The Attachment

by Ailsa Piper

  Greg had so much he still wanted to do—two lifetimes’ worth of dreams and projects—but he exited with exemplary courage and style. He gathered ten of us around him for his final days, and we cared for him at home, sleeping in shifts so he was not alone, organising practicalities like food and cleaning, his bathing and medicine, and herding the waves of people who came to farewell him. I don’t think he would have considered turning anyone away, though there were days when the rest of us wanted to slam the doors.

  My abiding memories are of laughter, in spite of the way Greg was being ravaged, and the certainty that his time was running out before our eyes. We spent many hours sitting around him in the bathroom, because he had to remain perched on the toilet. I recall one night when he wept, heartbroken and humiliated because of the indignity of his ‘bare-arsed’ state. We were all pretty raw at that stage, and would have done anything to make him feel brighter, even for a moment. So what did we do? We removed our trousers and sat around him, equally bare-arsed, on the floor—like children in a playground. There was no shame or prurience; just a determination to do whatever it took to give him relief and to raise a smile.

  We were a mixed group, brought together by our love of Greg. We all did our very best, every moment of each day. The instructions for his farewell—music, speeches, venue—were carried out to the letter. He was a director and had left nothing to chance. We gathered in one of the wharves down at Millers Point. The weather co-operated and at the last, doors opened onto the water of Sydney Harbour and bright white light flooded in as the volume pumped up on his favourite dance music.

  Sometimes I’ve considered trying to write the story of those days but I can’t. I only own a corner of it. There were nine others looking after him. There was his blood family—complicated, because of Greg being gay. There was his work and other friends—hundreds who loved him—and he was different with every person, as we all are. He was a library of stories, and I could never do justice to them. But we honoured him, I believe. Body and soul.

  Greg would laugh at that. He didn’t believe in souls or spirits or afterwards. He believed that when he closed his eyes, it all stopped. I think dying that way, clear-eyed and steadfast in the face of a void, is one of the bravest things I know. The promise of afterlife or reincarnation is something to hold. Greg had nothing. Only love.

  Hmm.

  I think I must stop writing about him now. It still can make me a bit wobbly, seventeen years later. Instead, let me tell you about my day so far, which has actually been a kind of birth.

  I woke at 5 am, sat down at the dining table, and wrote the opening of my book. It has been eluding me for about two years. Now it is done!

  Well, the first draft of the first pages is out, anyway. Let’s not go overboard. My task for today was to return to that section, and I thought it would take all week, maybe all month, but I woke and it was there. Cooked. And I think it might really be the actual first chapter. All before 7.30!

  I wanted to tell you, given our conversation in Sydney about the wee small hours being the best time to write.

  Soft rain has started to fall. I was about to get up and walk, but perhaps I will stay beyond the easy, unearned idea, and see if there is another lurking. Also, I might just sit and let myself be still with the memories of best beloveds, and the smell of rain on parched ground. Endings and beginnings. It was ever thus, I guess.

  May your day be full and productive and hap-hap-happy.

  Ailsa

  Good morning,

  As I was reading those stories of the death of your mum, and your friend Greg, I couldn’t help being caught up again in the power of being with people who are dying. There’s something that cuts through all of the trivia that distracts us most of the time. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Beyond doubt, they are sacred moments.

  Talking very personally, I find it hard to take my own mortality too seriously. You’d think that at 78 any sensible person would allow time for the subject. Perhaps I do, to some small extent—although now I think about it, even a brush with cancer over a decade ago failed to convince me to stop and reflect. I suppose it can be explained as no more than common or garden denial. But sometimes I speculate that it is about the nature of the work I do—baptising tiny babies one moment and celebrating a funeral the next; counselling terminally ill people and then reading to a class of eight-year-old kids; going from a bright-eyed couple preparing for marriage to an aged-care facility. It is often a kaleidoscope of life and death. Ironically, it leaves me feeling a bit bulletproof . . . sometimes.

  But to get to your writing . . .

  I think the mistake you make is going to sleep. Allowing that explosive unconscious to start brewing up the Piper creative juices. That is what I mean by writing at 4 am. Magic happens.

  Another thing that’s patently obvious is what an unstoppable walker you must be. To make a comparison, if I had spent a couple of days away from home, I would be slumped in a chair falling to sleep over the cricket. This powerhouse friend of mine has hit the word processor and written half a book.

  There is not the slightest jot of criticism in this—simply sheer admiration and not a little envy.

  But let me tell you where I am.

  Sunday was bursting with people and events. Read your material quite late and went to bed smiling. Rose early this morning and headed for my car to take me swimming and the battery was flat again. So I have been waiting for a mechanic to get me mobile—talk about disen-bloody-chantment. In half an hour I head for St Michael’s Golf course right on the dramatic cliffs of the coast with surf hitting the rocks and me keeping my head rigid over my putts. Ask Peter—he would understand.

  You’re a firecracker of a woman—should put you on the Bridge on NYE.

  Happy days.

  Tony

  Querido Antonio!

  You know, it tickled me to think that you’re approaching 80 and don’t fret about mortality. I’m 25 years your junior, and I have felt the push of it in my back ever since I can remember. I am sure it is why I race at the world and have such greed for experiences and people. Most mornings, on waking, my first thought is ‘Hooray, I’m still here.’ I truly don’t expect to be. Not sure why, but it fires me to move, to do, to meet, to greet, to gobble it up. I’m not at all skilled at sitting and reflecting on anything—but I suspect mortality is the one thing I do not need to give my attention to because I can’t recall a time when it wasn’t present with me as a spur. Quite a sharp one at that.

  And on the subject of moving, I’ve just walked for four hours along forest trails, climbing so high that I can literally see for miles. Now I’m ensconced at the general store with coffee, and a corn and asparagus pie. This is our own one-bar pueblo, where one day, you must walk.

  And no, no. I’m not unstoppable at all. Matter of fact, I relish the stops. My mind, which goes out dreaming when I walk, has to catch up with my body, to settle back into it. And you know, I can walk differently, more like a snail.

  Anyway, as a reward for slogging, your email. Thank you. Hope the mechanic came and you are birdying or putting or jabbing or whatever you do.

  I’ve had a swirl of ideas in the hills, sparked by a call asking me to perform a piece written by Michael McGirr. In it he makes reference to his wife, and that made me reflect what a loss he must have been to his parish and community when he left the priesthood to marry—and what a gain she might have been, had she been able to be the wife of a working priest.

  A kookaburra just whipped past, like a dart through the garden. I’m grateful for our place up here among the peace of minimal digital interference. No television. Tiny internet grabs here at the store. Silence. Animals. So lucky.

  Hope the golf is perfection.

  Oh wait! I forgot. You’ve given up on perfection. Hope it was heaven!

  A x

  Good morning sunshine,

  COINCIDENCE; COINCIDENCE; COINCIDENCE.

  I am dogged.

  Michael McGirr is one of my
hero writers. I have even taken out some of his writing and tried to mimic that wonderful silken touch of his storytelling. An aeon ago I took his cousin (or his aunt or someone called McGirr) to a dance as a shiny young eighteen-year-old. I attended his ordination as a Jesuit. I have read everything he has written. I lust after his immense skill.

  Your comment about McGirr and marriage leads to the controversial question of celibacy. Let me offer a few words. Not the last by any means. But a little toe into the water. Starting with my own story.

  When I considered this life—as a young adolescent, and then later after working, studying and furiously socialising for six or so years—I think my choice for the priesthood and therefore a celibate life was based on people I had met, rather than some lofty, impersonal ideal.

  Did I know what I was giving up? I guess not. Do we ever know what we are giving up when choosing one lifestyle over another? One of the great surprises for me on entering the seminary was not so much a matter of ‘giving up’—I found a rich alternative life among stimulating companions. I’m sure that wasn’t the experience of everyone, but for me, much of it was great fun and expanded my life enormously. Perhaps it was the age thing. I was a young man when I joined, and not an adolescent.

  In choosing the life, I guess much of my trust was placed in celibate friends of mine, women and men, who seemed pretty sane—above average in their self-awareness and relationships, really, and with a good grasp of their sexual identity.

  Going into the seminary at 22, the eight years ahead of me before taking the final commitment seemed a long way off. You eventually decide to enter the agreement not to marry about six or seven months before being ordained. I guess the years of seminary life gradually socialised me into that final choice.

  Would I have been able to do better pastoral work if there was an opportunity to marry? Frankly I don’t know. Would I have been a saner and better-balanced person? Don’t know that either. If marriage meant I could write as well as Michael McGirr, I might give it serious consideration.

  I don’t put this story forward as an argument for obligatory celibacy—I think the future needs to be otherwise—but simply my story.

  Tonight I attend Sandy’s latest play, and we will meet afterwards. Your ears will burn.

  Tony

  PS This is written in haste. Still to reply appropriately to your lengthy weekend reflections.

  Dear Tony,

  Today is a plodding day. I’m writing, but it’s like wading through Andalusian mud. This is a quick break to check work email, and I caught you instead. A treat.

  Thanks for your reflections on the celibate life. You always seem pretty sane to me. Balanced, too. But then I’m the woman who wandered across a country carting sins—not a model for sanity, some would say.

  I feel a bit uncomfortable asking you to speak about celibacy—I don’t usually get into long raves with friends about how they negotiate their sexual lives. Certainly not with a parish priest!

  Interestingly though, I have a couple of girlfriends who’ve always been single by choice, and they find it incredibly offensive that people feel they have the right to ask them how they cope without a man or regular sex, as though they are disabled, or not a fully realised person, because they’ve not had a long-term relationship. These are remarkable gifted women, with big hearts and creative lives. They are not ‘old maids’—that ugly expression—or ‘spinsters’. They are contributors of the highest order, and funny and full of life.

  As an aside, on the subject of impertinent questions, people always feel mighty free to enquire after why I have not had children—as though it is some fatal flaw in my character. It was a choice Peter and I took for our own considered reasons, and I don’t feel I’m in any way diminished by it. Just different roads taken. That said, I experience my sexual identity, and the expression of it, as an integral part of myself, and can’t imagine making a choice for celibacy—particularly as a prerequisite for a career.

  And therein lies the rub, for me—the word ‘obligatory’ with reference to celibacy. I think it’s cruel to make it a condition of ministry—particularly when one considers someone like McGirr. If it sits easily for some people, that’s great—it’s a requirement of many spiritual traditions, I know—but I can see no humane reason to deny partnership and a family to those who would like to be able to live that life. Or, for that matter, to deny the community access to some wonderful ministers.

  I guess that it’s when I think about an edict like that, or about the refusal to allow women to be priests or to choose Popes, that I picture the Catholic Church as an overbearing father standing over a table of children who are quaking at the possibility that he will lose his temper. A bully who insists that it is ‘my way or the highway’; someone who directs people to ‘do as I say and not as I do’, rather than, as the Gospel says, ‘Do unto others.’

  Sorry. Not directed at you. A blurt. Telling, I guess. That isn’t at all how I see you, but I guess the truth is that it has been how I’ve seen the Church for many years.

  Regardless, I’m grateful to you for sharing more of your story with me. I appreciate your candour and generosity, instead of resorting to a party line.

  I will read the McGirr piece tomorrow night, and will do my best. Imagine him being such a hero of yours. Truth be told, I’m actually way more nervous about my other job, which is to introduce Helen Garner—MY hero. What do I say about the mountain?

  OK, signing off now. It’s wet here today. Maybe that explains the fuzziness.

  A x

  Ailsa, Ailsa, Ailsa,

  Where to start?

  A bullying father? It’s a curious thing—a frequent image of the Church that comes to mind for me is a frail, aged mother grown old with her faults and limitations, her superstitions and rock-like prejudices, but one who has given life to me and whom I love with a passion.

  If I am honest with you, reading your words hurts. Hurts, and renders me quite inadequate to answer you with truth and in words that would genuinely help you to appreciate the subtleties needing to be faced working in an institution like this.

  Your anger is not new to me, of course. It simply puts into strong language the feelings of many, in this seriously fractured time, about the supposed blindness of those of us who identify with the Catholic Church.

  Needless to say I am one such person.

  It puzzles me how you can make the distinction between me, priest for a lifetime supporting the institution in all I do and all I say—not exempting myself from taking issue with many of the more controversial matters, of course, but nevertheless seen as a faithful cog in the big wheel—and this colossus called the Church. Like many others, you quickly separate the individual that you agree with and the big institution. It’s not always logical to make this distinction.

  To describe this gigantic network of good and bad, fragile and strong, arrogant and unsure, self-satisfied and battlers as a ‘bullying father’ is a little disconcerting, to say the least. One of the colourful gospel images is of a large net of odd fish pulled up on a beach. I prefer that. We’re a pretty mixed lot, you know.

  If I am passionately committed to one thing, it is to explain to you how challenging it is to wrestle with the ambiguities and tensions within the Church today, while at the same time holding on to integrity and attempting to be a genuine minister of the gospel.

  It seems to me that each of us, whoever we are, has a fundamental choice to make: work with one’s own individual resources to bring some sanity to a world broken in so many ways (and some have the genius to do this); or work within some larger group of people, say an institution, with all the weight in the saddle-bags that comes with that choice. Think of the Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières, for example. Such people choose to draw on the best traditions, accumulated wisdom, hard-won experience and human resources that such institutions offer.

  In my experience, the struggle to work with the inevitable weight of an institution overwhelms some. For othe
rs the difficulties help them to grow. But for all it is a walk on a tightrope. I suppose the years spent chopping away at the coalface makes me guarded about hasty slogans or simplistic solutions. Or am I too fixed in my ideas? Dunno.

  Talking about his own institution, a hero of mine, Jesuit priest Walter Burghardt, nailed it for me:

  In the course of half a century (and more),

  I have seen more Catholic corruption than most Catholics read of.

  I have tasted it. I have been reasonably corrupt myself.

  And yet I joy in this Church,

  This living, throbbing, sinning people of God;

  I love it with a crucifying passion.

  Why?

  For all the Catholic hate, I experience here a community of love.

  For all the institutional idiocy, I find here a tradition of reason.

  For all the individual repressions, I breathe here an air of freedom.

  For all the fear of sex, I discover here the redemption of my body.

  In an age so inhuman, I touch here the tears of compassion.

  In a world so grim and humourless, I share here rich joy and earthly laughter.

  In the midst of death, I hear here an incomparable stress on life.

  For all the apparent absence of God, I sense here the presence of Christ.

  Haven’t addressed your issues of the significant role of women, and I’m sure a dozen other issues that could be discussed, such as the horror of sexual abuse. But enough already.

  May the conversation continue.

  Tony

  My dear Tony,

  Firstly, an apology. I’m so sorry. Hurt was the last thing I wanted to give. I’m appalled that my hastily typed words caused pain. They were not written in anger, as you suggest. Quite the reverse. They were thrown down in a stream-of-consciousness rave, without any thought that they were contentious or personal for you. Stupid. Careless.