by Jessie Cole
For me, grieving had entailed a kind of disappearance. A withdrawal from the world at large, but also a toning down of self. For someone who’d once been so talkative, so expressive, I’d become more and more subdued. Watching my boys’ childhoods unfold in the place where I had been a child, I was constantly reminded of who I used to be. The manhandler of biting insects who had taken on a goanna beneath a bench. So sure of the world around me, so sure of my place within it. As a child I’d been vivacious, wilful. I knew this lively part of me had become muted. I didn’t believe expressing grief was a self-indulgence, but I worried that if I gave it too much room, I could lose control like my father had. In the aftermath of his suicide, I kept myself on a short leash, and perhaps with the kids there just wasn’t the space.
My mother had always been quiet—private and seemingly serene. When I was a child she’d had a series of best friends, brash and opinionated, who’d never stopped talking. She’d enjoyed their raucousness, their colour and drama. But these kinds of relationships only function in fair weather, and over the years these women had all gone their separate ways. When I returned to Burringbar with my children, my mother’s relief seemed almost tangible. I’m sure she would have listened to me if I’d been willing to talk about my grief, but I was loath to overwhelm her with the inner workings of my mind. It was as though we had agreed at some earlier stage to shelter each other from our darker emotions. We’d both simultaneously decided: She’s been through enough, let her be.
Whatever feelings I had I kept to myself, and over time I became more and more secretive, hiding from my mother all my saddest musings.
≈
In my bedroom, I scrambled through old letters, birthday cards, drawings and notes, searching for the familiar folded envelope of the letter from my father. I had held this envelope in my hands many times, folding it up into a square and then smoothing it out again. Inside it, creased with the lines of my sad thoughts, were the scraps of the torn-up letter my father had sent before he died, which I had never read. Finding it tucked against the bottom corner of an old shoebox, I pulled it out and folded it again into a tight square, the reflexive habit returning on cue.
In a shiny metal box, I was going to bury it.
Evading my mother, carrying the metal box and a small shovel, I took my sons out along the ridge, to my secret place. Milla raced ahead, fearless and filled with ease, but Luca clung to my legs, trembling slightly as he peered over the steep edges. I had to half-carry him down the muddy slope, the shovel clanking heavily against my ankles. At the bottom I held up the barbed wire and we slid carefully beneath. Once we’d made our way down, the boys were nimble, as I used to be, and they skipped across the rocks over the creek and onto the pebbled flat.
On the higher land above the creek, under a canopy of camphors, I began to dig.
‘What are you doing, Mum?’ Milla was watchful as he slid around the trunk of a tree.
‘I’m burying this box. I don’t want it with me anymore, but I’m not ready to throw it out.’
‘But what’s in it?’
Pushing the shovel into the dirt, I paused to look at my son’s face. ‘I can’t tell you about it, Milla. It’s just something that I don’t want, but I can’t get rid of.’
Luca wandered closer, kicking at the red dirt with his bare toes. ‘Mummy, I can help. I can do some shovelling.’
‘No, baby—not without shoes. You can help me put the dirt back on top afterwards, okay?’
Placing the box in the hole, I began to cover it with the damp, pebbly soil. Luca threw small handfuls while I squashed the dirt flat with my feet.
‘There, now help me find a stick to mark the place.’
‘A big one, Mummy?’
‘One I can wedge into the ground, so I don’t lose the spot.’
Milla strolled over from his tree with a long, slightly curved stick.
‘But I thought you didn’t want what’s in the box,’ he said. ‘Why do you need to know the spot?’
‘I just do, that’s all.’
I stood a moment beside the stick, wondering if the damp soil would turn my box to rust and knowing that a flood would wash it all away. I imagined the metal box wedged between the branches of a tree on some lone farmer’s land.
‘Come on, boys—let’s go for a wander.’
Leaving the shovel propped against Milla’s tree, we headed downstream, watching for stray pieces of barbed wire and the low, thorny bushes that always caught against our clothes.
All along the creek edge grew straight-leaved plants that thrust from the ground like pompoms. Covered in moss, boulders were strewn about, ferns growing from their dirt-crammed pockets. When I was a child I’d seen these rotund bodies as alive, as entities with their very own dispositions: serious or jolly, comforting or cold. From where I stood with the boys, the roots of the forest trees lay exposed in cross-section, part of the ever-changing creek bank. I could see their private underworld in all its intertwined layers—years and years of connectedness and union—changing but unchanged. My secret place, out beyond the ridge.
We walked along the banks of the creek, weaving on and off the well-trodden cow paths. Luca stopped to poke at the water with a stick, stirring up mud, and Milla looked across at me as though searching for something.
‘Mum, what was in the box?’ His face was tilted. Watching me, he pulled at his bottom lip with his top teeth.
My children always seemed to be studying me for clues to some great mystery I could never explain.
‘It was something private, something sad.’ I heard myself sigh. ‘Something I’m not ready to share.’
‘A secret?’
‘Yeah, baby. A kind of secret.’
Milla shuff led towards me, wrapping his arms around me and leaning against my hips, restrained and tender. Catching sight of us, Luca dropped his stick into the creek and ran across to squeeze in against his brother, working his way into the embrace like a wriggling puppy. Both boys pressed against me until they began to jostle, and I nudged them from my arms and turned to head back.
≈
My brother visited sometimes with Gemma, a weekend away from uni. He came to see us, but he never said much. I was struck by how quickly Jake curled into the couch of our childhood, as though once home he slotted straight back into the habits of his adolescence. Despite the boisterous excitement of my children, quiet swirled around him, like the notes from his guitar. I had to hold my tongue for long stretches to hear him speak.
‘I liked that CD you gave Mum,’ I told him. ‘The Lucinda Williams.’
‘Yeah … it’s … good.’
‘It’s really atmospheric, but so sad.’
‘It’s … it’s got that …’ My brother’s voice fell away. ‘When you listen to it …’
I had to stop myself from filling all Jake’s pauses with my own thoughts, from talking and talking so that the silence did not hang between us.
‘It kind of …’
‘Yeah?’
‘It just …’
‘Makes you feel …?’ I asked, inclining my head in encouragement.
‘Makes me … want … yeah …’
I tried to leave room for my brother’s words, but he did not step forward to fill the gap. I wanted to give Jake space to be, but it always seemed that the space I allowed just became more space between us. A void where my words used to lie. I wanted to step up and fill in all the gaps, to join together all the missing parts and tape up all the broken edges. I wanted to bridge the place where the unspoken lay: the abyss, the hidden chasm between him and me.
Brother and sister.
In his company, the clamour of the unspoken filled my ears—the clanking, banging, shifting machinery of all those words left unsaid. Two minds at work avoiding the unploughed ground. Weed-infested spaces had grown between us where all our secret sorrows were buried. Underground, deep underground. I wanted to burrow beneath the surface to these hidden chasms, but instead was solitary and still, w
aiting for the outstretched arms of my brother. I waited for Jake to reach out and give me balance, to hold me steady while I stepped forth and crossed that bridge between us. I saw the unspoken hovering behind my brother’s eyes, and I waited and waited for those small, unbroken moments when the chasm between us would be breached.
≈
Since coming home I had avoided people I saw on the street the way they had once avoided me, averting my gaze, going about my business. I believed myself to be lost to them, someone who’d become separated from the flock. I knew it had all started with awkwardness and not from a lack of love, but how long after someone’s father suicides is conversation with them discomfiting? In my experience—quite a long time. I appreciated those who had taken that plunge into awkwardness, though they were few and far between, and every friend who had called me after my father’s death would stay forever etched into my memory, just for being willing to listen to my sad voice on the other end of the line. Bravery comes in so many forms, but this has to be one of the most overlooked. We celebrate those who have climbed high mountains or broken into burning buildings, but try calling your friend who has just lost her baby and listen to her keen. I know how hard these moments can be. I have experienced them now from the other side, more times than I would have ever expected.
Why do we find the pain of others so difficult to bear? Nowadays, I think of our country’s asylum seekers, locked away in detention centres, sewing up their mouths or lighting themselves on fire. They’re trying to make their suffering visible, but the more they do it, the more likely we are to look away. I wonder about this collective mercilessness. I know that it is in some part a feeling of helplessness, but the outcast within me wonders how much of it is also a fear of contagion. We make them live on the other side of the river, like the lepers of old, so we don’t have to witness their pain. If we really looked at these people, what would we see? Does their brokenness somehow reflect our own? Or, at the very least, our own potential for it? Or is it the other way around? In acknowledging their suffering, will we find we’ve been complicit in it? Will it require something of us that we feel unable to give?
≈
There are different routes to choose when it comes to the expression—the outward expression—of who you are, and what your story might be. Conversations can lead quickly to topics like siblings and parents, so if you want to communicate about those things the opening is often there. But if you don’t want to communicate about them—or don’t know how to—then you must, from the outset, avoid whole major areas of conversation. Looking back, I think this was often the path my siblings took.
Many years after my father’s death, I went to Japan to visit Billie, and while I was there she invited a close Australian friend over to her house for lunch. My sister was fussing in the kitchen, and her friend said to me, ‘So, when did you appear?’
We were sitting at the dining room table. It was a small open-plan Japanese house and I assumed my sister could hear our conversation from the kitchen, but she didn’t show any sign of registering the question.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, a touch confused.
‘When did you appear in Billie’s life? When did she discover you?’
It dawned on me then that this friend thought I was some long-lost sister who’d turned up late, who’d just appeared out of nowhere.
‘Oh, no, I’ve been here from the beginning,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ve been here all along.’
I looked across at Billie, understanding in that moment that she hadn’t told her friend anything about me. Though she had lived so far from me, and for such a long time, Billie had always worked hard to stay in touch, to maintain our connection, despite her intensely busy life. She had never made me feel that I was not an important part of her family, and yet she had managed not to mention my existence to one of her best friends in Japan. I knew why—because as soon as she talked about me, she’d end up having to talk about Zoe, and then probably Dad. And if she didn’t want to talk about Zoe or Dad, or she felt that there wasn’t room for that conversation in her friendship, then she had to avoid talking about me too, if she didn’t want to outright lie.
‘Oh, right,’ my sister’s friend said, glancing towards Billie. ‘Well, so, how many of you are there?’
I knew this was an important moment, and I knew my sister had thus far avoided it. I wasn’t sure what I should say. I was happy to answer the question however Billie wanted me to, but she didn’t give me any sign from the kitchen.
‘Well, there were four of us, altogether,’ I said, tentatively.
My sister’s friend raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh, right,’ she said again. She paused. ‘So what are the others doing now?’
I went through it with her: Zoe and me and Jake. I could see both her shock and her understanding. It was all there in her face, the fact that she knew why Billie had never mentioned me, and the fact that she knew—right then and there—the kind of painful hidden past that my sister must carry but never ever spoke of.
So that’s one way to manage that conversation—just never to have it. To let people assume that you don’t have a family. I’ve had similar experiences with my brother, going to visit him when he lived in share houses. I’d turn up, and his flatmates would think I was his new girlfriend, and they might be different shades of enraged because he already had a girlfriend, and I’d have to explain that I was a sister who he’d never mentioned.
I have never been surer of anything than that my siblings love me, that they value me and are glad I’m in the world, but the story of my family is so hard to tell that sometimes it’s been easier for them not to tell it at all, even when they know I’m going to visit them and no one is going to understand where I came from. This is the conundrum of the grief-laden, the conundrum of those with stories too hard to tell and too difficult to bear hearing. It is easier to reinvent ourselves unhindered by our history in a new city. Our whole past just disappears, evaporating behind us as we walk. It’s a road that both my siblings took, or have taken from time to time, but it’s not a road that I could take. In erasing my past, I would be erasing my dead ones—Zoe and my father—who in life had loomed so large. I didn’t want to live as though they had never existed.
In my homeplace, I wanted to live with my story. I didn’t want start again somewhere fresh and pretend it never happened. I wanted it to be visible behind me, not evaporating into the air so everyone else got to feel more comfortable. But I didn’t know how to breach that space. I lived, nestled in the forest—held, loved, connected—but walking the streets of my hometown I felt potently the opposite. Belonging, it seemed, was conditional. In grief I felt myself to be cordoned off, I had become an untouchable.
Many years later I read about studies that found the lonelier a person is the more likely they are to interpret social cues negatively. To see themselves as rebuffed or unwelcome. But because this shift into loneliness is often incremental, these changes in perception are not at all apparent to the person suffering them. The lonely person is caught in a cycle, seeing rejection everywhere and withdrawing rather than reaching out, compounding their isolation. It struck me that this must happen very quickly in cases where a person has experienced something that is difficult to approach in conversation—rape, sexual abuse, mental illness, the murder or suicide of a loved one, or just plain and simple loss. Awkwardness is a small thing in comparison to the kinds of troubles that incite it, but humans—for the most part—seem intent on avoiding it at all costs. How many avoided interactions does it take for the lonely person to start seeing them everywhere? To start avoiding being avoided?
≈
In our daily meandering, I spent a lot of time wondering what to say to my children about my family history. I worried that suicide ran in families, that once one person fell, others would topple, as if suicide had become an option. I didn’t want my sons to see taking their own lives as a viable solution, but I also didn’t want my history to be a secret they uncovere
d later. I didn’t want them to feel they’d been lied to, that their childhoods were built on something false. I knew the questions would come, and I tried to be ready.
On a drive to the shops, I glanced at my boys in the rear-vision mirror.
‘Mum, why does Billie live in Japan?’ Milla asked out of the blue, searching for my eyes in the mirror.
‘She has a fancy job there. In a big company.’
‘Will she ever come back here to live?’
‘I don’t think so. She likes living in the city.’
‘What about your other sister, the one who’s dead?’ In the back of the car Milla was suddenly alert. ‘What’s she called again?’
Luca listened, but didn’t speak.
‘Zoe was her name … Billie and Zoe.’
Holding my breath, I waited for the next question.
‘But how did she die, Mum?’ Milla asked.
It seemed to me that the truth was my only option. The raw truth: It happened, it was like a bomb dropping, no one was unscathed.
I breathed in and out, slowly, wanting to reply but not knowing how.
‘She killed herself—’
I scanned Milla’s face in the mirror. He looked thoughtful, pensive.
‘Like your dad?’
I’d already had a conversation with Milla about my father’s suicide. He knew the basic facts.
‘Yes, like my dad.’
Milla peered out the window. I could see Luca’s gaze slip back and forth between us. I’d avoided telling Luca that part of the story at the creek. There in the car, I didn’t know what else to say, what to explain and what to leave out. My boys were five and three, too little for the details. I wound down the window to feel the wind in my face.