by Lucy Palmer
‘It’s okay, Luce,’ she said, reaching out a pale hand to touch me. ‘I’m going to be alright.’
Our recording session was delayed by the arrival of two women who had come to shave Ros’s head following what turned out to be her last session of chemotherapy.
As they waited in the kitchen, she whisked off her headscarf and said, with characteristic black humour, that she felt like something out of a horror movie. There were sprouts of dark hair sticking out of her shiny skull.
‘What do you think, Luce? Should I go for a number one?’
‘The hats were okay, but the tufts have to go,’ I told her.
She laughed weakly and her eyes met mine. Despite everything, it amazed me that Ros could still find moments to savour the life she still had to live.
After the bright headscarf was back in place, we resumed our seats in the corner of her room. I could feel the tension in my heart until, with a sad smile, she finally spoke.
‘Well, come on, Luce,’ she said with an ironic smile. ‘I haven’t got forever.’
So I switched on the recorder and held the microphone near.
‘What are you going to ask me?’ Ros said matter-of-factly.
‘Why don’t we start with the children’s births?’ I suggested.
And so began her last letters to her children.
Over the next hour, Ros spoke directly to them, as if I was no longer there, but was simply a witness to her most honest and sacred self. She told them some of the stories of her life, her passions, her regrets, her hopes for them.
Through tears, she told them, as only a dying mother could, how much she loved them.
I wept on the train to the airport.
It was not just Ros’s eccentricities, her sense of fun, her serious, frustrating earnestness that I loved; it was her ability to tell the truth and, even at this most critical point in her life, to speak with such honesty to the people she loved most. Having cancer had given her permission to be more real than she had ever been and allowed those around her to set aside the usual inhibitions that can ruin so many potentially wonderful friendships.
I had watched her open up her heart as the illness progressed, and felt privileged to be a part of her warts-and-all journey. Her cancer was not pretty; it ravaged her. It was such an extraordinary journey through gratitude, shattered dreams, anger and then back to love.
‘I often think of Jules,’ she said later that day.
‘What do you think about?’
‘I think of the moment you met at that party.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘I felt such a strong sense of light between you,’ she said. ‘I have never forgotten it.’
After she died, for many years I kept a photograph of her on my desk. Behind her, in the foothills of Madang, was a blur of women dancing in a line, their bodies oiled, their hair festooned with feathers. She is looking back towards me over her shoulder, and in her eyes the same old Ros is always there, her gaze direct and full of kindness.
•••
A year after Ros died, my father also died from cancer.
George and I flew over to the UK and decided that we would go with Libby and her children, Hannah, Beatrice, Sam and Florence, to see his body at the funeral parlour, a modified terrace house in the backstreets of Kidderminster.
Bizarrely, he was clothed in a silky white outfit with a high winged collar, a waistcoat and a bow tie. He looked like a cross between Liberace and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It was somehow fitting that this self-deprecating man with such a wonderful sense of humour would be clothed in something that was more akin to fancy dress. We laughed and held one another, none of us really knowing how to speak about the departure of such a complex man.
I could not cry for my father at his funeral, and I never have; it has always felt as though there was no unfinished business between us.
Before he died, I had flown to England to spend some time with him and to offer my mother whatever meagre support I could. He was already so weak and unsteady on his feet that I could not imagine how he would survive the weeks of radiation that were planned.
One day, running late, I rang him from the side of the road. Our conversation was punctuated by long pauses as he gathered his breath to speak. After one long break he said, ‘I love you, I hope you know that.’ The world seem to suddenly hover in the space around his words.
‘Yes, I do know that,’ I told him, ‘and I love you too.’
The people I have loved who have left this physical life have become a part of me; I carry them, embody them.
Over the years I have discovered that death and grief are such inadequate terms to describe or evoke the mystery of what happens when someone dies. Even language itself shrinks in the face of the enormity of its mystery. ‘I’m sorry to hear that Julian passed over’ or has gone ‘to his eternal rest’.
The only peace I have ever found is in the space beyond words.
Instead of asking questions or seeking answers, I prefer to sit and watch the trembling light as it falls through the open window on my lap, or to follow the cloud’s shadows on the long, waving grass outside my window.
28
All love ends in loss, eventually.
Ten years ago, at Julian’s funeral, I attempted to say something about him, something defining and memorable. I failed. I found it impossible to describe, in such turbulent days, the essence of who he was.
In this past decade, I have come to know Julian in a different way.
I retraced him through the meals he cooked, the books he read on the Spanish Civil War, the opera and jazz he loved and the long life he lived before we ever met, a life I could never possibly know.
The children and I developed little rituals to include Julian in our daily lives, often to do with his poorer choices in food. Dad’s Worms – two crackers squashed together with butter bursting through the tiny holes. Dad’s Pies – revolting meat pies that he loved. Dad’s Lollies – a tin of travel sweets covered in fine icing sugar.
We had old trunks into which we put some of his belongings – wallets, glasses, old credit cards, pens and – the perfect Harry Potter costume – his black lawyer’s robes.
I carefully put aside a well-thumbed copy of The Economist that he was reading before he died into a box with his belongings – family photos, his MBE, his Independence medals from his years in Papua New Guinea.
He still has a life in me as he does in all the people who loved him.
•••
One of the greatest gifts Julian ever gave me was very simple; he believed in me with a faith that never wavered. He saw me as a very capable, gregarious and loving person. He knew my faults, of course, and tolerated them, but these he always saw through a much kinder and more forgiving lens than my own.
Julian never imposed on any of us a sense of his own suffering. He never wept and said, ‘Why me?’ He never said cancer was unfair, that it shouldn’t be happening. While he certainly became very gloomy and inward at times, he was always at great pains to protect us all.
While I lamented in the past his inability to talk to me honestly about how he was feeling, over the years I began to see the greater wisdom of his decision to leave us with peace and in peace. I was in awe of what he had done for love, for all of us.
When Julian died, I crossed the threshold into another life, seeing everything but understanding nothing except for the enormity and extraordinary miracle of death. I felt strangely awed and elated, privileged by my momentary glimpse into its impossible, beautiful truth.
Sometimes I still go out at night and stand on the edge of that mystery; I have come to love the comfort of the sky. To stand on that threshold with Julian and then to return to life empty-handed was, in fact, an enormous privilege, and I sometimes dare to wonder – what if it all makes sense in the end, the things that seem to make no sense at all?
Ten years ago, I stepped through an invisible door and found myself in another life.
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My whole being became a scattered landscape, a series of fragments all slightly askew.
In this emptier world, it became my main task to reassemble the pieces of myself that I wanted to keep, and to leave behind the attitudes, emotions and relationships that could not be sustained.
It was deeply painful, to realise that there were people that I had loved and valued who had walked away without explanation. This was something else that I did not expect, that the world I knew would undergo such enormous, unpredictable shifts. These betrayals, if that is what they were, brought another sense of bewilderment, a cruel reminder that Julian really had left and that the world, as I had known it, had inexorably changed.
Life can have so many untidy endings.
In my lowest moments, I often thought of my mother and her resolute determination. There were only a few times I had ever seen her truly crumble under pressure but it never lasted long – the strength of her will to keep going was just too strong. And while I sometimes found her tough and unyielding, there were many moments where I relied on her example and remembered the lessons she taught me.
As a student, I had moved to a dilapidated house in Battersea for the summer and found a job at the famous Price’s candle factory. In the evenings I renovated and painted, slept on a mattress on top of newspaper and lived mostly on packet soup.
The factory was oppressive, full of booming machines, fluorescent lights and the sickly stink of hot wax. Over the machines, I could hear the remote sound of a tinny radio blasting out Stevie Wonder: ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’.
One evening I was feeling very down. All my friends were away for the summer and I knew few people. I went to find a phone box and called home.
‘I think I’m going to come home for a while – it’s miserable here,’ I told my mother.
There was a pause while she considered my request.
‘You just have to pull yourself together, Lucy,’ she said eventually. ‘You’ll be fine.’
I remember putting the phone down, numbed by her response.
But as I walked back home along the empty streets, I had a moment of rare clarity. She’s right. It’s all up to me. I can do it.
The fortitude I gained from my mother’s remark has remained with me all these years, the last defence against giving up. With three children to care for, I knew I had no choice but to keep going, to keep growing as Julian would have wanted me to. It was also the kind encouragement of others that got me through, when people gave me the greatest gift we have – time.
I have gradually healed and learned to be grateful for so many things: close friendships, a financial legacy that allowed me to be a full-time mother when the children were small, and the sanctuary of the farm where we have now lived for so many years. Most of all I am thankful to the children, who gave me a reason to get up every day and keep going.
Remembering Julian’s quiet determination helped me to gradually rebuild my life: socially, as a parent alone, the daily care, the homework, holidays, disputes and emotions, the flat tyres, the bills and the broken pump. I have done my best to provide the love and support the children have lost. I hope it is enough.
And somehow, very much in keeping with the persistence he always possessed in life, Julian’s spirit is still here. I sit at his desk and look out at the orchard that he planted. A pair of his old corduroy trousers hang on my study door. I’ve accepted that the door of my love for Julian will never be shut, and I no longer wish it to be so. Love did not die when he did.
I remember how he dealt with so many disappointments and setbacks; I was at his side as he faced every trial, every dashed hope. Cancer repeatedly brought him to his knees. And yet I saw again and again his true calibre, how he maintained a deep, inner calm and remained gracious to others even in the face of his own suffering. Not for a moment did he relinquish the freedom to embrace everything that life offered, even death.
Tonight, I simply want to be with him, to sit in the same companionable cocoon that marked so many hours of our life together over those brief six years. I have been on a long journey, and now I want to rest and remember.
In my hand, I hold an empty acacia pod with one seed remaining. It has laid itself bare, an offering with no apology, no regret. Its long once-cupped hands are tilted back, parted to take in the first crack of light, the moment where life and surrender began. I gaze upon this lonely seed and drink in its contentment, and begin to write:
My darling Jules,
It’s been ten years, hundreds of human days, since you left us.
These days have drifted away like the slow turning of another page; not the laughter and intimacy of our life together, but with quiet reading by a solitary lamp.
I still sleep on the same side of the bed. If I lie down on your side I feel marooned, as though I am in the wrong body, disorientated. For months after you died I woke all the time, my breath sharp and short, thinking you were there. Were you? Did you really come and speak to me? I may never know.
I read a lot about grief after you died, the sort of books that would have made you quietly roll your eyes: self-help books, spiritual books, accounts of the afterlife and the meaning of death. I know you would have found it embarrassing, you with your stoic English attitudes and deep, unshakeable peace. But I never hid anything from you in life, so why start now?
There were times that I blundered so far into my internal forest, I doubted whether I would ever come back. I was in denial, people told me. I needed closure. I needed to let go.
You would have understood. You knew the intricate fabric that binds people together, the strong threads of unbroken love. You knew that whatever I did, even if I remarried a hundred times, there would always be a place in my heart for us that nothing could assail.
I hope you sometimes glimpse me now, in my stronger days. I hope you know your children are all thriving. They miss you, Jules.
But when the sadness lifts, I feel so grateful that I knew you. I would suffer it all over again to have spent those exhilarating years with you and to know what I know now. If the pain of loss is the cost of a real, enduring love, then that is the price I have paid.
All my love, L
Epilogue
Our home is full of personal treasures, including several videos I made of Julian with the children when they were young.
But there is one I have never seen. For some reason the video cassette which just had 2001 written on it was unplayable on the machine that I had, so for many years it just lay in an old black box at the back of a cupboard.
In 2016, fifteen years after Julian’s death, I decide it’s time to watch it so I have it sent away to be transferred onto a DVD.
The first image that flickers onto the screen is Julian sitting in the garden, near the cubby house, pallid and thin in the faint winter sun. The children are playing nearby, occasionally coming in to hug him, and I am holding the camera, asking questions as usual.
‘How are you feeling, Jules?’
‘It’s so nice to be out in the sun, the first day I’ve been able to get out.’
He tries to give me a heartened smile but I can see it is an effort.
‘It’s not cold at all is it? How are you feeling?’
‘Tired, very tired,’ he says. ‘I’ve still got a bit of a queasy feeling. But otherwise I’m enjoying the day. Just letting the time go nicely.’
There is a long pause while I film him and he stares back at me, saying nothing. The children run in and out of earshot.
‘This is lovely, darling,’ he says finally without irony, coughing slightly.
I zoom out a little. Julian is framed by spring flowers and the budding promise of long days under a kind tree.
‘These days and hours are precious,’ he says, ‘they really are.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my children, George, Meg, and Charlotte, for their patience and understanding while I took time away from them to write this memoir.
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p; My heartfelt thanks to Oliver, Charles, Henry and Edward for their friendship, love and loyalty. Without the support of all of Julian’s children, this book would never have been written.
To the extended Thirlwall family, especially Jordana, Mark, Cat, and their children, whose generosity and integrity have brought such light and joy to our family.
To my mother Eileen, for her resilience, strength and unconditional love. To my sister Libby and her children Hannah, Beatrice, Samuel and Florence, who have brought us so much joy.
To the formidable Mary-Louise O’Callaghan and the extraordinary Harry Moore, whose love, constancy and wisdom are the bedrock of my daily life. To Celeste Coucke and Stephen Fearnley, my dear friends who lift my soul and are a constant source of inspiration.
To Steph Hammond, Meg Harris and the wider Hammond family. I could not have done any of this without you by my side, encouraging me every step of the way. To Joan and Michael O’Callaghan, whose love and support for us all has been truly remarkable. To Tara and Craig Elias, who kept me going with fresh fruit, laughter and friendship, my heartfelt gratitude.
To Jo Shepherd, my loyal and loving friend, and to Susie Smith for her fearlessness and loyalty.
To John, Meg and Lydia Bell, our beloved friends. Thank you for filling an important space in our family with laughter, love and warmth. Every moment with you is memorable.
To Janine Shepherd, who has not only opened doors for me but led the way with courage and dignity. To Judy Benjamin, who convinced me that being a single parent was a gift and not a burden. Thank you both for your vision, inspiration and the love you have given us all.
To Emma Calver and the extended Gordon-Calver family in Robertson and Braidwood. Thank you for standing by me and for all the love and care you have given my children, especially in the days when darkness descended.
To Mandy Fleming, the children’s second mother and my unswerving supporter. Thank you.
To Maur and John Huskisson, Philip and Shelley Boyce, for your wisdom and friendship.