by Petrea King
‘With remarkable candour, Petrea King reveals a life buffeted by emotional and physical trauma. That she survived, and thrived, and has helped thousands of others along the way, is testament to her conviction that it isn’t our traumas and tragedies, but the view that we take of them, that determines the quality of our lives.’
Margaret Throsby
‘So many hearts salved, so much joy, strength, consolation and wisdom given by this extraordinary woman. As another prominent Australian said to her not long after he was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, “I have arranged to take my own life, but be damned if I will die before I’ve learnt to love.”’ David Leser,
The Australian Women’s Weekly
‘Petrea King works and writes from a rare level of insight. She understands that true healing is more than a question of physical life or death.’ Swami Kriyananda (Donald Walters), author
‘I have personally observed Petrea King’s work, and her work is both loving and beautiful.’ Dr Jerry Jamposlky
‘Petrea’s support group is not about dying. It is about living. For these people every moment is precious, to be savoured and lived as vitally as possible. It is not the quantity of life that matters but the quality.’
Panorama Magazine, Melbourne
Certain names and details have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.
First published in 2017
Copyright © Petrea King 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 76029 733 6
eISBN 978 1 76063 930 3
Internal design by Romina Panetta
Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Cover design: Romina Panetta
Cover image: Ben Dearnley
Until you become a rebirth, you won’t know what that is.
It’s the same with anything.
You don’t understand until you are what you’re trying to understand.
Become reason, and you’ll know it perfectly.
Become love and be a burning wick at the centre of yourself.
I would make this very plain, if someone were ready for what I have to tell.
Figs are cheap around here!
Mystical knowledge is easy to come by.
All you need is just to arrive, as a bird who loves figs lights in a fig tree.
Rumi, 1207–1273, excerpt from ‘Dying’
Contents
A note from the author
Part 1 Growing up
1In the beginning, there was an end
2Off to Sydney
3The bones of my story
4The love of country
5Putting one foot in front of the other
6The great outdoors
7The land of the long white cloud
8Travel broadens the mind
9Escaping madness
Part 2 A quest for love
10Naturopathy, Leo and love
11Life’s surprises
12Helping, fixing or serving
13The roller-coaster of life and death
14Grief and loss
15Out of the frying pan
16A good death
17Finding a way through
18Escape to the country
19Back to the cave
20Home again
Part 3 In search of meaning
21Behind closed doors
22The peace that passes all understanding
23Stepping out
24A growing confidence
25A full house
26Difficult work
27Broadening my horizons
28On the move again
Part 4 A home for the bewildered
29Hope and hesitancy
30More flesh and bones
31Who’d have thought?
32Leo’s lump
33Our tree change
34Healing journeys
35A dream come true
36Never smooth sailing
37Without a dream, nothing happens
38Out and about
39Meetings in the ether
40The quest for peace
Epilogue
Quest for Life Centre
Quest for Life Foundation
Acknowledgements
A note from the author
It’s often not until we encounter a significant trauma that our desire for peace becomes paramount. This trauma might be the death of a loved one, the diagnosis of a serious illness, or a divorce.
When you’re faced with the unfamiliar landscape of your own anguish, it can be hard to find good company, so it’s a blessing to spend time with others who are familiar with the territory. They help normalise the powerful emotional roller-coaster that we find ourselves riding. We hurtle through space and time, unwilling passengers without a compass—but in their company, listening to their stories, we no longer feel isolated, that we’re going mad, that God’s out to get us, that life isn’t worth living.
The stories we tell about our lives are comprised of bones and flesh. The bones are the historical facts: the dramas, traumas, disappointments, joys, tragedies and disasters that interrupt the unfolding of a life. The flesh holds our emotional reactions, often buried for years or even decades until the unconscious rattling of our bones demands acknowledgement, expression and healing. It’s not enough just to hope that we’ll survive our traumas. Hope has to have legs. Moving forward is always underpinned by effort.
I’ve sucked and chewed considerably upon the flesh of my story over the past thirty-plus years: in the therapist’s chair, in lonely dark nights of the soul and in sharing details with hundreds of thousands of people. I’ve told parts of my story on television, on the radio, at workshops, in interviews with journalists, and through countless talks and speeches. Fragments of my story have also appeared in several of my other books, but many people asked for something more sequential and complete.
In writing this memoir, I found that it was still a challenge to explore so many deeply personal aspects of my life. I was confronted with raw emotions that I had assiduously avoided at the time, when tears were not an option. Ultimately, it has been healing to revisit past traumas now that I have more emotional awareness and understanding.
I am indebted to thousands of people who, over the decades, have helped me find words to describe the inner journey we are all embarked upon: the journey home to our essential self, a place where we stop needing life to behave in a particular way in order for us to be happy. The individuals and groups I’ve worked with have taught me that we can grow through adversity into more compassionate, wise and insightful people who choose courage in the presence of the unknown. We are designed to heal from trauma, though it certainly doesn’t feel like that when we’re in the midst of despair. Our bodies are designed to heal from injury and sickness and the brain can heal from trauma too.
CHAPTER 1
In the beginning, there was an end
1951
My first memory is of rainbows. I lay on the floor, staring at the bevelled edges of the small windows that enclosed the verandah of my family home in Brisbane. I was entranced by slivers of rainbow light.
My next memory is of being lifted onto a chair with my nose at the level of a table. In front of me lay a box encased in black leather. Someone opened it, and I was fascinated and captivated by an optometrist’s prism sitting in purple plush satin, colours radiating from its facets. Rainbows have woven their magic throughout my life and, to this day, their sublime beauty fills me with joy and wonder.
***
According to my mother, Rae, I was very quiet and contented as a baby. She would often leave me under the trees in my bassinet, where I was mesmerised by the movement of the leaves in the breeze or the clouds drifting through the sky.
Rae already had two young children on her hands, my brothers Brenden and Ross. Brenden, twenty-one months older than me, was a handful and required a good deal of Rae’s attention. He clung to her back like a frightened little koala as she attended to her household duties. She has often said there was no space for me because Brenden was always in her lap or being carried.
Ross, in contrast, was an easygoing child with a sunny disposition and a broad grin. He seemed to weather the emotional undercurrents in our home with ease, perhaps through oblivion. He was dark-haired, freckled and four years older than me. Brenden was fair haired and not so freckled as Ross, and his worldview was completely different from Ross’s—and probably from that of every other family member. He once said, ‘It’s easy for Ross to be nice.’ Yet Brenden dominated our household; everyone seemed to have a stronger relationship to him than to each other.
Brenden may well have had intense ADHD thirty years before anyone used that term. He was highly intelligent, funny, accident-prone and complex, and his moods could shift in a flash. As a small child, I found him quite unnerving—sometimes frightening—because I never knew what might happen next. My fight-flight-freeze button was perpetually switched on. Only one thing was predictable, a daily disruption that I awaited with a confusing mix of emotions. Each morning, the moment my mother’s back was turned, Brenden emptied the porridge bowl over his head. I waited anxiously, watching him watching Rae. He would catch the one moment her attention was distracted from supervising him and, in a flash, the bowl was on top of his head. Porridge dripped down through his short hair, over his mischievous face, landing in splotches on his fresh, clean clothing. His enjoyment of this daily prank was tinged with my anxiety at the ensuing upset and Rae’s frustration as she mopped up the mess and rushed to wash his hair and change his clothes.
Being the youngest, I tried to be as little bother to Rae as possible. Brenden filled the house with his chaos and was forever getting into more mischief than most: falling out of windows, cutting himself, breaking bones, setting fire to things, painting the walls with lipstick. I did my best to be invisible and not to take up any space or have any needs. This became second nature to me, along with a strong sense of responsibility for keeping Brenden safe. I loved him intensely and was always trailing along behind him, seeking his acknowledgement of my existence. He often roped me into an activity better left alone.
One sunny day in our backyard, Brenden discovered something strange in the fork of a tree: a nest of white fluff. When we scooped it up enthusiastically, we were stung all over our hands by baby hairy caterpillars. Brenden’s screams were much louder than mine, and I was struck by an agony of fear at seeing him so upset. My tears were as much for him as for the stinging in my hands, which weren’t as badly hurt as his.
***
My father, Geoff, had not long returned from World War II. He had lied about his age to enlist at seventeen, interrupting his education. He served in the Middle East and New Guinea. On his return five long years later, he and his fellow veterans were told to get on with their lives—and never to talk about the bones and certainly not the flesh of their experiences. Geoff married Rae shortly afterwards and was soon focused on building a career and providing for his young family. He did his best to put on a brave and confident face in the workplace, appearing happy and jolly in public, while at home he was often tense, irritable and guarded.
His father, Harold, was bound by suffocating social and religious strictures that had long ago quashed any sense of humour—if he’d ever had any. His presence alone instilled fear and hesitancy in me and my brothers. Not that he would ever raise his voice or hand. He didn’t need to: he could slice you in half with a look. I imagine he was no fun for Geoff to grow up with, and I’ve often wondered whether my father’s harshness was born of his upbringing or the war or a combination of both.
He played some strange games with us when we were very young. He would often tickle me before I went to sleep at night, and while I couldn’t stop laughing, I was also beside myself with near hysteria, because Geoff wouldn’t stop. This agonising hilarity underlined the sense that things could look and sound okay but, in truth, they were the opposite. In an even stranger game, my brothers and I would lie in a line on the living-room floor, and Geoff would put matches between our toes. Amid the fear and nervous laughter, he would then light them and see who could bear the heat the longest.
These ‘games’ were more than confusing to me and, while I loved my father, I was also scared of him. I have no memory of sitting on his knee or receiving affection from him, though anyone hearing our nightly merriment would have been surprised by this. I found the combination of laughter and fear quite bewildering as a five-year-old girl finding her way into this strange world, dominated by the males within it.
Like me, Rae was dwarfed by the masculine energy in our home; and, like Geoff, she had her own complicated emotional history. Her father, Siegfried, married my grandmother, Phyllis, when he was forty-two and Granny was just eighteen. They had three children: two sons and Rae, the youngest. His Judaism didn’t feature strongly in their early upbringing, but as he aged he wanted his sons to say the Kaddish prayers—the Jewish prayers for the dead—for him when the time came.
Judaism is passed down through the women, so to enable the boys to become Jewish, Granny and Rae, who was then just thirteen, converted at my grandfather’s dogged insistence. This involved them learning Hebrew and being dunked by the rabbis in the Sandgate Baths, something that Granny and Rae resented and found excruciatingly embarrassing. My mother struggled as a newly converted Jew in a private Methodist and Presbyterian girls’ school; she was forced to observe the Jewish holy days, which inevitably drew unwanted attention to her. She was fortunate to find a friend in one of her teachers, Jean, whose understanding was a balm to poor Rae.
The whole ordeal turned Granny vehemently against religion, and she lost all respect and love for her husband. She and Rae were very close, so when Rae became a talented contralto singer and was accepted into the Melbourne Conservatorium, Granny moved down with her as a chaperone. This allowed Granny to escape from the claustrophobia of her relationship with an increasingly demanding and difficult husband. In her sixties, long after my grandfather’s death, she married a minister on the condition that he never mention religion in the house!
I adored my mother’s voice, full of the warmth of autumnal colours. Her specialty was German lieder and, after her marriage to Geoff, as she became well known through her singing live on radio, her career began to overshadow his—a fact that he resented. Once he was mistakenly called by her maiden name, ‘Mr Benjamin’, he set about sabotaging her career, perhaps unconsciously. When my brothers and I were very young, Geoff would cancel his commitment to mind us just when Rae was due to leave for the radio station. She finally gave up her career in frustration, find
ing it a stress instead of a pleasure.
Granny’s temperament was quite different to her daughter’s. Like Ross, she was a delightful antidote to the shifting emotional undercurrents that pervaded our lives. She was a spectacular human being full of love, life and good humour. She had a keen wit, could play any tune on the piano after someone hummed a few bars, was heartily impressed with her own efforts at watercolour painting, and had generous arms that were always happy to hug me.
It was Granny who reassured me that farting wasn’t a medical condition as she enthusiastically rattled the timber shutters of her Queenslander with her efforts. Her confidence in life was inspiring—she strode heartily into any situation with an unshakeable certainty about herself. I felt safe in her presence and relished her company.
At home, I was acutely aware of, and confused by, the emotional undercurrents within our family; they were never shared out loud except through unpredictable, angry outbursts. Geoff ’s frozen silences were hard to interpret and, at such times, I did my best to give him a wide berth. I grew into a quiet and anxious child, uncertain about the world or my purpose within it. I became preoccupied with existential questions while being too young to articulate them. Perhaps I had been born to the wrong family—or, more likely, on the wrong planet.
***
When I was four, I had my first encounter with death.
Granny’s companion, Peter, was a crusty old sea captain with a ready smile and a gentle disposition. The delicious smell of pipe tobacco hung about him and heralded his presence; nowadays, the very rare scent of it still melts my heart and brings tears of happiness. His hair was wispy white, his face crinkled with long exposure to sunshine and laughter, and I was fascinated with the white hairs that sprouted like grass tufts from his ears. While his features were chiselled and tanned, his eyes danced with a humorous twinkle and were full of softness, compassion and wisdom.
Peter and Granny were dear friends, and the warmth of their companionship was a safe and happy harbour in which I felt anchored and cherished. For one of his birthdays, Granny and I decorated a cake with liquorice straps for a roadway and a liquorice model of his car, including its running boards; in my mind’s eye, it was an identical replica of the one he drove and loved. On very special occasions he’d let me stand on the running board of the car as he drove slowly to the bottom of our street. His warm delight when we presented him with our special birthday cake was memorable.