The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  *

  For fourteen years, Mum has been slowly fading away. Now, it ’s apparent that her life is coming to an end. I fly from Melbourne for a weekend with her in Canberra. Irene meets me at the airport and takes me to the nursing home where Mum has been for the past three weeks as her health has deteriorated. Irene tells us that she’ll be back in the evening, and I take my place at Mum’s bedside.

  During these past weeks, Irene and Phil have been constantly by Mum’s side, but Phil’s away from Canberra this weekend. He made her laugh, and I always thought he was her favourite. Even after she didn’t remember him, her face would light up when he visited, as if she knew that, whoever he was, he was someone she loved.

  I spend the day with Mum, holding her hand and stroking her forehead. We sink into deep silences marked only by the sound of her breathing. At these times, as she fights for each breath, her stoic spirit fills the room. There’s no doubt that she’s engaged in a huge struggle, one harsh breath at a time. A nurse comes in and gives her morphine, then hands me a sheet of paper that lists the signs of impending death. I read it and put it to the side. I don’t have any sense that Mum is going to die today.

  I tell her stories of whatever comes to mind – her life, my life, our family – letting the narrative flow along its own course. Whenever something I say catches her attention, she looks at me and I’m held there, suspended in the open space of her gaze. I feel then as if we’re floating together in the room, adrift, light as air. In between times, when my words fail and there’s only the exertion of each rasping breath, I moisten her mouth with a small wet sponge and stroke her cool forehead.

  As the day progresses, her skin takes on a bluish tinge, and she drifts in and out of awareness. I think of a brief exchange we had a couple of months before in a rare, lucid moment. ‘Am I dying?’ she asked, looking up at me from her chair as I bent down to take her plate. I could see, from her eyes, that there could be no evasion.

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Is there any way to reverse the process?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid there isn’t. But you won’t be on your own. Irene’s here – we’re all here with you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, patting my hand.

  In the evening, Irene and Annie arrive, and we gather around her. She seems to know that her three daughters are all here. On hearing of Mum’s failing health, Annie immediately flew from East Timor to spend time with her. And Irene is standing by her, as she has for the past twelve years.

  The night wears on, and Mum’s struggle for each breath becomes more intense, a profound and stubborn fight for air. Then suddenly it changes, becomes lighter, a kind of wheezing. I realise she’s dying. We hold her hands, smooth her forehead, talk to her softly. It’s 11.15pm, and I tell her that it’s nearly April Fools’ Day, her wedding anniversary.

  She looks at me with eyes that seem to be opening into the light, not closing off from it. An expanding, deepening consciousness. As if something vast is enfolding her. A full and pure emptiness. Then she breathes out and closes her eyes, and she doesn’t breathe again. In that moment, a blade slices through my heart so smoothly, it feels like love.

  *

  While I’ve been writing this book, I’ve discovered that time is deep as well as long. I’ve read through my old notebooks and letters, relived experiences of love and madness, and danced again to the music I loved when I was young. I’ve also retraced my steps, returning to places that were important during the times I shared with Julianne and Michael.

  I’ve walked the route that I used to take to Julianne’s house, finding my way after all these years without having to think about it. I’ve also walked around the ANU campus, along the paths between the white poplars to Garran Hall where Julianne and I spent so much time in 1968. The trees are taller, the canopies thicker, there are new buildings among the older ones, but our younger selves still exist there somehow and have left an imprint, however subtle.

  The places I associate with Michael haven’t fared so well. Most of them have been destroyed or renovated beyond recognition. M Ward no longer exists. What had been the Canberra Hospital was demolished on 13 July 1997, in a staged event that was watched by over a hundred thousand people. One of these spectators, a twelve-year-old girl called Katie Bender, was killed when a fragment of the imploding building pierced her where she stood. A place that bore the histories of three or four generations of Canberra’s population met its end in a tragic spectacle.

  The National Museum of Australia now occupies the site on the peninsula where the hospital once sprawled. The area of lakeshore where Michael and I discovered the green bell was unrecognisable when I visited it in January 2010: the land surrounding the museum was parched by drought, and the few willows still growing along the bank were no longer lush and luxuriant. The green willow bell had disappeared.

  In contrast, Lennox House just up the road from the museum has a happy ambience. Walls have been demolished in a renovation that’s turned it into a community childcare centre. Small children play in colourful spaces that in the early ’70s were run-down students’ rooms, and workers’ rooms in previous decades.

  Other places have simply been superseded. The bungalow where Michael, Richard and Simon lived at Hall has been pulled down, and a new suburban house built on the block of land. And an ultra-modern hotel now stands in the place of the building that once housed Dimitri’s restaurant.

  Captains Flat is now home to a thriving if somewhat sleepy community. Empty houses have been renovated or carted away, the pub revitalised, and there’s a cafe on the main street, frequented on weekends by daytrippers from Canberra. As part of a remediation program in the ’70s, the slagheaps were covered in soil and planted with shrubs and other vegetation. Those old mounds of mine refuse have been recreated as small hills that blend into the surrounding countryside. The program has also reduced the toxic leachings into the river, and there’s hope that native fish species will be re-established. Although it’s taken a long time, the scars from the mine are healing.

  Michael has gone, and lost also are the places that I associate with him. M Ward, the green bell, the bungalow at Hall and the slagheaps now exist only in memory. And in this story.

  *

  At odd moments I think of Michael and remember how it felt to be with him. I see now that a powerful drama was enacted in and through him during his short life. He interrogated male identity and sexuality, and he surrendered passionately to the psychological magnetism of myth and romanticism. In the crucible of his imagination and in his poetry, Michael constellated multiple identities. Ultimately, their competing visions and restless demands overwhelmed him. His death – and his identities – demonstrate the impossibility of someone with his complex psychological make-up leading a conventional life. He didn’t conform to society’s expectations of how a young male should live or who he should be.

  Instead, Michael became a trickster, disobeying society’s rules and challenging conventional codes of behaviour. A boundary-crosser, wise and foolish and boastful of his exploits, he used his poetic talent to cross between the real world and the realm of the imagination. There were times when, like an eagle, his spirit soared into the heights, ‘above concrete and minimal existences, above idols and wars and caring’. Though he eventually became entangled in the depths, these experiences of soaring – and love – were his ‘desiderata’.

  He was a shapeshifter, a mischief-maker; now appearing in one form, now another. And he played at the periphery of the known, using his imagination to show us new worlds, drawing on his fantasies to reveal truths belonging to the other: the outsider, the exile, the freak. Michael was a brilliant poet, hypersensitive, kind and outrageous – and he bore the burden of his unique self gracefully and with courage.

  Sometimes when I read the last lines of his poem ‘Portrait of the artist as an old man’, I wonder how it would be to pass an evening with Michael as an old man, sitting by a fire together, reflec
ting on life and on the times we shared. I wonder what he’d say, and what I would say. And if it would be as he described in his poem:

  When night or winter comes, I light a fire

  and watch the flames

  rise and fall like waves. I regret nothing.

  I can’t say I have no regrets. There are a number of things that I would have done very differently – if I’d known how.

  *

  Until I wrote this memoir, the young woman I was in my early twenties was as distant from me as an actor in a film, even as I watched her enact my memories. Now, she’s here within me, a second self, a wraith just under my skin. I see scenes and events as they emerge in memory through her eyes as well as my own. I feel her emotions, her pulse; I sense what she wanted. Both of us are here in the remembered moment. I’m with her as she moves her head to let her hair fall across her face like a curtain that she can hide behind. I feel in my body her breath and her instinctual life. I know the extremity of her desire and her dread. I’ve been there, inside her madness. And I’m tuned into her sensitivity to the energies of other people, to sounds and light and touch. I know her dreams.

  I’ve discovered that she has always been with me, waiting to be born into language, waiting to speak and make sense of her life. She craved a face and two hands, and a mouth that could say true words. Now she has a face, lined with age but as much hers as it is mine. With both her hands, she held her newborn baby and nothing ever mattered more. And true words now rise up within her. She can speak. I can speak. She has given me back a part of myself that I thought I’d lost forever.

  There are still times when people appear as unsolvable problems, and I continue to be challenged by social situations. If I allow myself to become stressed, my mind goes on the attack. But as Rilke says, ‘What matters is to live everything.’ There’s no escape from the wounded state of the world or from our flawed humanity. I struggle with the obstinacy of primal emotions, with the daily claims of the real, and I grieve for the natural world. But I find that mostly I’m immersed in the moment, the people I love, the work I’m doing, the world I’m part of. Pain and joy, the middle way.

  As I get older, the necessity of finding some meaning in the life I’ve lived becomes less urgent. Now, living life as a poem is more important than ever to me. I want to be present and aware in each moment, and eventually be awake to death when it comes. I hope to be conscious when I die, my heart and mind wide open.

  In the meantime, the experiences I’ve had of love and loss help me live now, in these present moments. The enchantment and rapture of the green bell and the cold despair of the slagheaps remain as part of who I am. I love the moments of ecstasy that open me to the invisible world – but I also cherish the sensation of dwelling within the physical world and sharing ordinary human love and friendship, flawed and earthbound.

  I know now that Michael was right, life is a poem, an encounter with the here and now of the imagined real. An excursion into its depths and reaches, its beauty and terror. And Julianne was right, the world is music playing. We live in this music, and it lives in us. The trick is tuning into it, listening for it. I have them both to thank for teaching me these truths. I’m grateful for everything, every moment we shared. I’m grateful, too, that the memory of our love and friendship endures and still moves me, still lives on in me. Sometimes it’s the love that breaks through; other times it’s the loss. And when they both emerge together, I find my old friends there, on the inside of my life.

  A NOTE ON 1960s PSYCHIATRIC CARE

  In 1960s Australia, it had only been a matter of years since the practice of lobotomising patients had fallen out of favour. For some time afterwards, treatments administered to people suffering from mental health problems continued to reflect a heavy-handed approach. Experimental methods were used with little accountability on the part of the doctors involved for deaths that occurred or adverse consequences of treatments.

  One example of a tragic failure of the Australian psychiatric system during the 1960s and ’70s occurred at the Chelmsford Private Hospital in Sydney. Between 1963 and 1979, twenty-four people died as a direct result of Deep Sleep Therapy (DST) administered at that hospital, and at least another twenty-two people committed suicide within twelve months of their treatment (New South Wales, Royal Commission into Deep Sleep Therapy, Report (1988), vol. 4, 25, 37). DST is a procedure in which intravenous sedative and anti-psychotic drugs are given to patients to keep them in comatose or semi-comatose states for up to several weeks at a time (Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, ‘Position Statement 34: Deep Sleep Therapy,’ 2009, http://www.ranzcp.org/Files/ranzcp-attachments/Resources/College_Statements/Position_Statements/ps34-pdf.aspx (accessed December 21, 2012)). Doctors administer ECT while the patients are in the induced coma. DST was practised for seventeen years at the Chelmsford Private Hospital primarily by the psychiatrists Dr Harry Bailey and Dr John Herron, but other doctors were also involved (Ibid.).

  The condition of patients undergoing this treatment should have been cause for alarm, if not urgent and immediate action. But over that whole period of time, no doctor involved in administering the therapy made a complaint. According to the Report of the 1988 Royal Commission into Deep Sleep Therapy:

  large numbers of patients were treated for complications, these being mainly infections, pneumonia and deep vein thrombosis … There was incontinence of urine and faeces and impaction and retention. There were restraints used to prevent falling from the bed, fractures and falls, vomiting, skin breakdown and metabolism imbalance. At the end of the treatment there were gross visual distortions and hallucinations and severe weakness. (New South Wales, Royal Commission into Deep Sleep Therapy, Report (1988), vol. 4, 25, 37.)

  Only one medical professional, a nurse, made a complaint over a period of seventeen years. The nurse’s complaint was made in 1970 to the Health and Public Service Board. It elicited a warning to Dr Herron, but no other action was taken. There was no serious investigation until 1985, followed by the New South Wales Royal Commission into Deep Sleep Therapy (1988–1990).

  As a result of its investigations, the Commission referred three doctors to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Dr Harry Bailey had committed suicide, but the other doctors fought the case in the High Court, which ultimately granted a permanent stay of disciplinary proceedings brought against them. In response to this ruling, the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped all charges (Inside 60 Minutes: The Story Behind the Stories (St Leonards, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 42).

  Julianne Gilroy did not die from DST. The connection is that her death occurred in Sydney at the same time that patients were dying at the Chelmsford Private Hospital in the same city. At this time (1963–1979), the circumstances surrounding conditions at Chelmsford suggest that a culture contaminated by hubris and incompetence developed unchecked within the psychiatric profession within New South Wales due to systemic failures within government and professional regulatory bodies.

  Despite the inquiry into Julianne Gilroy’s death, questions about her treatment and death have not been answered. It appears that no one was made accountable for her death. And the practices at the hospital where she died do not seem to have been subject to any official scrutiny.

  REFERENCES

  ‘The eyes are not here …’ T.S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 91.

  ‘doctor says how are you …’ Paula Keogh, ‘I swallow the pills’, unpublished poem, September 1972.

  ‘energy of ages …’ Keogh, ‘Where eyes would be’, unpublished poem, September 1972.

  ‘I read a newspaper article …‘S.M. finds girl died from drug poisoning’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 April 1970, p. 4.

  ‘he is white pain …’ Keogh, ‘laugh at the sky’, unpublished poem, September 1972.

  ‘all is new …’ Michael Dransfield, ‘Always a season’, The Canberra Times, 18 Nov 1972.

  ‘prisoners of the H
otel Grand’ Dransfield, ‘paul and cathy,’ Collected Poems, edited by Rodney Hall (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987), 361.

  ‘Sorcerer, note how the stars …’ Keogh, ‘Michael’, unpublished poem, October 1975.

  ‘poetry is the blood in my veins …’ Dransfield, ‘Journal d’un Homme Vide’, Diary March–April 1967, 23 March 1967, Papers of Michael Dransfield, MS 4741, National Library of Australia (hereafter cited as Dransfield MSS).

  ‘and all his words …’ Dransfield, ‘Esais’, Collected Poems, 43.

  ‘the inspector of tides … dressed in clouds …’ Dransfield, ‘The Inspector of Tides’, Collected Poems, 116.

  ‘haysheds and corners …’ Dransfield, ‘Minstrel’, Collected Poems, 42.

  ‘archaic … rise and fall …’ Dransfield, ‘Portrait of the artist as an old man’, Collected Poems, 17.

  ‘the hermit … imperfect silence … it is enough’, Dransfield, ‘The hermit of green light’, Collected Poems, 88.

  ‘dreams of a perfect poem …’ Dransfield, ‘Miss Havisham’, Collected Poems, 83.

  ‘I am Proust …’ Dransfield, ‘Chaconne for a solipsist’, Collected Poems, 243.

  ‘love / let live … Writ in the House of Torment …’ Dransfield, ‘The nature of passion’, Collected Poems, 342

  ‘The article appeared’ … Maurice Dunlevy, ‘Poet who lives in the underground’, The Canberra Times, 30 September 1972.

  ‘Survival is the password …’ Dransfield, Untitled poem, Collected Poems, 356.

  ‘The ultimate commitment …’ Dransfield, ‘Like this for years’, Collected Poems, 50.

  ‘I cannot pull …’ Dransfield, ‘Still Life’, Collected Poems, 356.

  ‘statue and prayer / of the merciful …’ Dransfield to Paula Keogh 1972.