like, and then you look back again. And when you look back again, for no other reason than the idlest of curiosity, you see it’s been so much longer a time.

There’s an embarrassingly wide, almost enormous, gap between the last time I wrote a blog and this time when I’m trying to write one. So long a time has elapsed that the composition page has been substantially revamped. I notice that, even though I can’t quite remember what it used be like back in the day when it was a familiar place to visit.

I’ll worry about finding the spell-check later.

Things have been happening, life hasn’t stopped whizzing and churning and leaping and heaving around.

There’s been Mondays and Christmases and birthdays and mornings after death and rain and supermarkets and good books gone unread and good and bad coffee drunk  and sledgehammer shocks out of the blue. The bathroom tap dripped, a tree died, long journeys were undertaken because people moved, babies were born, laughter was heard, the dog got bathed, there was nothing to watch on television.

The usual things, right?

But I haven’t been writing about them here. I write sentences, sometimes, in my head,  quite by accident. Sometimes I’m impressed, but I don’t take them out and write them down. I don’t come briskly to this keyboard and tap them in.

I have been still, mostly. Standing still, sitting still, laying still. There hasn’t been a lot of waving going on.

Maybe that’s a subject to write about one day. But right now, this getting back on the saddle is enough of a thing.

At least I’ve learned something for my efforts. The spell-checking red line pops up as soon as you make your mistake, not when you invite it to or when you’re at the finish line.

What a useful life tool.