by Lucy Palmer
OUR CHILDREN
Three budding flowers
In the summer of my life,
The autumn of yours.
Their ripening petals
Unfurl around you,
Softening your winter memories,
Warming with gentle breezes
Your falling, fading blooms.
Out of season they came,
Unexpected, joyful blossoms
To feed your weary spirit,
Offer their soul’s essence,
And lead you back home.
They know all about death,
More than we do. They know
These stars, this moon, this firmament
Is within them, that what we
Bend down to whisper as magic
Is really the endless mystery
Of creation,
Breaking and mending,
Beginning and ending.
They burst into your life like blossoms
Carried on a southern wind
From a far, faraway place
To call you home to rest.
17
Those days were like dry brittle leaves, dropping
unseen; another cup of tea and child crying.
The next morning I sat in the shivering garden watching the children play in the sandpit. A small hunched figure in a woollen hat. A slab of sorrow.
There was a swish of tyres on gravel and the sound of an old car door clunking shut.
Julian smiled ironically when he saw me, as if to say, ‘Well, I’m still here. Just.’ His skin looked drained and pinched as he shuffled into the house and I followed him inside to make tea.
I stood by the kitchen window, one hand on the warm kettle, the other on the bench. I pulled my cardigan tighter around me as I gazed over the garden. A magpie flew down and began pecking at the clothes pegs on the grass. Its sleek black tail bobbed and flitted under the flapping sheets. I wanted to stand in this spot for as long as I could, to remain in the safety of this eternal moment, to make it last. The worst is happening, I told myself. It’s here.
•••
Later that night, Julian confirmed what I had already guessed – that he would not return to hospital under any circumstances. It was clear that we had passed through yet another invisible door and were now in a place where our life together would be measured in weeks, possibly days.
Julian’s decision brought both anguish and relief. He had already done so much to prolong his life and stay with us – I did not feel I had any right to ask any more of him than he had already given. Even if I had, what difference would it make except to alienate us when we needed each other the most? He wanted to die at home, surrounded by his family, and that was what I wanted too. That night I made a promise – I would do everything possible to give him the death he wanted and deserved.
Ever my mother’s daughter, I immediately started to address the practicalities of our situation. I needed the guidance and advice of a palliative care team; I needed help with the children, knowledge of any medications and what to do if pneumonia, which he had only just narrowly overcome, should strike again.
Driven by a sense of urgency I called on all the local resources I could muster. Julian’s older sons also needed to be kept abreast of everything that was happening – particularly Charlie, who was away in Seoul, and Oliver, who was also overseas.
My relationship with the boys had, by this time, spanned more than six years, and we had all settled into a state of comfortable friendship and respect. Now I needed them; this was not a journey I felt able to take alone. Although I was conscious that the experience might be especially difficult for them, as they had already lost their mother, still I felt confident they would know what they needed to do; I admired the support they had always given Julian and was grateful for their presence.
•••
While doctors were helpful in explaining Julian’s likely medical needs in the days ahead, I focused on his emotional and spiritual life. I had already been reading as much as I could – Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying had become my bible, a blueprint of a path I should try to walk when the time came. I was trying my best to prepare but Julian’s death was impossible to imagine. I would never be ready. I could only hope that I would be enough.
Henry organised for us both to attend a conference on Spirituality in Palliative Care at the Nan Tien Buddhist temple in Wollongong. Catholics, Buddhists, Aboriginal healers, palliative carers all spoke about what they had learned about caring for someone.
One speech began in a very unexpected way when a diminutive Filipino woman with greying hair quietly shuffled onto the stage in an old-fashioned blue housecoat, pushing, as I recall, a tea trolley. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the room wondering if she was lost.
Then, quietly and with enormous dignity, she walked to the microphone and began to explain her role in a Sydney hospice.
‘When I am with the dying,’ she said, ‘I take them tea. But that’s not what is important – the tea is just my excuse.’
Relieved, muffled laughter scattered across the room.
‘I bring my presence, my brokenness, my humanity, and we sit together.’
Driving home up the winding Macquarie Pass with its ancient outcrops of weathered rock walls, I felt grateful to be reminded not to get caught up in the detail and distraction of what was happening to Julian’s body alone. I needed to love him, to stay connected with the man he truly was; and to allow us both to love one another, no matter how imperfect either of us might be.
•••
As the days passed, time no longer felt like a seamless line along which we could move at will – remembering the past, thinking about the present, worrying about the future – but was now almost one continuous, almost static moment.
In this sacred time, so many things that did not really matter simply fell away. There were times when, instead of fussing about the play dough all over the floor, I stepped over it and noticed instead the way the light was falling through the kitchen window as dusk approached, the sun squandering its last offering of warmth. Rather than worry about the mud that would be coming into the house, I felt the wind hurtling past the trees as the children repeatedly climbed and leaped to the ground. I inhaled, as I never had before, the sweet decaying stench of rotting earth and the touch of thin fibrous leaves. I found myself leaning more towards another reality, absorbed and transported by all the extraordinary details of everyday life.
Without my fully realising it, I was being slowly stripped down. I moved into Julian’s space, seeing the things that he was noticing, the details of life that we both might have previously overlooked. I focused as much as I could on sensing and trying to tune in to where he was even though he was often in a world I could not reach. I looked on with envy at times as he moved into ever deeper acceptance and a seeming contentment.
One day, when a flurry of morning snow came, I took him tea. He was sitting up in our large bed, reading Mountaineer by Chris Bonington. He was so terribly thin. The hardback book was cracked open, his glasses were off and his nose was almost touching the rigid paper peaks.
‘It’s snowing, Jules,’ I said.
The book was closed with a soft sigh.
I expected Julian to complain, to say something about the frost on our newly planted trees, and about how cold these days could be, these long, uncertain days. Instead, he took my hand and gazed out of the window at the falling flakes, his expression full of awe.
‘The snow,’ he said, and then repeated it. ‘It is so beautiful.’ I remember crying in his arms, my hot red face buried in his shoulder, his hand on my back. I cried not because he was dying, but because he was seeing, as I was through his eyes, the pure and simple beauty of snow, possibly for the very first time.
•••
I often wondered whether Julian would ever break down, whether there would be a moment in which he cried, raged or protested against his fate. That moment never came.
‘Thank you, darling,’ he said, always gracious and grateful for every act of kindness he was shown.
I had decided to ask Allan, our main source of physical strength, to re-landscape what I considered to be quite a depressing section of our back garden.
Behind our house, in the middle of the extraordinary landscape of Kangaloon, with its wild ghost gum forests and silken hills, was the vision of a 1960s suburban dream – a great concrete slab with a Hills hoist in the centre. I couldn’t deny its usefulness, but I cringed whenever I saw it.
The children had a mixed relationship with this part of the garden too. While it was great for wheeling a tricycle or pushing a doll’s pram, they often fell over on it, scraping the flesh of their knees and arms, while all around the patient trees with their dappled, dancing light beckoned us to their shade and softness.
When I explained my plan to Julian, he disagreed. Ever the pragmatist, he thought the concrete was useful for the children – and if I dug up the ancient hoist, where would we hang our washing?
It was hard to answer – I only knew that my heart and soul needed more beauty and that the harshness of that awful grey concrete just outside our back door affected me deeply, irrationally.
Despite his initial protest, I think Julian understood for he said nothing more against the idea. Within days the offending area was excavated and replaced by a tentative lawn with stone steps leading to a small cubby house for the children under the wisteria. Our friend Maur donated an outdoor table.
When it was finished, Julian shuffled down the stairs in his dressing-gown to stand at the open door.
‘I rather miss that washing line,’ he said with characteristic irony.
And I remember thinking as I looked at him, He knows we’re going to be okay.
•••
Many people came to visit Julian during his final weeks. Most times I loved to see our friends, to bask in the kindness they brought us. Late one afternoon, however, an acquaintance of Julian’s came. Initially I was pleased to see him at the door and I knew Julian would be happy too.
But as he walked into the house, I realised he had brought two of his young children with him. I watched in dismay as he settled in a chair next to Julian and opened two bottles of beer, already oblivious to where his children might have gone.
I went into the garden, where they were all playing, seething with frustration. It was typical of a certain kind of man to turn up announced with two small children and then effectively abandon them without a word into my care.
As the sun went down I called Meg, Charlotte and George inside for dinner, keeping an eye on the other two visitors through the kitchen window as they continued playing in the sandpit.
A short time later our guest came in.
‘Oh!’ he said, glancing at our children. ‘Where are the others?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said, not looking at him. I was in no mood for explanations.
He went outside, collected his children, said a stiffly optimistic ‘cheerio’ and left.
Even though he later apologised, incidents like this played into my sense of struggle and a certain level of self-pity – it seemed very few people understood the load I was already carrying. One afternoon Oliver drove down from Sydney.
‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked.
‘That,’ I said through gritted teeth, ‘is becoming a very dangerous question. Perhaps you could try something else? Do you have any dinner planned? Do you need any help or do you need me to go to the shops? And would you like me to cook?’
I knew that I sounded curt but I was, at that moment, beyond caring. I had always been hesitant about seeming to be too bossy or demanding with Julian’s boys, although their recollections may be quite different. But the days when I could happily accommodate their needs were over. I knew I was risking a great deal by being so direct. Despite my outward confidence, I nurtured a very real and secret fear that if we seriously clashed during this stressful time, that our relationships might not recover.
I realise now, knowing them as I do, that this said a lot more about my fragile state at the time than about their resilience, generosity or sense of family loyalty. When I did raise my issues with them after hours of private agonising, they were often surprised that I had so much trouble saying what I needed. They understood more than I realised how much I was struggling, and that ultimately it was all about making things right for Julian.
•••
One morning I woke up with a strong intuitive sense that something was different; the world had somehow shifted overnight. I went downstairs to make some tea and as I passed by a bookcase, a small piece of folded paper came fluttering down in front of me and fell at my feet.
I opened it up. It was written in Charmian’s handwriting and appeared to be a short recipe. I looked up to see where it might have come from. The books on the shelf were all in place with their spines facing out. I sat at the kitchen table trying to decipher the hastily written words, and wondering what I was supposed to make of this strange event.
Later that day, I was sitting in the garden at dusk while the children were playing. The sky was watery and the day was fading without fanfare. A dull light about the size of a person, perhaps slightly smaller, moved slowly around the garden. I watched as it gradually disappeared, wondering what I was seeing and experiencing, half sensing it was a woman I should have known.
The following night I sat with Julian, who was occasionally using an oxygen tank to help him breathe. Just under our window was the front door, where there was an old wooden statue we had brought from Papua New Guinea: a carved naked woman carrying an open-sided bowl. I had made a raku pot which sat inside its alcove. The night was unusually still.
The next thing I heard was an almighty crash. I ran downstairs and found the statue had toppled to the ground, my bowl smashed into pieces.
I had a strong intuition who it was – a feeling of energy and light that seemed so familiar.
‘Okay, that’s enough,’ I shouted to the seemingly empty garden. ‘If all you want to do is frighten me, go away. Otherwise, come and help.’
When I went back upstairs Julian said, ‘Who were you talking to, darling?’
‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s just me, talking to myself.’
I never told Julian about any of these experiences – they were unnerving enough for me.
As I lay in bed that night, I felt a sense of softening, as though the air from an overinflated tyre had been let out. Beyond the medical care, beyond what I could physically do and beyond the love I could give, it was clear that I now needed help of a very different kind.
COME CLOSE
Come close and sit and talk with me a while,
We need to be more honest with each other.
I know I make you smile, and sometimes cry –
You know I have a love I cannot smother.
We are made such by facts we do not will,
And like great standing stones – the facts stand still.
I cannot check your skill to move my heart,
I cannot pass an hour without a thought of you –
Strongest when we are most apart.
I long to break the ties that keep us bounded,
To fly with you in some forgotten place,
Untrammelled, free to love as we are able,
And wipe away the tears upon your face.
18
Outside my window, a branch scuttles against the
glass. A leaf leans out, not straining, but flowing
out to a tapering end; effortless like death.
As Julian’s health declined over the first two weeks of September, we were extraordinarily blessed by the arrival of an amazing and deeply compassionate palliative care nurse, Jean Warburton. Out of all the people I met during this ti
me, she was one of the few who had the soothing presence of the truly kind. It also helped that she had trodden this road so many times before and knew what lay ahead. One afternoon she rang to see how Julian was, explaining that she had been delayed and could not come to see him unless there was something important for her to do.
‘No, everything is fine, Julian is resting,’ I said, ‘but the girls have come home with lice, so they can’t go to preschool tomorrow.’
Without my saying anything, Jean suggested that she would find time to come after she had finished work. She could sense that all was not well with me.
‘No,’ I insisted, ‘leave it for today. I’ll be fine.’
After I put down the phone I burst into tears – no preschool meant no rest at all for me and a potentially exhausting trip to town with three children to fetch the lice treatment.
I began to prepare dinner. Thankfully, Edward and Henry were expected, which I knew would cheer Julian up and give us all a much-needed morale boost. A few minutes later I heard a light knock at the front door.
It was Jean, carrying a small paper bag and looking slightly sheepish.
‘I thought you might need this,’ she said, handing me two bottles of lice shampoo.
•••
I knew that the time for Julian to leave us was getting closer. It was not just his physical self that was fading, but his gaze was increasingly focused on a faraway point. He was sleeping a great deal and eating less and less.
I rang Charlie and Oliver and suggested they should come home as soon as possible.
We managed to have a family dinner one night with John and Mary, a bittersweet celebration that week of Edward’s twenty-first birthday and Henry’s twenty-fourth.
After we’d eaten, Julian removed one of his favourite possessions, an old Rolex watch, and handed it to Edward.