Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  ‘Life goes on,’ one of Mum’s friends said recently, in a particular tone that made me think she might need some reassurance that it actually does. And, of course, it does. But some things change too. Steve is not a trained nurse, for instance, but is now somewhat of an expert regarding the different ways that Mum could suddenly die.

  ‘The wound on her left hip has never properly healed,’ he told me during a rain break in the cricket telecast. ‘So if an infection gets into her bloodstream that’d be it pretty quickly.’

  ‘A couple of times,’ he continued, muting the sound on the television while I swung my legs back and forth over the edge of Mum’s empty wheelchair in which I was, for that moment, sitting, ‘I have caught her choking on some food. Once on a banana. In a second she went blue in the face. It was horrible. I started bashing her on her back. I bashed her so hard I could have broken her spine, but at that point I wasn’t worried about that. All I could think was what a horrible, violent way to die, asphyxiating to death on an undigested banana stuck in your throat. Another way she could go is if some liquid goes down the wrong way and finds its way into her lungs. That would also be the end very, very quickly. And, of course, if she goes into hospital for any time at all she’ll be dead pretty much in a matter of days. So really it’s best for all of us to be prepared for those things.’

  Cathie: I guess my response to the inadequacies of institutions in caring for people has mellowed with time. But while it was happening all of us were angry, outraged, frustrated and shocked at the quality of Mum’s care and at the ignorance of some of the people doing the caring. If I had a warning it’s that it’s probably best to accept that no doctor, nurse, therapist or professional carer is going to be as interested in your loved one’s life and health as you are. And take as much responsibility as you can to ensure the best of care. I do realise how lucky we are that we have had family members looking after Mum. You don’t spend all your time worrying about what might or might not be happening while you’re busy with all the other things you have to do in your own life.

  There is a ritual that Stephen and Mum perform together each time he lifts her in and out of bed. I call it their dance and they are now well practised in its choreography. There are only brief respites in the day from the full-blown rigidity which afflicts her body; these usually occur forty minutes or so after my brother has crushed up her medication and mixed it in the thickened drink which he then spoon-feeds her. Sometimes this is a painstaking process which itself can take up to half an hour. Often I have watched him say a word over and over for her to repeat so that her mouth will form the exact shape for him to be able to push the spoon containing the crushed-up medicine through the gap between her lips and teeth and down into her throat for her to swallow.

  Mum, he says, holding the spoon close to her lips and his lips close to her ear. Can you say Rumbarala?

  Or Mum, can you say tee tippee ta ta?

  Can you say far and away ha ha?

  Sometimes it might take a minute or two of Stephen repeating the phrase tee tippee ta ta or rumbarala before Mum, with head lolling and eyes still closed, replies in a faint slurring voice tee tippee ta ta. Stephen then slips the spoon between her crumbling teeth and deposits the sugary mixture into her mouth. Another waiting game then begins: sometimes it might take twenty minutes or so for Mum to swallow the medicine. During this time Stephen will stay bent over my mother, tickling her throat gently to loosen up the rigid muscles in the hope of stimulating them enough to become aroused and creak into action.

  After the medicine is down, it is time for Mum to be taken to the toilet on her special commode wheelchair. To begin this ritual, Stephen draws the sheets gently away from her body and says: Ok, Mum. Toilet time. He stands at the left of her bed. On the right of the bed hang pictures of Mum’s two grandchildren, Finn and Kel. Next to these is a small print of an angel by a Renaissance artist and a calendar made by Nepalese village women which I sent to Mum during my writer’s residency in 2005.

  Slipping his left hand under her neck he pivots her body towards him. He then puts both hands around her waist and hoists her up towards him so that she is standing chest to chest with him: chest to chest with her son, who looks just like my father did as a young man, when Mum was still a child. She is standing on tiptoes then as Stephen takes her right hand and puts it around the left side of his neck, leaving his right arm folded around her waist like a dancer ready to lead his partner to the centre of the dance floor. Mum’s legs are purple and rigid as he taps her right arm with his left arm and says: Come on, Mum. Left arm up. And as she has practised and performed a thousand times already since she moved with my brother to the house at Brighton she lets him lift her left arm up to place it around the right side of his neck. Sometimes her lips and neck strain with the effort of holding on to him but the muscles that are still strong in the right upper arm of her wasted body testify to how many times she has held on to her son’s neck and not let go. And sometimes my brother’s neck shows the strain too, underneath his passive face, as he puts his right arm up her nightie and slips off her underpants without looking down, and in one quick graceful movement spins her around on her tiptoes and pivots her gently towards the wheelchair.

  It is not a dance you would ever see in a public place; it is private and full of intimate, familiar effort. Because they have executed it so many times it might even seem, to the causal observer, completely mechanical. But there are moments in this dance when I see my father’s face in the face of my brother as he holds my mother; only this time it is my mother who is older than my father. While he is fathering her, I know Stephen is also mothering her, as she mothered him. Others might find it grotesque or macabre, but often as I watch them I am struck by the thought that not only is it one of the most beautiful dances I have ever seen, it is also one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And though I have become an avid chronicler of family events, I don’t dare photograph this great unfolding piece of art that is my brother’s service to our mother.

  Cathie: You can see the influence of our father in everything that’s happening now. That and the good humour and the ability to cope with solitude – to not need a lot of external stimulation for a happy life. And the older I get the more I appreciate Dad’s quietness. If there is any one thing, though, that stands out for me about Dad it was his love for his family. That and his Mona Lisa smile, his dry sense of humour, which both the boys have inherited, and his ability to keep a straight face when the rest of us were doubled up with laughter. Do you remember playing tennis after mass on a Sunday morning when he would lob Mum from side to side – she had no backhand so she just kept changing hands? Then Mum would start giggling and this encouraged Dad in his mission. All the time while he was doing this he would look very serious, which of course made Mum giggle even more.

  Ten days before my father died in 1993, I hitched up to Brisbane to see him. I didn’t know he was dying then; he had been sick for several years since his strokes. To him, I looked terrible in those days: a blowsy bohemian from a respectable family playing electric violin in bands around the Sydney underground. The thing about having an older father is that you’re still a young woman when he is an invalid. He’s not meant to be dead when you’re still wild at heart; there’s no opportunity for wise conversations or reconciliations. No comforting apologies or forgiveness. So all I have now is one last tiny memory to place like a fine jewel at the end of this string of gems that I have laid out side by side so that they might catch, reflect and refract the light.

  My father is lying in my mother’s bed. It is late afternoon and he is, as usual, listening to the ABC on the radio. It is still hot and he is only wearing his pyjama bottoms. They are faded yellow with a pattern of tiny white horses on them. Dad never cared about what he wore so I don’t think he would have picked out those horses especially. What I mean, I suppose, is that the symbolism of those horses – the freedom, the wildness – did
not mean anything in particular. Probably someone gave them to him or bought them for him from St Vincent de Paul’s.

  He is lying on his stomach with his head to one side when I walk into the room to say hello. He looks thin and exhausted. His greying hair is combed down across his forehead and tufts of white hair push out from his underarms and chest. In his weakness he looks even more like a vagrant than when he especially tried to look like one, in the days when he would taunt my mother, and amuse his children, with his unkempt appearance and shuffling walk.

  His eyes are half open when I enter the room. He peers at me and then whispers something. But I can’t hear it because of the radio. Dad loves playing games, so I know that he is play-acting a little. I go along with his game and make a big deal out of bending over him to hear what he says, but I still can’t make out his mumble. I hop up onto the bed, crawl around and lie beside him. I curl up around his body as if we are two spoons, him and me, my father and his daughter, as if we have been spooning each other our whole lives and not just at this moment for the first time. He growls a little as I hold him and says: Mmm, that’s nice.

  We lie together like this, hardly moving, for over half an hour. We don’t speak; instead, we listen. Or rather, my father listens to the radio and I listen to him listening to the radio. Alistair Cook, I think it is, reading one of his Letters from America, Dad’s favourite radio program. I notice as I listen that my father is a soft breather. I also notice as I breathe in time with his soft breath that he doesn’t sweat. Or rather, that he does not smell when he sweats. It is the first time I have realised that he doesn’t smell and that in my whole life I have never smelt his body odour. I remember Mum telling me once: ‘Your father was a prince. And his name means “blessed”.’

  A blessed man, I suddenly think, who leaves no smell.

  My father.

  After the program is over he reaches up a limp hand and switches off the radio. Outside, my brothers, who are also visiting, have just finished a game of cricket and downstairs Mum is taking one of her students through last minute vocal preparations for an upcoming examination. It is late afternoon, almost early evening, and the light is an ache of deep yellow and lilac. I am still curled around my father as he turns his head towards me, opens his other eye and says, as if he is passing on to me all the secrets he has learned in his long and sometimes difficult life: Always remember, Linda, he tells me. You can never have too much affection.

  There are no more words after that. Just another theatrical sigh as we are called to dinner and the warm Brisbane evening turns into night.

  During the months after my father died the right side of my body was stricken with sciatica that became so severe I once had to be taken to Emergency in a wheelchair. It was, friends later told me, as if my father’s old affliction had moved into my body because the suffering he had left behind him was not yet ready to leave the earth. Eventually the pain was so bad that I was considering drastic measures such as cortisone injections or hospitalisation. My thoughts turned very intently then to my father. I had not thought about him much during the period before his death. And if I had I was always more concerned with myself in relation to him than with him in relation to me.

  One night the pain in my side was so intense I couldn’t move from bed just as he couldn’t for nearly a whole year after he retired from teaching. I didn’t struggle with the pain. There was no point. I just lay in my bed and tried not to move. Keeping absolutely still was, I had discovered, one of the best ways to minimise the trauma. I then thought of my father in a way that made me feel as if I was inhabiting his body as he lay immobile on his bed. Or even that he was inhabiting my body at the moment of his own death. I could sense, for a few seconds, his whole life stretching back from that moment of passing to when he was born; from the old man to the young child. I saw the distance he had travelled across continents and over oceans and through towns and cities. I saw the young man in his clerical collar, the mature, still-virginal man in his wedding suit, the older man in his swimming goggles and togs, gliding along lane six of the university pool. I saw, through his eyes, his wife, my mother, and his children, me among them, a vague curly outline in a crowd of curly children, holding out my violin for him to tune, not because I knew he could but because I wanted him to tune it, not my mother who usually did it. But he would not take my violin because music was my mother’s area, the woman’s domain, not his.

  It was a particular experience to have then my father’s memories in my consciousness, to feel him as he was at the moment of dying. And then I felt my breath pull hard at my body as if something was sucking me down inside myself. My throat tightened. I heard a rasping sound as I sucked the breath back in. My right side was in spasm; I could feel my back arching involuntarily, fighting the trauma in my muscles, as if my body could not support its own pain anymore. And then, as if my father was there – not just standing beside me but somewhere inside me, inside me and the pain – I felt him give me something. I let my breath out slowly and sucked it in again, more gently this time, then exhaled once more. I felt him do this too, at the same time, him and me together in the same body. A few more times we breathed in the darkness. I felt like crying. I felt as if he might feel like crying as he gave me this gift of dying; this gift of knowing his dying and, subsequently, mine as well. Of knowing through his dying how to live. Of understanding that it is that simple – to just breathe and let go. To breathe until you stopped breathing.

  At the beginning of 2007, I sing my songs as part of a small concert in Brisbane. It has taken me a long time to get back into my music. During my year abroad in 2005 I rediscovered, through travelling, the wonder of the art my mother had lost forever, the art of singing. And I did climb another mountain, the hills of Anapurna around Kathmandu, the roof of the world where I lived for two months at the end of 2005 and where I recorded a whole album of love songs in a tiny acoustic studio beside a Buddhist temple.

  The concert is held in West End at an old Cypriot club. I’ve been nervous about re-entering the marketplace with my songs, uncertain how my fragile tunes will be received in what I have always perceived to be a hard-edged and demanding environment. I am different now to how I was before, when it was my passion and my instincts that made my life and my music possible. I worry that I have become too serious and fragile rather than clever, wild and amusing as I’d once been with so little apparent effort, when I was just, as Mum used to say, doing my ‘own thing’.

  As I walk into the hall I see in a far corner Michael Franklin wrapped around his guitar, as sometimes men wrap themselves around their lovers, as he once might have wrapped himself around me. Or vice versa. I feel awkward in this once familiar environment.

  Hey, Michael calls out. I saw you were playing. It’s good to see you here.

  I don’t even think before my next words to Michael tumble casually from my lips: You can sit in on my set if you like.

  He smiles at me. Sure, he says, squinting at me through his thick wire-rimmed glasses, like a wise old owl. That’d be fun.

  Later, Michael joins me on stage. During my set I hardly even notice he is there, he fits in so smoothly with the meanderings of my melodies, with the movement of my words, and the breathy fragility of my voice. At the end the audience whoops it up and I am relieved that all the little songs I have nurtured in Mum’s lounge room have been so warmly accepted.

  They liked it, I whisper across to him as we take our bows. They really liked it.

  Sure, Michael replies. It was a good set.

  Thanks. And thanks, I tell him, smiling. Double thanks. I clip my words just like he does. Just as I always have done. I remember now, as if by surprise, that I once loved this man. That I am a woman who has loved, who has been loved.

  I also remember something else Mum once told me. ‘Some things never die. They just change. And then they change again.’ I had never taken much notice of her when she said these kinds of
things. They always sounded like ‘old wives’ tales’ to me. I never really thought, as many daughters do, that Mum understood anything I needed to know about life or about love. I remember also how in New Delhi, two years earlier, I had dined with a billionaire philanthropist who admired the way I played the violin. After dinner he turned my hands over as he said to me softly: ‘We always say you can trust a musician because where there is music there can be no violence.’ I was surprised. I had always been too aware of my passionate, tumultuous emotional nature to think I could ever be seen in such a light.

  But now I realise that perhaps both Mum and the billionaire were right. I had spent a lot of time trying to get over love, get through love, or forget about love. To wait for love, and the fierceness in my heart, to die so I could move on. It is useless to think that love dies. I understand at this moment, though, that it can change and that music can help to bring about that change. After all, here I am with the man for whom I had written my very first shaky, out-of-tune love song, and all these years later we can still play love songs together. Not as lovers, not as partners, not even as friends. Just as two musicians who can forget about everything that has passed through the fleeting miracle of a song.

  SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE

  Cathie: I remember when Mum first became ill I had recently moved to Townsville with a broken heart. I was a very sad girl, prone to moments of great sorrow, grief and self-pity. When Mum was diagnosed, it gave me the opportunity to focus on someone close to me in a worse situation. I am sure this helped me, even though it took me a long time not to be unhappy again.

  The first time I felt that my heart was broken, I heard my mother singing. I can’t exactly remember why I’d gone to visit my parents that day. It was after Michael Franklin and I had broken up and I had been walking around in pain for weeks and so my reasons for doing anything were not very clear. I came late in the afternoon. Dad was out the back of the house in the garden when I walked around the side of the house and sat on the green vinyl couch outside the music room. Mum was inside giving a singing lesson to an elderly man called Harry, who had come to learn to sing after his wife died.