Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  There isn’t anywhere for me to go either so I start to run – through the hospital corridors, past the laundry truck where Mum had taken refuge, and up the driveway where I see a police car idling. I suddenly want to scream at them to: Go inside and arrest the real criminals. They’re inside in uniforms too, and they make sick people crazy. But I don’t raise my voice. I’m like Mum now, and I don’t want to make a scene. Instead, I jog past the car muttering to myself like a madwoman, reduced to insane imaginings and delusions. I feel so winded I slow down to a walk when I make it to the road outside the hospital, from where I let gravity propel me down the hill towards Coronation Drive. The lights are flashing don’t walk but I cross anyway, seizing this meaningless opportunity to break the law. My rebellion brings me a few aggravated beeps from the cars whizzing past me, but I don’t care. I have made my stand against the machine, even if the machine is only a traffic signal and not the hospital up the road.

  When I finally turn around and make it back up the hill to Mum’s room, I take her hand and tell her I am sorry. I say over and over that I am sorry. I mean it. I’m sorry that I cannot help her more. Sorry that I feel so guilty. Sorry for fighting her; sorry for not fighting her more. Just sorry. She’s too out of it to really understand what’s going on. Her glazed eyes find it hard to concentrate on anything I’m saying.

  I pull her forward towards me. Mum, I tell her firmly. I think we should walk around the corridor. We need to get the drug out of your system.

  That’s all I ever do, she tells me, dragging down hard on my arm. Walk and walk and walk around and around and around. I don’t want to go out there now. They might see me.

  She starts crying. I lean in and hug her, whispering close into her ear, trying to convey through my body the urgency of what I am saying: Mum, I need you to concentrate and listen. I need to be strong, I think to myself. I need to be strong the way I’ve never been strong before. The drug will take a while to get out of your system and what’s happening is a chemical reaction that’s affecting your brain.

  Well, something’s affecting it, she says with a wry smile. We all know that.

  I suddenly like her so much, like that she can make a little joke in the middle of her psychosis. I wrap my arm around her and hug her.

  Whatever you think in the next few days probably won’t be true, I tell her. But if you keep telling me, or Paul, or any of the family who ring up, we’ll all be able to help you understand that what you’re scared of isn’t going to happen, isn’t real. Ok?

  I can feel the panic rising in her again, feel her heart pumping against my chest, the disorder of chemical upon chemical swirling through her brain.

  I have to get out of here, Linda, she whispers. You have to do something. I can’t go on like this.

  We talk about changing the doctor who prescribed the drug. Mum refuses, afraid of offending her.

  It takes over a week for Mum’s psychosis – and the drugs that caused it – to pass through her system. All through that week she accuses me of being ‘in on the conspiracy’. Mindful of how distraught her brain has become, only being able to imagine the chaos of her mind, I make my visits longer and more consistent, sit meekly beside her bed as she raves about the hospital, the nurses and us, her children.

  You’ll all burn in hell, she yells at me one evening as I leave for home. All of you.

  I don’t know about hell. I never have believed in it, not in a religious sense. But as I listen to my mother’s tearful apologies after the psychosis has passed, I recognise it is a place with which she and I are now both familiar.

  LIEBESTRAUM

  From the look of old photographs, my great-grandmother on Mum’s side was not a happy woman. She also arrived in Australia by boat and was seasick for most of the journey. She grew to hate the sea during that voyage and once she landed in Sydney she vowed she would never set foot in it again. Instead, she settled herself and her fourteen kids in Tenterfield and never went near the coast as long as she lived. In old photos her face looks hard and tired. Disappointment has settled in the flinty blueness of her eyes and the narrow line of her mouth. I imagine she used her breath to hold herself in; that she learned to breathe like a gate opening and shutting on the shed at the back of her house where she locked her supplies of sugar away from her great mob of children who came home hungry from school every day.

  She stopped crying after her fourth child, stopped breathing after her eighth and tenth died. She thought breathing might kill her too. She needed her body for other things: to wield sacks of potatoes, to balance two children, one on each hip, while another dragged at her skirts. What breath she had left she saved, like her pennies, for a rainy day, for when her children were cold, or when one of them died.

  Her husband, on the other hand, had grown up on ships and had been a deckhand at the age of thirteen. His ruddy skin and piercing blue eyes speak to me not just of his Scandinavian blood, but of a life lived in chilly ocean mists. He had breathed in the sea for so long the ocean spray settled in his lungs; but nothing cold or damp would kill this man, whose pink cheeks told of someone who knew how to breathe, but who did not know how to share these secrets.

  I wonder sometimes if my forebears ever felt the trauma of what was happening around them in the hard, brown country where they arrived; whether they had any compassion to spare for the other, more long-standing inhabitants of their new country, who found themselves, through the very fact of my ancestors’ arrival, hurtled from the familiar into a terrible unknown. I hardly ever heard them speak of these other traumas. Perhaps, like thousands of other dirt-poor Irish, they were too preoccupied with their own survival to worry about anything else – like my great-grandmother, whose heart might have slowly hardened to anything other than her own family’s existence as she got through the births and deaths of her children alone while her husband, my great-grandfather, whom Grandma called ‘Daddy’, was away on the water. From her ‘mummy’, that busy little woman Grandma would recall fondly, she learned her frugality – both the material and emotional kind – and never forgot its lessons as long as she lived.

  In a letter she wrote to me in 1985, Grandma says:

  A week ago, an ‘alien object’ from outer space came down at Gumdale [a suburb near Wynnum] and the occupants invited a housewife to go up for a drive. She rushed inside and locked her door. Do you believe that? I don’t know what I believe, but I think it’s always best to keep an open mind about these things. Now, from the ridiculous to the everyday, I am wondering if there is anything overseas that can be done for the ears, like a tube for the ears. It’s being done, I know. Deaf children are hearing through a device the doctors have found. I am wondering if it’s ‘common’ over there. I’m not complaining. I certainly have a lot to be thankful for. I have no pain, or not much anyway, and good ‘I’ sight, but if I had a little better hearing … But don’t take too much notice of my writing. I’m getting madder all the time.

  There are photos of Grandma as a young girl, the startlingly blue-eyed, Swedish-Irish Christina Augusta Jurgenburg wrapped in fake fur and hipper, jauntier versions of the hats we saw her in long after she stopped being just a Christian name or even a Mrs Somebody else’s surname, when she had become a generic title, someone that we referred to as ‘ours’ or ‘my’: ‘our’ gran, ‘my’ grandmother. There is one particular photograph taken on the Fairstar, the ship which took her around the world when she was seventy-three. She is standing on a stage with her violin in front of a room full of her fellow passengers, with the ship’s band behind her.

  Tell us again what you played, Grandma, we would ask her every time she got out that photograph.

  Well, I played ‘Liebesliede’, ‘Liebesfreude’, ‘Liebesfreunde’, ‘Liebestraum’, and ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. I love this story, the names of the music she played:

  Love’s Song

  Love’s Happiness

  Love’s
Friend

  Love’s Dream

  Of course she could never really play well at all. Not before, not since, not ever. The violin she carried with her around her world perhaps represented to her the impossible. Or the possible. The possibility of music. The possibility, despite all evidence to the contrary, of love.

  When I was older and could finally appreciate how difficult it was for Gran to actually string three notes together on the fiddle, I used to wonder what those ship’s musicians had actually thought about her getting up to play with them when in reality she could hardly play at all. You do the action for long enough, she used to say, you eventually master the practice. The important thing is you never, never, never give up.

  She never did give up, even though she never did get any better. But she kept on practising anyway, day after day, in her bathroom, where the acoustics were so much kinder than in the rest of her flat, right up until she was bedridden with the cancer that eventually killed her at the age of ninety-two. I appreciate that she never did give up, not the violin, not her family, not herself – that she kept going with her love and her dream, no matter how impossible it was for a woman of her class and circumstance, that she did not let life knock it out of her, this love of hers.

  Four days before Grandma died she was involved in a strange incident that involved Mum as well. Gran was bedridden with cancer and suffering from jaundice when at three am one morning she got out of bed, packed up all her costume jewellery in a small leather case, tucked her violin under one arm, painted her lips with her favourite coral red gloss, and walked noisily – and unaided – down the back stairs. She had already lost the use of her legs and could barely speak above a whisper, and so Mum never suspected that the racket that woke her up after midnight was coming from her own mother.

  Mum found her downstairs sitting on the old wooden rocking chair that she had dragged on her own from one end of the garage to the other. She was sitting near the garage door, which she had opened so she could look out onto the road and see the light coming in. She was waiting for someone, she told my mother in a booming voice. Mum was surprised, but did not force her back upstairs to her room. She just sat down too and asked Grandma if she minded some company while she waited.

  I’m waiting here for them to come for me. To take me home, Grandma told Mum, a bit put out.

  Who’s coming, Mum? Mum asked her. Who’s coming to take you?

  My mummy and daddy and Yehudi Menuhin, Gran replied.

  Mum was incredulous. You’re waiting for Yehudi Menuhin? she asked.

  Grandma’s voice was loud and strong as she answered: Yes. He thinks I’ve got potential.

  When Grandma began to talk about things Mum had never heard before, her voice sounded like a young girl’s. Mum remembers: She was talking so loudly I was worried she might wake the neighbours. I didn’t want her to be upset when no one came, so I was just waiting with her until she got tired. But she didn’t stop. She told me stories about her mother and father. About her love affairs. Things I’d never dreamed of. It made me realise what a life she’d had. Just little things, but a lot of little things all strung together making a big life.

  Gran finally jerked her head up just as she seemed about to stop talking and drop off to sleep. I want to play ‘Meditation’ now, she told Mum. When you hear Yehudi play ‘Meditation’ you believed in the angels.

  Grandma took out her violin then and played like she’d never been able to play when she was young and healthy. I don’t know whether Mum added this detail just for the effect of it; I doubt it, as Mum has never really leant towards the poetic. Grandma took her fiddle out, rosined her bow and played the opening bars of ‘Meditation’ from Thais, as if she was channelling the great Yehudi himself. Mum remembers how simple, pure and effortless it was.

  Joan: As if all the difficulties she’d always had with the instrument, the fact she’d had no lessons, no one to teach her any of the things she so wanted to learn, nothing but her love of the instrument to keep her playing over the years. Everything just melted away and she found a direct route from her spirit to the instrument. As if all the things in her life that had prevented her from her doing that, all the things she had to do to survive, to endure, to take care of her family, just fell away. She finally had the luxury to make a few moments of pure, beautiful music.

  Grandma often told Mum that she didn’t want to keep living if she was in extreme pain. It was an understanding, never openly articulated, that Mum would make suitable arrangements to make sure her death was relatively painless. I imagine their conversation about this topic to be as unsentimental as most of their other dialogue throughout their shared lives as mother and daughter: practical, efficient, and to the point.

  A few weeks before Grandma died the doctor told Mum that the cancer would soon begin to cause her terrible pain. He presented Mum with two choices. Either Grandma could go to hospital and receive the best care available, or she could stay at home with Mum. If she preferred the second option he would visit every couple of days to make sure she was comfortable.

  Mum still cries about it – not the sadness of her mother being gone, but what she calls ‘the absolute rightness of how she ended up’. The doctor told Mum that when the time came he would make sure Gran went with no pain. Mum wanted Grandma to die in her own bed. It was a gift she had been preparing for her mother ever since she had moved up from the coast to live at the back of our house. Later she remembers:

  She was never alone. I loved looking after her. I loved it. Do you understand? It was a privilege going in with her food every day and giving her kisses. She was like your father. They get so affectionate when they’re nearing the end. I couldn’t have asked for anything more than to be able to help my mother have the right sort of death. And the doctor was true to his word. When she started to turn yellow and the jaundice was right through her blood and the cancer had begun to make her uncomfortable he came down and gave her something to help her go peacefully. And she did. She had exactly the sort of death she deserved. And if I’m proud of anything in my life it’s that my boys, both my beautiful sons, were with her every day and Stephen was there holding her hand as she took her last breath.

  Stephen played cricket in the back yard with Grandma up until she was ninety. So did Paul. I still remember her running between the metal wickets, her laughter, her strong active body, her delight to be there with her grandsons.

  ‘Keep the children at home as long as you can,’ she used to advise Mum. ‘Don’t give them a reason to leave before they have to.’

  Two days before her death my grandmother turned yellow and asked for rosary beads to be brought to her. She died in her own bed with the blinds open, her family nearby and several crucifixes hanging around her neck.

  MY MOTHER’S MAD OPHELIA

  Joan: If you haven’t had the experience, you just think about it and then you let it go. But when you’ve had the experience, the sadness, the joy of everything taken from you, it’s quite different to people who don’t experience it. So in that way, it’s very valuable, as a human being, to be able to go into a hospital and talk to people. They talk about their sadness and what’s been taken from them. And while you’re speaking to them, you try to point out to them that it’s not all loss at all.

  Throughout her teaching life, Mum attended hundreds of vocal seminars, conferences, workshops and master classes. She also read a large volume of literature about singing. While she felt most of what she had read, heard and seen was beneficial, she also sometimes voiced her personal concern that dialogue and approaches to the pedagogy of singing were in danger of becoming too scientific. ‘Are we as teachers,’ she wondered in an article for the Music Teachers’ Association of Queensland, ‘in our healthy desire to understand how the vocal parts work and to familiarise ourselves with scientific terminology, forgetting the essential tenet of vocal teaching: to convey information to the student in the quickest, clear
est and simplest way so as not to create confusion, which inevitably leads to doubt, worry and tension?’

  ‘Is the art,’ she asked in an article written in February 1997, barely two years before she became ill, ‘becoming a little stifled by the science?’

  During one of her last hospital visits in the summer of 2002 Mum teaches singing to a Mary, a Mary Mary quite contrary Mary, who is depressed, obese and suicidal. Mary gives Mum massages in the evening when she becomes anxious and, in return, my mother teaches her how to breathe. I’m on hand one evening when Mum begins to pass on her knowledge to Mary. Though Mum has become increasingly frail, she confidently reaches her hands around Mary’s unwieldy body as she begins to show Mary how to access her breath, how to fill first her stomach then her lungs and chest with air, how to arrange her mouth and lips to form a sound from that air. The room changes tangibly as the two women begin to breathe. Their fatigue seems to subside as their energy grows. I notice how sound can protect, eradicate weakness, disarm resistance. How Mary lifts up her chest as the breath travels upwards and out of her mouth.

  Mum is firm and kind – her old professional self – as she transmits her knowledge. A tiny light fills her eyes; they become sharper, more focused, more intensely blue. I remember that light from when I was a child, startled and sorry that I hadn’t understood then – hadn’t really understood till this moment – what that light was. The loss of that light had been her catastrophe. No wonder that no one can really say exactly what came first, the illness or the loss of the voice – whether the loss of the voice had been the illness, the cause of the illness, or a symptom of the illness. These questions don’t really matter now, because just like the preachers say, I’ve seen the light – well, a light anyway. It is in Mum’s eyes and it is in Mary’s eyes too – Mary, quite contrary Mary, who has a body the size of a refrigerator and a wish to obliterate herself. Mary, who can now learn to sing with my mother’s small hands holding her gigantic sides. Contrary Mary lets out such a wail that three nurses come running in to shut her up, and Mum too, both of them, these women with their wailing voices that fill the room, their eyes charged with light.