by Leigh Sales
All of us will experience grief and suffering. It is part of the human package. I dread the anticipated losses of life – the deaths of my parents, the slow decline of age – but those prospects don’t terrify me as much as something unexpected that turns life upside down instantly. I have spent much of my career trying to avoid direct exposure to those events. My own life in 2014, plus the news stories I anchored afterwards, made me realise that avoidance is pointless. It is trying to hide from life itself.
What prompted me to begin writing this book was the thought of what might happen if I walked towards what I most feared, rather than in the opposite direction. What would I learn if I spent time with people who had lived through some of the things I most worried about happening to me or my family? What could the newest scientific research teach me about the way the human brain comes to terms with such things? The novelist Iris Murdoch once wrote that paying attention is a moral act. To me, paying close attention to these kinds of tragedies felt like staring at the sun. It scared me to do it, yet I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t look away.
I’m sure I’m not the only person to watch something awful on the news and think, That could have been me. But what is the actual chance that you or I could be swept up in a tragic event of the kind that makes headlines and permanently transforms our lives?
One morning while I mull this question, I stop by the Lindt Café in Sydney for a cappuccino. Instead of powder, coarse flakes of Swiss chocolate float on top of the coffee. It’s delicious, and I drink it sitting at a table with my back to enormous windows that front the outdoor plaza of Martin Place. Along another wall are glass cabinets with thousands of brightly wrapped chocolate balls and gift boxes tied with ribbon. Rainbow-hued macarons line up in a display case under the cash register, and the ding of a counter bell punctuates the hiss of the coffee machine every time an order is ready.
The café patrons are as varied as the goodies on sale – young, old, frail, professional, touristy, weather-beaten, solitary, convivial. At one table, a thirtyish businessman methodically polishes his glasses with a handkerchief, an act so old-fashioned in a young person that it both charms and jars.
A few blocks from the colourful Lindt Café is a courtroom whose colours run the full spectrum from light brown to dark brown. On the same morning that I sit sipping my coffee, eighteen people, just as diverse as those sitting around me, are having a very different experience. One by one, they are stepping into the witness box at a coronial inquest. Nearly two years earlier, on a very similar day, they too had been at the Lindt Café; sadly, they experienced one of those days that begin ordinarily enough but don’t end that way. Some of them were staff at the café, others were meeting friends or on a break from work.
These strangers were forever united when a gunman, claiming to have explosives in his backpack, took them hostage. Man Haron Monis had a long history of violence and an affinity with the murderous Islamic State movement. He terrorised the group in the café for sixteen hours, all of it broadcast live on television by cameras trained on the building. During the siege, many of the hostages escaped through various exits, but at 2.14 am, with five hostages still trapped, Monis executed one of them, the café’s manager, Tori Johnson. Hearing the gunshot, police burst through the doors in a hail of bullets and glass. A café patron, Katrina Dawson, was killed. The three remaining hostages survived their injuries, but everyone in the café that day, even the people who escaped early, was left with lasting trauma.
I drink my coffee in the exact place where that all happened and I dwell on it. Why is it that the people I’m with get to enjoy morning tea and then go about their business, but the others did not? A café is so non-threatening and familiar a setting that the Lindt siege caused most Australians to feel rattled and unsafe, even if they were nowhere near the place at the time. This is a common reaction to major disasters, and the more regular the scene of a catastrophe, the more our collective sense of security is undermined. The tragedy feels too close for comfort.
But when we look at the facts, not just our feelings, what are the genuine odds of an awful, random event ensnaring us individually? And are the things we most fear happening to us the things of which we should be most afraid?
In September 2002, Louisa Hope was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As if that wasn’t enough bad news for a lifetime, in December 2014 she was a Lindt Café hostage. The chance of any Australian having the remarkable misfortune to tick both those boxes is one in 1.39 billion.
‘Oh, I’m so glad you worked that out,’ Louisa exclaims as we share a beetroot salad for lunch at my house. ‘I’ve been saying I wish I knew an actuary who could run the stats for me.’
Louisa is a vivacious 54-year-old, a large woman with wavy chestnut hair and a face like a porcelain doll: creamy skin, brown eyes, rosebud lips. She had arrived laden with treats for me – chocolate-coated cherries, loose-leaf tea and a colourful mug – a gesture made sweeter by the fact that she was already being very generous by letting me pry into some of the most difficult moments of her life.
If anybody’s entitled to feel victimised by misfortune, it’s Louisa. Should I be diagnosed with MS, I would think that entitled me to a leave pass from further misfortune for the rest of my life, never mind finding myself part of a terrorist attack. I suspect my fury and indignation, were I in her position, would be boundless. I want Louisa to help me understand how somebody comes to terms with being singled out this way.
Louisa’s MS diagnosis came about thanks to a sore back. She’d had a few falls, putting them down to bad luck and high heels. When she visited a chiropractor for some relief, he urged her to see a neurologist, fearing something more sinister than clumsiness. The specialist sent her for an MRI, and soon after delivered the terrible blow: Louisa’s falls were caused by multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease of the central nervous system that affects the brain and spinal cord.
‘Did you know anything about MS at the time?’ I ask her.
‘No. But when I was a child, there was a lady right next door, a young woman, and she was in a wheelchair. I have the most vivid memories of her life, she was very disabled. She used to send us up the road to buy her cigarettes and then we’d come back and we’d have to light the cigarette for her. It was so exciting, we loved that,’ Louisa recalls. After her own diagnosis, her mother had told her, ‘You know, Noelene had MS.’
Louisa says, ‘I was like, “What?” I remembered she went away and had to be looked after in some special place for people with MS and she died. I was thinking, Wheelchair, right, that’s it, that’s my future.’
Today, fourteen years after her diagnosis, Louisa walks slowly with the aid of a cane. She may maintain her mobility for many years, or things could change suddenly for the worse. MS is an insidious disease because it’s impossible to know how it will proceed in any one case. Sometimes it’s aggressive, but sometimes the decline is very gradual and a sufferer can slide in and out of remission for years.
The same month that Louisa was diagnosed, she was whacked with two other blows: she turned forty and her husband divorced her.
‘You don’t imagine a future that’s full of crap, but there you go!’ she laughs.
‘When this cluster of events happened all at once, did you think, Why me, it’s not fair?’ I ask. ‘How did you process it?’
Louisa thinks for a few moments. ‘It was shocking and life-changing, it really was. It’s like you’re standing on a shore watching the ocean suck the life right out of you. But the truth is, I believe in God, I have a personal faith, and I had to just rely on that. It was like, I have to trust God’s best intention for my life. Otherwise I would have just fallen into a screaming heap.’
When Louisa says this, my heart sinks. I flirted with religion in my late teens and early twenties but ultimately, I just couldn’t buy the dogma. It seemed irrational to me that people who didn’t believe the same things that I did were going to hell. I saw too much hypocrisy in supposed Christ
ians who said one thing and did another. And now I wonder if anyone can really be at ease with having MS and being a victim of a terrorist attack by believing it’s God’s will. I’m very sceptical. It can’t be that simple.
No sooner do I have these thoughts than I’m irritated with myself. Who do I think I am, judging somebody in Louisa’s position? It’s presumptuous. I’m never going to learn anything useful if the first time somebody trusts me enough to let me into their thinking, I immediately close my mind to what they’re offering. I hope my internal reaction hasn’t showed on my face. I really do want to understand how Louisa has dealt with what’s happened in her life, and the only way I can do that is by drilling down into what she believes.
‘But didn’t you think, Why, God, why are you doing this to me?’ I hope I’m not offending her with my blunt questions.
‘No, it never was Why, God? or Why me?’ Louisa says emphatically. ‘I remember once at work, before all this, I was working on reception and someone came in. They had a walking stick. They were much older than they should have been, I could tell that. They felt sorry for themselves, they were very filled with self-pity. You could just feel it. I wondered what had happened to that person that they had reached that stage, and I thought, That will never happen to me. But at the same time, I thought, What makes you imagine that won’t happen to you? Why wouldn’t bad things happen to you? It was like this moment where I thought, Huh, that’s right. So when I was diagnosed with MS, Why me? wasn’t a question.’
‘You already had an understanding that you’re as vulnerable as the next person?’ I ask.
‘I really did,’ she replies.
I am still very sceptical that Louisa’s faith meant she could calmly accept having multiple sclerosis. As we talk, it becomes clear that I’m jumping to false conclusions based on my own dismissive view of religion. Of course Louisa wasn’t calm, especially at the beginning. Her beliefs don’t inoculate her every second of the day from fear and anger.
‘It was scary. It was a dark time, this new reality I had to come to terms with. But the thing was, I really didn’t want to go down some rabbit hole of self-pity and resentment and just general insanity. I wanted to avoid that so much, and so at first, I had this thing where I would only allow myself one hour every day to think about the MS and my divorce and all the other random things you dwell on when your life has just disintegrated. At first, I couldn’t wait for that hour so I could just cry and rage and freak out in the privacy of my own head. But over time, as I prayed and meditated and the days rolled into months, I couldn’t wait for the hour to be over, and then it got shorter and shorter and then I didn’t do it anymore.’
‘What about being alone – were you worried about who would look after you if the MS got bad?’
‘No,’ she says, ‘that was always okay. I knew I’d be looked after. I have great friends and a good church community and my family is loving and caring, they would always be there for me.’
Louisa’s 72-year-old mother, Robin, was with her on the morning of the Lindt siege. They were in the city for an appointment in the same building as the café. The women were running early, so they decided to stop for coffee. As Louisa went to the cash register to pay, she saw that some of the other customers were flustered that the café doors wouldn’t open. The girl behind the counter seemed vague and distracted.
‘I went back and sat down with my mum and I said, “The doors are stuck, I think I’d better go and speak to somebody about this door situation.” I mean, we weren’t in a desperate hurry, we figured it was just some little alarm thing. But then he stood up,’ Louisa says.
It was Man Haron Monis. Louisa had noticed him earlier, when he had been sitting at a table near her and Robin. Now he was towards the front of the café.
‘He stood up and he said, “Okay.” I can’t remember exactly what he said, but he may have said, “I’m taking you hostage.” He had his gun and then he started to say in a very calm and soft voice that he had two bombs in his backpack and there were other bombs around the city. Then he started to direct people. And it’s very real at that point, you know,’ Louisa says.
The hostages were ordered to hold Islamic flags in the window and to ring high-profile media outlets. During the ensuing sixteen hours, Monis swung between acts of benevolence, such as allowing Louisa to take her medicine, and extreme hostility.
‘Once the initial shock settled and the hours passed,’ I say, ‘did you think, Oh God, give me a break, I’ve got MS and now I have to be a hostage in a terrorist situation?’
‘No, actually my thought was: Oh God, give me a break, my mother’s here with me. I’m going to have to look after her. Not that I have any problems looking after her,’ Louisa adds, ‘but I just knew how hard it was going to be. It didn’t take too long to work out that he [Monis] was that classic dude, the one that bashes his wife and then says, “I love you,” at the same time. He needed the women to be submissive. Robin was quite back-chatty and that was quite distressing.’
The mood among the hostages, perhaps surprisingly, mostly remained very calm for the duration of the siege. Nobody wanted to do anything to upset Monis or make things worse. That’s not to say the situation wasn’t utterly terrifying. In the early hours of the morning, a group of hostages escaped. Louisa was not far from the door herself, and for a split second thought she could make it out too. With difficulty, she started walking towards the exit, but then she thought of her mother and stopped. Louisa knew she couldn’t live with herself if she left Robin behind. As she stopped walking, she expected Monis to shoot her in the back and so she crumpled to the floor, face down, believing her death was imminent.
‘My mind is saying, Okay, look at this situation – oh no, you’re not getting out of this one. For me, I always understood intellectually that we have a spirit and we have a mind and we have emotions. But in the siege, I understood this for the first time within myself, in my gut. There was this voice telling me not to be afraid. There’s no fear, it’s peace, absolute peace,’ she says. ‘There was a battle within my mind, yes – I would have liked to not get killed by this mongrel. But emotionally, I’ve gone through the battle of surrendering to my spirit’ – Louisa means because of her religious belief and adapting to MS – ‘and yes, I’m okay that I die. If that’s the way it’s got to be, that’s it.’
The next thing, Monis was dragging her to her feet. She will never know why he chose to let her live. Not long after, he executed Tori Johnson, triggering the police bombardment. When the police burst in, Monis had positioned Louisa and Robin on either side of him, perhaps intending them to be shields. With deafening gunfire exploding around her, Louisa fell down again, certain for the second time that she was about to die.
‘They’re coming in the door. Me, Man Monis, [there’s] like a foot between us. When you’re in there, the bullets . . . it’s all going insane. Monis is dead. Katrina is dead. How am I not dead? That’s a serious question,’ Louisa says.
‘Because of your faith, do you believe there’s a reason for that? Do you believe that God chose to let you live?’
‘I don’t have that sense. There is an absolute ratbag delusion of “God chose me” and there’s a dangerous element to the concept that “I’m special to God”. So many people have said to me, “You were saved for a reason,” and all that kind of stuff. Maybe.’ Louisa sounds as if this might be something she’s still puzzling through herself.
During the gunfight that ended the siege, Louisa was pelted by shrapnel, including a particularly nasty piece that embedded in her left foot. An ambulance rushed her to hospital, where she endured three operations during a three-month stay. After we finish our lunch, Louisa removes her sandal and pulls down a pressure bandage, showing me a giant, scarred hole, basically covering the entire arch of her foot.
‘This foot is what they call the MS drop foot,’ she tells me. ‘This was my dodgy foot anyway. How fortunate am I that if I was going to get an injury, it’s in my dodgy foot?’
‘This was just from shrapnel?’ I’m shocked at the size of the scar.
‘Just from shrapnel. I got shrapnel in my body too. I’ve got two scars, one that looks like it was done by French nuns and one that looks like it was done by German butchers. One of the pieces of shrapnel, they couldn’t get it out. The doctor came around and she was like, “I’m so sorry,” and she was so intensely conveying her disappointment that I just randomly said to her, “Oh doc, what a shame you couldn’t have done a bit of lipo[suction] while you were down there!” And she chastised me and said, “Louisa, your fat saved your life.” I think sometimes, things that you think you don’t like about yourself or someone else, you don’t know how this sets you up for future salvation in some way. You know, the MS in itself, having MS and all the physical trauma involved in that, prepared me for the three months in hospital. I knew how to sit and get better and wait for things to fix and not go crazy.’
‘Do you ever wish God could give you just a bit less of the . . .’ I pause, because the word I’m thinking of is ‘suffering’. Although it’s obvious Louisa has suffered enormously, I feel awkward about saying that out loud to her.
Louisa doesn’t share my discomfort at confronting this question head-on.
‘Yeah, I’m often like, God, could I just learn the lesson quickly? But when the random bad stuff happens, it’s like, Okay, what’s the lesson? What good am I going to be able to suck out of this that’s going to grow me?’
Louisa’s positive attitude, born of her conviction that God has a plan for her, is admirable but I still have a hard time thinking the way she does.