Home Truth

by HarperCollins Publishers

  Such a thin soup is ‘my future’ when compared with ‘our future’. This month. Next month. Next year. A life without the shared blessings, the celebrations enjoyed, the disappointments cushioned, our political discussions, our family talk, the gossip and laughter, our walks, our meals (I can’t walk, I can’t eat)—and our rituals. The wine at 6 pm, the thanks for our good fortune, our glasses always raised to her health, the libations at the apricot tree. (The apricot tree which died and is now thriving again. Why did it survive and not you?) So many rituals established over the years: the ice-cream at the cinema, holding hands during the film, the dancing in the lounge room. And our morning ritual: me sitting cross-legged on the quilt, you still in bed. I’ve been up an hour, you are not long awake, and here’s your coffee and here’s my second cup of coffee and Wystan snuggles between us as we talk.

  So many poets

  starve

  in the cold faery spaces

  between their frost-bitten ears

  How lucky I am

  to hear you, darling,

  coming up the stairs

  to smell the coffee

  floating ahead of you

  like my favourite incense.

  I am shoring up our past—the photos, cards, letters, e-mails, text messages—so much paper and so many words to brighten the bleak future. In these early days of her absence, I actually add to her visibility in our house. She is gone so the note in her handwriting to put out the rubbish bins, her place on the couch, her favourite mug, the books she was reading, her fossils, her favourite jumper, the pen next to her bed assume talismanic qualities. I touch her things all the time. Very occasionally it is as if I touch her.

  Valium puts me to sleep, but it lasts only a few hours. And there are no dreams. Up at 5.30 and while I try to act as if everything is normal—breakfast, my morning reading—everything is spoiled. Except her work. I decide to start at the beginning, her first book, impose some order—as if that might restore my equilibrium. But there’s no familiarity with Little Hoodlum, no touch. I take from my DP shelf (See, I said to her, years ago, a whole shelf of you.) my various copies of Akhenaten, make myself another coffee and withdraw to the couch with ‘the book that made you look at me twice’—D’s inscription in the splendid Hyland House reissue.

  It was May, 1992, and the Victorian Women’s Writers’ Train, a National Book Council initiative which brought together eight women writers to travel through rural Victoria for a week giving talks, readings and workshops. There was a reading on the first evening and how shocked I was when D stood up and read from Akhenaten. This annoying, noisy, intrusive woman who from the moment of our first meeting earlier in the day had rubbed me up the wrong way, performed like no poet I had ever seen before, and with poetry that was, literally, breathtaking. And it’s working again. Akhenaten is working. I read very slowly, the whole so familiar but many individual poems forgotten. It is such a passionate work: Akhenaten’s vision, his yearning for more and different, the fire and the disappointments, the achievements and the losses. D always said Akhenaten was the most autobiographical of her characters.

  I have taken the turquoise scarab from her desk and carry it in my pocket. You can’t separate / a heart / from its brother, Akhenaten says in ‘Scarab’, his prayer over Smenkhkare’s dead body.

  I love Akhenaten.

  Days of panic, days of attack, the point of a knife poised to plunge, and my own voice haranguing me: what do I need to do to help her, what do I need to do to bring her back? Nothing has prepared me for this. The interminable longing, this interminable missing. I struggle to get through each day only for another impossible day to loom. I flitter from this to that, I can’t stick with any task. But most of all I can’t make sense of her death. Suddenly my whole life has become linear A.

  I used to take walks alone to think, to work in my head; I can’t walk. I used to cook delicious meals we would eat together; I can’t cook. I used to enjoy food, now I feel a boulder in my stomach. When first we met D hardly noticed food, and not simply because she was riding the riffs of a new passion: I soon realised she was not interested in food. About three months after the writers’ train (D could tell me the exact date—for a girl who ‘didn’t get numbers’ she certainly got dates) she managed a stopover in Melbourne on her way from Sydney down to Hobart for a gig. I decided to cook for her—always such a personal gift—tomato and roasted capsicum soup, pasta with my home-made pesto, a rocket and pear salad. D shovelled in the food, she hardly chewed much less savoured, she heaped salad on top of the pasta. Finally—I couldn’t stop myself—I asked whether she was enjoying the food. I might just as well have asked if she liked the décor of the house. She never warmed to décor, but she did to food. So many rituals developed around food that, over time, cooking and shared meals formed part of the connective tissue of home. Cooking was for us, cooking fed our shared narrative.

  Now the narrative has been blown up. No slow unravelling here, what has happened is immediate, instantaneous, explosive. I had a life that was infused with D, now it has burst. And I have no desire to rebuild it differently. Grief is like the hard edge of even numbers. 10/12/2008. The date of her death is sharp and steel-plated.

  Hours would pass in this house, D downstairs with her books, me up in my study with mine; I can’t read for more than thirty minutes. And music, always my emotional interpreter and comfort, I can’t listen to music and I certainly don’t dare play the piano. I can stroke and cuddle Wystan. I can go to the letter box and collect the day’s condolence cards. I can read the cards. I can look at photos. And I can read her books. Sometimes I think the screech of my own longing actually blocks her out.

  After a while photos lose their power: they don’t recall the living person, they recall only themselves. And memories are no help either, their immateriality only reinforces the very real palpable life you have lost. The books are better—D’s books, other books too. I am calm when I read, and time passes without my having to shove it along.

  After Akhenaten I start on her 1996 collection, Crete. The inscription in my copy is all wind and spark: ‘For my-at-last leopard, music, park-stripped-to-its-bones, beautiful friend, Trojan Horse, honey Daimon.’ I begin at the beginning then cheat and whip across to ‘Why I Love Your Body’.

  I put your body

  between me

  and the terrifying future

  of my body

  This poem was written only a year or so after we met. It gained in its truth. Night after night these past nearly five years D would wake in the dark and turn to me. And I would put my body between her and the history of horrors, between her and the terrifying future of [her] body. I would keep her well.

  I fill up on her books and all the while the house is emptying of her. I’ve finished the honey we used together, the Vegemite is getting low; her peanut butter will go rancid before I throw it out. I never have any fresh milk; there are two unopened boxes of her blueberries in the freezer; wherever there is running water there is a container of antiseptic liquid soap which, like the peanut butter, has remained untouched since D went to hospital; yesterday I threw out her mouldy yoghurt. And this morning I used one of her towels clean from the linen cupboard, and on my skin was a long straight hair and now that too has gone. These things which linger and go bad, the other things we shared but I finish alone, all these things which have out-lasted her.

  It’s just our things

  that survive

  dissolving in the end

  even the most sticky

  of our clutching

  smudges.

  I wonder what Dot would do if I had been the one to die. And I find myself smiling: she had such a poor tolerance for misery.

  I first read CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed in 1973. Mine is a slender Faber and Faber edition. The glue of the spine has hardened, a bunch of pages at the beginning has broken free. At my first reading, Lewis’s grapplings with his God were irrelevant, but now I find myself longing for faith.
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br />   Be still, is the message of this book, let your mind wander, make space for her—H for Lewis, D for me—to come to you. You cannot summon your beloved on demand simply because you are desperate. You can’t make the dead live again—Lewis doesn’t think even his God can do that. I don’t need CS Lewis to tell me that intoning to a photograph is no substitute for conversations with D, but it helps to know there are facets of this state shared by others.

  Lewis writes: ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.’ Not for me: I’m not afraid. And as time passes, I am realising it is not grief that is the issue for me, it’s loss and the chill of homelessness. It’s this alien existence, this hostile future, this aloneness which is fast lurching into loneliness, the people who don’t understand and those who nearly do, the crushing house, the food mouldering in the pantry, my life hacked from its moorings. Out in the open and shockingly exposed, I have lost my bearings.

  Books, books, I grab anything that might stop the attacks. I read for calm, I read for consolation. I read for familiarity and understanding. I long to feel firm ground beneath my feet. I read Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ and wonder as I have before at Alfred’s depth of passion for Arthur Hallam—betrothed to Tennyson’s sister but occupying the better part of Tennyson’s own heart. I read Rilke’s ‘Requiem For a Friend’, written for the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker who had died following the birth of her only child. Paula married and she wanted to paint, but the times and her milieu made it impossible for her to do both. Only after she was gone did Rilke realise what a great painter she was. With Tennyson I am interested but not moved; the Rilke I find unbearably sad.

  David Rieff, in the memoir of his mother’s dying, Swimming in a Sea of Death, is wracked by guilt. I don’t understand it, or at least not from his rather costive and polite account. Susan Sontag was desperate to live; in her last illness she was prepared to suffer terrible treatments offering only a remote chance of success because of her love of life. It was her choice: her son could not have stopped her.

  D loved life like no one I have ever known; life was her great and good fortune. And she was terrified of death. But she would never have chosen as Sontag did. I know this with certainty, for as we stood together in a Brooklyn gallery back in January 2007 surrounded by Annie Liebowitz’s horrible theft of Sontag’s dying, D told me so. I read Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened of, a book exploring the author’s fear of death. (Shocking title, I say aloud, forgetting that D cannot answer me.) I have no fear of my own death, but many of the issues Barnes raises as a non-believer are relevant to me now. I know I can’t summon up faith at will. I have, however, created an afterlife consisting of spirit dimensions—no God required—that are beyond our comprehension and certainly beyond description. I imagine these dimensions to be like the almost unimaginable quantum world. One can’t ascribe thoughts, feelings, sensations to them—such responses are all too human. So I am thinking instead of a wave-like/particle-like X out in the cosmos with which I can connect. And that’s D: happy, without anxiety, without cancer. The thought eases my distress, but it does nothing to fill the terrifying spaces.

  And at last to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, recommended by many but deliberately avoided. There’s history attached to this book. Inscribed in the copy I bought for D I have written: ‘To my healthy D, How lucky we are that your experience was a dream run from woe to go—and on’. It is dated 30/10/05—just over three years before she died. I read the book now in a single sitting. What a disappointment it is. Rather than the raw unflinching grappling with death I expected, Didion tries to skirt around, leap over, even silence thoughts of her recently dead husband, John, and of her seriously ill daughter, Quintana. I do the opposite: with the real D gone, I grab on to anything and everything that is associated with her, as if I might build up a proxy Dot. And Didion writes from a distance, as if she is describing a film; even her ‘waves of grief’ are cool. What I feel is not waves but a welling up, as if someone is squeezing me from my feet, and the moisture sweeps up through my body and oozes from my eyes, leaving my body limp like an empty tube of toothpaste. Maybe waves, so smooth and well-shaped, attach to grief, while welling (such messy spilling) is loss. I feel lost and empty, I feel fury and hatred. I feel nothing so civilised as grief.

  My weeks and months of loss is everyone else’s getting on with their lives. Of course they know D is no longer in the world, but they are not bludgeoned with her absence over the second cup of coffee, cleaning up the kitchen, changing Wystan’s litter tray, receiving advance copies of my new novel without a shared celebration, sitting alone in the middle of the couch, the silent drink at 6 pm, her empty bathroom, the solitary bed. And mostly they don’t want to know about it.

  People fall short—and how can they do otherwise? What I want they can’t give me, no matter how understanding they are. You have to do this suffering alone. But the house has become a cage, a cell, a barbed-wire enclosure. Far from the sanctuary of the past, this place is now endless solitary confinement. I rage and rage within these walls. I am furious at Kübler-Ross with her smug, orderly stages of grief. I’m furious at those distant friends and acquaintances now showering me with sympathy and embraces, who not only dismissed D in life but actually did not like her. I rage at the heat, at the drought, at the empty house, at the food rotting in the fridge. I rage at Telstra and AXA and Westpac. I rage at the cancer itself. And so much anger over those articles written by people who ignored her and her work in life, yet now have leaped on the death-wagon for their own self-serving purposes.

  So much effort and yielding so very little. I explode at the Telstra guy who deserves it, I explode at close friends and family who don’t. I explode at the sky, the stars, the dishes in the sink, the dead grass, the dusty earth. I’m an addict to e-mail, to anger, to anxiety, to human contact. Stop, I tell myself, you’re making it worse, you’re driving yourself mad. And then quietly quietly I read her e-mails to me and mine to her, I read our cards and letters. Our voices so close and clear.

  We were indeed imperishably marvellous.

  Some days drag. Others gallop along. I see many people, I read, I think, I fill the days in activity and silence—all in service to the fact she is not here. And I look for omens. A single rose suddenly blooming in the garden in this hot dry summer, surely a sign of her spirit, and a white-faced heron down at the Yarra another sign. I latch on to falling photos and sulphur-crested cockatoos; I never stop searching. And it’s exhausting because it is not faith or omens I am wanting, but D. I look for her in trees and birds and the shapes of clouds; I look for her in the inexplicable happenstance of everyday life.

  I play with Wystan, I do the dishes, I shop for food, I talk to the neighbours. I do these things consciously, as if I could trick myself into forgetting that life as I know it and want it has gone up in smoke. Poof! But death will trample the fresh grass whether I understand it or not, death will house the nettles whether I see them or not. Death is the sting.

  Another Wednesday, another migraine. A real shocker this week. Is death always so punitive? And suddenly out of the pit of the morning my computer slips into the photo library screen-saver and there before me is a photo of D taken from behind as she marches in her sturdy, healthy way down the street toward the park.

  I plunge into my photo library, find the photo, print it and perch it on the coffee table, this oh-so-familiar figure. D would complain she does not look sufficiently sylph-like. But it’s her, dressed in her purple fleece, her ‘best’ black, now-very-faded Versace jeans, white runners, arms bent at the elbows, the broad back, the strong stocky legs. I send the photo to close friends and family. They agree: it could not be anyone but Dot.

  It is August 2009; eight months have passed. There are periods now when I am not thinking of her, not struggling to hold her close, not struggling at all. I berate myself: I don’t want her to slip away. But the fact remains, there are moments of normality, unrehearsed normality. Even the incomprehensio
n—she can’t have gone forever—can become normalised, and hard on the heels of that: I am here without her—no howling, nor even resignation, as if her death is a fact like my being small or Jewish or living in Melbourne. Just an ordinary fact. I would prefer the pain and the howling, I would prefer the loss and longing. I hate that I would ever calmly accept her absence, hate that I would calmly accept being alone.

  But you have to make a life alone. It is almost as if you have to push the absent beloved aside in order to go on living—even when you don’t want to push them aside. I feel the world tugging at me. The rhythm of conversation, the play of music, a spattering of rain on parched skin, the hot hungry skin itself. Dot died and with her my collaborator in this wonderful wild world. But the world remains and it does beckon. The two things—keeping her with me and having a future—are so unfairly opposed.

  This house, our house, is filled with books. Thousands of them, Dot’s and mine, and surprisingly little overlap. I wander the shelves of my library. Now and then I take down a book and recall the circumstances of its reading. Other books I have forgotten completely. Plenty of pleasures to be had here, I say to myself. My entire life’s journey travelled with books, in words, in what is portable and invisible, what can be carried with me when life slips off the rails. And fiction most of all: I have always found a natural home in the mutable texture of narrative. And it is a home in uncertainty. You pick up a book and you don’t know where it will take you, but you trust it to take you somewhere. Throughout my life, in calm times or tumultuous, home is where the books are, raucous and uncomfortable, vibrant and enduring.

  I read for hours now, and no longer just death books. I read Sebastian Faulks’s Human Traces and his excellent Engleby, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, David Malouf’s Ransom, Steve Carroll’s The Lost Life, Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. And biographies, too: Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch, and new studies of Anna Akhmatova, Thomas Mann and Robert Oppenheimer. And old favourites: Henry James and Edith Wharton, Milosz and Whitman, Virginia Woolf and EM Forster. While I am reading the storms recede and time passes without leaving scars.