This is Gail

by O'Brien, Gail

  Here it was again. A beautiful cedar box filled with ashes. Would we bury these in the garden too? We couldn’t bear to do it all again. Adam’s ashes were placed in a pretty cupboard next to Gail’s bed that had belonged to Dad and now held precious objects. Every time she opened that cupboard she could smell them. It was not a comforting smell. It was unfinished business. She knew that his ashes needed to be in the earth. He and his father needed to be together. But it would take three years to muster the strength to see it through.

  E.M. Forster wrote that, ‘One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another; the groping inquiry must begin anew.’ The aftermath of Adam’s death was very different from Dad’s in many ways. There was no building named after Adam. No best-selling memoir. No radio interviews with his voice or newspaper clippings with his photographs. We just had the memories of him, having known him in all his ordinary, imperfect splendour.

  Dad’s death had come after a period of dread and expectation, while Adam’s was a sudden shock. Contrary to what some people assume, one was not worse than the other. They each brought their own torments.

  There was our grief, riddled with questions and guilt. Adam was gentler, quieter, more unassuming, more undemanding than Chris had been. Did we forget him? Did we let him down? He was the best, the truest of us all. Did we tell him that? Did he know how loved and adored he was?

  And there was a new question too: how should you live your life now? My brother’s life was as precious and valuable as my father’s. What does it mean to have a good life?

  And once again there was the loss. The terrible, maddening loss. Adam’s entire life had been shorter than many people’s after retiring age. He had been robbed. But who robbed him? Who robbed us?

  When Dad was ill, I had prayed every night. But now I told Father Kev I couldn’t. I had nothing to say. ‘You could pray in silence,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to say anything.’ So that’s what I did. I was silent towards God, as I felt God was towards me. And when I needed to speak into the void, all I could say was, ‘Dad, you wouldn’t believe what has happened.’

  The Answer Lies Within

  My mother kept her faith. She did not believe that Adam was with Dad; she knew it to be so. She did not harden. She appeared to fold her son and husband into her heart and continue up the mountain. Adam and Chris are ever-present with Gail, their lives, their illnesses, their deaths: from those days of heady bliss when she married Chris and gave birth to Adam to the horror of learning the news about them both and seeing what happened to them with her own eyes. Every moment remains with her. Every part of them rests in her. She bears all this, all of them, folding them within.

  Some people would say that if the same happened to them, they could not survive, they would ‘simply curl up and die’. But that’s the thing. For better or worse, you don’t.

  Every night Gail lay herself down in bed as a guided meditation began to play. She hovered between waking and sleeping. She waited. Soon, eyes were looking at her from the darkness. Thousands and thousands of eyes.

  The first time my mother heard the name of Jo Boney, a healing touch and spiritual practitioner working in a professional practice called Anam Cara Healing, she took little notice. The second time someone mentioned the name to her, she took notice. The third time, she knew she had to meet this woman. ‘Did you just say Jo Boney?’ Gail asked the friend who had been speaking. ‘Would you give me her phone number please? I think I’m supposed to contact her.’ Gail was familiar with the term Anam Cara as the title of a book by John O’Donohue. She was not familiar with healing touch therapy, which uses energy fields to heal.

  Gail called Jo, who suggested they meet. When Gail walked into the beautiful room, heard the quiet music and smelled the sweet aroma, she knew that she was supposed to be there. Her decision to trust her instinct to call Jo was correct.

  They sat and talked about what had brought Gail there until Jo asked, ‘Do you want to try it, and see what I do?’ Gail climbed up onto the massage table and lay down. Jo placed a soft blanket over her. Gail felt warm and comfortable. Jo stood on Gail’s right, said a silent prayer and placed her hands on Gail’s arm. Her hands moved to different parts of Gail’s body, to her stomach, her neck. Then, gently, Jo put her hands on Gail’s head. Instantly Gail saw a coursing river of light like shooting stars moving across her. The milky image of a hand waved through, as the light flew over and around her.

  Jo continued to move her hands over Gail’s body for an hour, and indicated that she’d finished by touching Gail on one arm. Gail didn’t want the session to be over. She sat up. ‘How do you feel?’ Jo asked. Gail tried to speak and started crying, the most visceral outpouring of pent-up grief she had experienced.

  By the time she left she had been there for three hours and paid the nominal fee. She made an appointment to go back the following week, and continued after that. The healing sessions did not always result in the same level of outpouring, but they were always very powerful. Gail attended these touch healing sessions for twelve months, and they gradually became gentle and calm. Rather than seeing coursing and shooting light, Gail progressively felt just a soft, floating glow around her.

  She continued her walks through Kelly’s Bush. She visited the magnificent fungus-covered tree trunks that, months before, she had thought had personal significance for her. There they were, those two beautiful trunks growing together out of the ground. We are still two, together as one, she had thought they meant. But now they seemed to represent her husband and son. She crouched down. She was weary, exhausted by all this searching and questioning. For months she had been coming, going, reading, listening, questioning, exploring, communing, contemplating, meditating on life and death.

  Now, here, in familiar bushland near her home in Hunters Hill — not in Bhutan or Santa Fe or New Zealand or Alice Springs — she had a moment of clarity and insight: Stop searching outside myself. The answers lie within me. Suddenly, she knew. Finally, she could stop this frenetic searching and breathe. There is a current in everyone’s life. Stop rowing against it. Just lift the oars and flow downstream.

  My darling Juliette,

  I am thankful that your father did not have to endure the sudden death of our beautiful Adam.

  Enduring Chris’s illness and death took nerves of steel, but the cry of the mother who has lost her child is primeval. Passed down through the ages, the cry of all mothers, through all worlds, through all time and space.

  I was recently asked to give a speech on the topic ‘resilience’, which I found somewhat daunting! Did this mean that I was somehow regarded as resilient? Everyone has their own motivations and their own fears — what aphorisms can I say about resilience that will work for anyone else?

  I do believe it is how we respond to events and situations that defines who we are and that WE, with choice and our free will, create our own reality, as we dance the rhythm of this moving world.

  As I prepared for the speech, I asked your grandfather, who, as you know, I regard as the wisest man on the planet, what were his thoughts on resilience. I asked him if he thought it a process, or a personal trait?

  He wasn’t much help because his favourite book is the dictionary and he was keen to refer to that (which defined resilience as buoyancy, bouncing back as if spring loaded or in terms of health, recuperating, if you’d like to know). From that we discussed the importance of a happy childhood, loving parents and strong family ties, which I have been so fortunate to have had. In the end he gave up and just said in his broad Irish brogue, ‘It’s because you were born in little old Dublin!’

  As I look at my wonderful parents and all that they have endured and overcome in their lives, I do believe I have a genetic predisposition to resilience as the second eldest of six children. We were loved, but not cosseted, and allowed to learn from our mistakes.

  And if we look to the philosopher Carl Jung for answers, perhaps it is an inherited blueprint of experiences and responses which hav
e been passed between individuals and across tribes and generations for hundreds of years which defines us as resilient. Or not. After all, we all just start out as one cell containing our specific genome which multiplies into the living, breathing, thinking organisms that we are. We are all around us and as individuals beset by crises of varying degrees of gravity. I am no different from anyone else.

  In my own case, these traumatic and unexpected family events in close succession are a great deal to process by any measure.

  I never thought I would be on the receiving end of people saying, ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ Certainly it is confronting when we try to place ourselves in another’s shoes. We ask ourselves, ‘How would I respond?’ We doubt our own capacity to cope, to rise from the ashes. But I believe with strong grounding in love, hope, connection and purpose we are imminently adaptable and the human spirit will ultimately triumph over fear. What I do know factually is that different personality types will process a life event differently.

  Now, I can genuinely say that I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to search more deeply for profound meaning. The process has not been one of contemplative philosophising. Rather, it has been a punishing journey of trying to grasp why this has happened and where our beloveds have gone.

  When I looked at myself in the mirror as I was preparing for your father’s state funeral, and said, ‘I am not going to be a victim to this,’ I was applying the mind-over-matter approach. But what I did not consider was the fact that this was not something that was perpetrated on me: it happened to your father.

  On returning home in the evening with you, Adam and James after the funeral and wake, all of us drained and bereft despite having put on a courageous show all day, remember I assured you that Dad would not have left us. ‘He loved us too much, and I’m going to find him,’ I said.

  So a search for truth, the enduring love of my son and husband — your brother and father — and an unquenchable desire and determination to see life for what it really is, has been a driving force these past years.

  On a recent Saturday evening, I was at a Christmas party at Jonah’s at Palm Beach. We were seated randomly but coincidentally I ended up sitting next to a couple who six weeks previously had lost their perfectly healthy thirty-two-year-old son suddenly from a heart arrhythmia. This was their first outing since the tragedy. We had never met before and they did not know my story.

  With their son’s recent death consuming every fibre of their beings, they started to tell me what had happened. Although it was early days they felt they had to get back into life. The mother of the young man told me that she would put on her mask to disguise the pain so others felt okay to talk to her.

  We talked at length. I told her that it is not her responsibility to make others feel good or to feel obliged to get back into life as though nothing had happened. It takes time to find peace. To keep walking in the darkness, one foot in front of the other in a cumulative coping scenario.

  Eventually noticing in small ways that strength is gradually returning.

  In our Western culture where we are consumed with materialism and individualism we are polar opposite to the Eastern philosophy of community and spirituality. It is more acceptable to take days off work for physical illness than to grieve. We don’t wear black armbands or dress in a way to tell people to be gentle with us.

  I have learned that grief is not linear but cyclical. When you least expect it, there it is again. Our vulnerability and fragility can be cleverly disguised but they are never far from the surface.

  Recognising the fragility of life brings me to a point of appreciation for each day rather than expectation. In so doing, the day is welcomed in and the story for the next brand new twenty-four hours starts to unfold. Tomorrow will have its own story.

  You children roll your eyes when I remind you that it’s about the journey, not the destination!

  Descartes, the father of modern philosophy wrote ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ . . . ‘I think therefore I am’, his statement of what it means to be human. This brought me to my own realisation ‘I think therefore I become’ (not that I would dream of trying to compete with Descartes!). This realisation involves attitude which is intertwined with belief.

  The following anecdote describes what I mean. I received a call two weeks ago from a friend who had also tragically lost her son and her husband a few years apart. I found myself disagreeing completely with her perception of our similar circumstances. She was desperate and asked me if I thought we had bad karma! Did we have some sort of cosmic debt to pay? I replied absolutely not, we had wonderful husbands and sons. How fortunate we were to have had them in our lives. The fact that their lifespans were not what we expected or wanted had nothing to do with us.

  What happened to your father and Adam didn’t happen to me: it happened to them! The depth of our pain is validation as to how much we loved, and were loved by, them. So that is good. That is what we want. To love and be loved on this earth.

  Love, Mum

  PART FOUR

  This is Gail

  The Main Event

  Back in August 2009, six weeks after my dad died, I sat with Mum in the kitchen as she practised a speech she had been asked to deliver. She read from her pieces of paper in the same soft, sing-song tones she used for bedtime stories she read to us when we were small. ‘I would like to thank Nat Zanardo, who has been a tireless supporter of the Head and Neck Cancer Institute,’ she read aloud. She stopped and took a sip of water. I could see she was nervous. The plan had been for Chris to deliver a speech at this function. But after his death it made sense for Gail to step into his place.

  My mother had never given a public speech before, except for her eulogy at Dad’s funeral. Because I had been schooled during a time when public speaking was recognised as an important skill and probably impossible to avoid for an entire lifetime, I was able to offer practical tips — print the words in a large font, double space the lines, don’t print into the bottom third of the page to stop your chin from dropping. Mum practised with me, reading the speech several times. When she finished, she put the papers down. ‘I hope I won’t be asked to do too many more of these,’ she sighed.

  But not long afterwards she was asked to open the Hunters Hill art show, and again spent a few hours preparing the short speech and practising it word for word. A few weeks after that, the deputy headmaster of Mulwaree High School in Goulburn asked whether she would speak at the school’s speech night. Gail had to stop herself from asking, ‘Me?’ She was bemused and honoured but had no idea what she could say on such an occasion. She needed some moral support, which her younger sister Adrienne provided.

  Adrienne and Gail look quite alike but their personalities are polar opposites. Adrienne, a loud and raucous nurse with a dry sense of humour and squawking laugh, chatted away as Gail’s car cruised down the Hume Highway. They changed in a Goulburn motel room and found their way to the deputy headmaster’s home for afternoon tea where they sat with their hosts in a pristine, old-fashioned living room. Mr and Mrs Wardle were warm and welcoming. They were very familiar with Chris’s story, and it turned out that Mr Wardle had known him as a schoolboy. Their generous hospitality comforted Gail, although she couldn’t shake her nervousness about her speech the following evening.

  At the speech night ceremony a number of local dignitaries were present. Gail gave her talk, touching on Chris’s life, work and her experiences. She told the students and their families about the tough lesson that life can change in a heartbeat. She wanted her speech to be inspiring for the young people and judging from the compliments she received, it must have been. But when one of the dignitaries described it as ‘refreshing’, it rattled her confidence.

  At the end of the evening, the deputy headmaster and his wife escorted Gail and Adrienne to their car. They stood on the footpath, smiling and waving goodbye as Gail pulled away. Bang! Gail had backed into a school bin hidden from her view. Mr and Mrs Wardle bent down to look through the w
indow and, flapping their hands, they shooed, ‘Go! Go!’ Gail and Adrienne made their getaway, leaving their accomplices behind in the dark night. The sisters soon descended into rolling, rollicking laughter. Gail hadn’t laughed like that for months. It felt so good.

  When she arrived home, Mum showed us the gift that Mulwaree High School had given her — a set of small wine glasses embossed with the school’s crest in gold. I began to put them away into a cupboard in our kitchen. ‘From now on, this will be the Cupboard of Awesomeness,’ I decreed. ‘Every time you do something awesome, Mum, we’ll put the gift in here if you’re given one.’ As the speaking invitations rolled in, the Cupboard of Awesomeness filled up with gifts — pretty teacups and saucers, boxes of tea, more glasses and a small bottle of perfume. A beautiful Aboriginal carving from the kind folk in Narrandera in country New South Wales was put on a shelf for everyone to see.

  In February 2010, Noelene (Chris and Gail’s financial adviser) arranged for Gail to deliver the keynote address at the Genesys Wealth annual conference for financial advisers. Gail was to speak about their insurance arrangements and how our family had survived financially while Chris was ill and when he died. ‘Not Taking Risk Insurance is Not Worth the Risk,’ was the title of Gail’s speech, referring to the insurance arrangements that Noelene had encouraged Gail and Chris to take and that meant we didn’t have to sell our home after Chris died. This was the first time Gail had charged a speaking fee that, while modest, gave her hope that she might be able to derive an income from these speaking engagements.