I didn’t know when I saw him at the funeral home that his head was empty.
His lungs were filled with blood. He had paracetamol, codeine and venlafaxine, an antidepressant, in his blood. He had a bandaid on his fourth and fifth fingers on his left hand and his right leg was broken. His brain had been torn away from his spinal cord. He had no chance.
There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
chapter 14
As I sit down to write about the death of my son, the first claws of autumn rip the air 1000 metres above sea level. It is March, 2013. In five months Christopher will have been dead for eleven years. Outside my study window in Sydney’s Blue Mountains, the mist has rolled in, blanketing the tall rhododendron and magnolia trees. The king parrots and rosellas are dining out on the last of the crab apple pods and the black cockatoos, having annihilated the pine cones, screech high overhead searching for a winter hideaway.
It is cold enough to light a fire in the hundred-year-old hearth and as it warms my back I feel the first tentacles of despair, the wretchedness which rubs up against me like an unwanted dog, its faecal residue lingering long after I finish for the day. I rub the back of my neck, let my fingers undulate in an upward motion between the vertebrae and stop at the spot where I think the brain attaches to the spinal cord. I strike it with the side of my hand like an axe. My head jars and my brain jangles, sending spikes of ice needles to my eyeballs. My brain resettles and I open my eyes. It takes three seconds to see clearly again. It takes the same amount of time to fall 10 metres off a cliff and a fraction of that for ‘injuries sustained to be incompatible with life’.
At the end of writing this chapter today I’ll have a headache, diarrhoea and a heart which feels lined with viscous tar. It is a purge with no clear benefits.
I look down the long, dark tunnel of grief and wonder why it still sits on me, heavy like a dead animal. Haven’t I done my time? Can I not be given back my wings and like the dragonfly, the devil’s darning needle, knit myself back into this world as it was before Christopher changed our happy lives?
This is the first time I’ve said that, the first time I’ve thrown blame at his feet. I want to take it back, rewrite it, but just for today, that’s how I feel. Grief has gouged much deeper lines than age would normally allow between Phil’s eyes, those soft and moist brown orbs which have lost the gleam of a life well-lived and the sparkle of an anticipatory future. And me? My skin hangs in disappointed folds and I cannot hear the music because I no longer care to dance. Ben can’t talk about Christopher, not even to Sarah, who is now his wife. He is safe behind his milky veneer but I know his heart lies in a tenuous, vaulted chamber which an ache would open and streak him with another jagged scar.
And Nic? After all the drugs and perhaps because of the ECT, much of his mid-term memory is fractured. It upsets him that he can’t remember Christopher as clearly as he would like. He has begged me for years to write about him, a gift, he says, which would ‘give me back the memory of Criddy’. For him, his brother is ghostlike, a caricatured jigsaw of images and memories.
Last weekend I gave him the first two chapters to read and left him slouched in a cane chair on the front balcony. My heart broke as I watched him from my study window, struggling with the words. And then, when I saw his tears bulge and swell like an engorged balloon then drop onto page one, chapter one, a loud sob shook me, the sudden pain as quick and shocking as a wasp bite. He stroked away the tears with a single swipe as I sat down beside him, waiting for him to finish.
‘It’s good, Mum. Please keep writing.’
I held him and cried into his mane of blond, greasy hair. I felt a mixture of pride and guilt as I made him a promise to finish what I’d started.
Unlike Ben, Nic often talks about Christopher but it’s from a feeling, a distant notion of the aura surrounding the brother who captivated him, the brother he can hardly remember.
Many of Christopher’s friends still protect Nic, mostly because they loved their mate and perhaps, like us, feel a shame they didn’t have the chance to save him. They tell Nic stories, naughty tales of Christopher’s mischievousness. They remind him of how he could always ‘pull a chick’ or light up a room. If Christopher wore a particular T-shirt, that was the new fashion. Everyone surfed with the same board and chose to curl the sides of their caps like Christopher did with his. Many of these friends support Nic, donating money to the Black Dog Institute’s annual fundraiser. Every year, Nic and a group, usually associated with mental health, trek some part of the world to raise awareness and funds for Black Dog. Nic has trekked the Great Wall Of China, Machu Picchu in Peru and the mountaintops in the kingdom of Bhutan. He has worked for Black Dog for four years, setting up and managing BITE BACK, a positive psychology website to help teenagers build resilience. He continues his enthusiasm for speaking to teenagers at various Sydney high schools, openly discussing his mental illness, the devastating effect of his brother’s suicide and his fight for recovery. It is his life’s passion—suicide awareness and prevention.
This is the positive side to our family’s trauma but it is only one square in the quilt of our grief; those tiny, perfect sections of different fabrics sewn together in a mishmash of prints and hues. It is a well-loved heirloom when seen all at once but an eyesore when you try to make some sense of the patchwork landscape. If I hold it to me it feels warm but then it prickles against my naked heat and I have to lay it down for more practical uses.
If I named each square with an encapsulating epithet, it would read like an angry lament which no one would care to decipher. It would feel like ice over the helpless mound of the homeless man slumped in the doorway of God’s cathedral.
Every day, I hug it and tuck it and fold it away. The senselessness of it all—the damage—the unending angst three seconds can cause. It lurks on every surface, behind every closed door and around each corner. It’s there like a muse atop my shoulder and in my outdoor shadow it frolics along to a melodic four-four beat. And just when I think I’ve leashed it and tied it to the dungeon door, I will see Nic cry or Ben battle against a memory. I will see Phil redden, close his eyes and choke on a ball of grief too large to swallow. Even now, after more than a decade of trying to live with this pall of misery, I realise the surface is merely sprinkled with a fine sheath of dust penetrable by the sun, the moon or a thunderstorm. Just the whisper of his name will make my heart contract.
The long, sad journey of the years has wearied us all, made us watchful, vigilant, fearful of what could happen next. Can lightning strike twice? Is it discriminate? Do I fear for my sons? Yes, every day. Will Nic have a car crash, will Ben hit his head on his skiff’s boom, become unconscious and drown? Will Phil have a heart attack?
And does Ben look at his one-year-old son, Zach, and give thanks that he is healthy and happy, or is he frightened he may lose him one day, like Phil and I did, like my mother and father did?
This is the journey of grief. And even after eleven years it still can incapacitate you, eviscerate you, suck you dry then spit you out like an unwanted wad of glutinous meat. It can send you mad. It feels like an illness, a prolonged cancer, for which there is no cure.
There is a pill to deaden it or a bottle of wine to quieten it for a little while, but it’s always there in the morning.
Still, now, grief is the dread which wakens me. Christopher’s face is my day’s first image and his death, the horribleness of it, the slow-motion intricacies of his final breath, is what wakes me in the middle of the night, shuddering, frightened. Still. Now.
Grief is an enemy. It assails you, hits you, batters you blue. It’s a torturer, slow and cruel. The last thing you think about when your child is born is that he may die before you. And when he does, the shock of it fries you. It marks the moments of each day like a thorn on a rose bush just around the corner, and when you are least prepared, it stabs. Reminders of his favourite things, the taste of a strawberry guava,
Eminem, a rugby match or a smile from one of his friends. Or it can be a photograph of him, in a room I hadn’t entered in a while.
I study his seventeen-year-old smiling face and wonder what he would look like now. Had the seeds of depression and anxiety already altered him, damaged him, made up his mind for him?
Still, now, I wonder what I could have done. I still crave to go back in time, pull him to me and bash out the illness that made him want to die more than to live and fight. This insidious, secretive, destructive illness so severe that life was too painful for him to endure. And while he may have teetered for a time between the alternatives, at exactly 11:30 on the night of August 29th, 2002, it was an exhausted, frightened, desperate teenager who tossed the coin in the air but didn’t wait for it to land.
Watching your son die, alone, cold and unable to hear any comforting words, would send any parent mad. There were times, in the early years, when my body fell to the floor and no one could pick me up. I wanted to melt into the cold tiles, evaporate into nothingness. I wanted to be with Christopher, wherever that was, for who can say for sure where the dead live?
I would have gladly forsaken everything, my husband, my sons, to be numb, to be dead. I would stand on the same precipice and, in the glow of the floodlight erected by council to prevent other suicides, tempt myself with the ignoble glory of oblivion. I could throw myself over it or force my feet into a backward shuffle to thwart the throbbing impulse. Forward, back, forward, back.
A week after Christopher’s death I stood there, watching the moon scribble on the ocean’s tides. I was frozen, my senses alive and alert. I could smell the seaweed, hear the flap of the wings of some nocturnal bird and taste the salt in the frigid air. A new floodlight blazed the rock face and the ocean pool below. On the fence railing just behind me, his friends had painted: RIP Cricket—forever loved by all who knew you. 22/10/1984 – 29/8/2002. Every day I would go to that fence and run my hands along the rough letters. Being there made me feel closer to him, in some esoteric way; but then several weeks later, the council painted over it and it felt like another death.
I stared down at the spot where Christopher’s body landed and wondered if I manoeuvred my body, whether I’d be able to hit the same spot.
Then I suddenly understood everything. At this very instant, when life meant nothing, when pain had cauterised every nerve ending, I knew how easy it would be to let go. It would only take a second. I knew then my son’s last thought and I understood that with the snap of fingers it was over, but for us, for everyone who loved him, we are sentenced to a lifetime to consider the consequences.
Still I stood there, teetering. Forward, back, forward, back.
Then everything went black and the shock of it took my breath away. I looked up to the floodlight and watched as it sucked in the last of its glow like the fade-out on a movie screen. I jumped back over the railing and shuffled down the hill to make my way home, wondering why the floodlight went out just before midnight.
A flash of memory. Christopher laughing, a steaming baked chicken, a surfboard and runny spaghetti. He was fifteen. Spaghetti was his favourite, especially the way Anne, Matt Holmes’s mum, made it.
‘Yours has lumps in it,’ he said to me as he loomed over the pot with a wooden spoon. ‘Mrs Holmes’s spaghetti is smooth and runny but thick. How does she do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered with mock irritation. ‘Why don’t you ask her?’
He smiled then hugged me tight as he always did when he wanted to smooth my annoyance. He patted me on the back playfully then returned to the dining room where three of his mates were grabbing at a slab of garlic bread. I put the meat sauce into the blender and whirled and pulsed it until there were no more lumps. I poured it over the pasta, sprinkled a handful of parmesan cheese on top and set it in the middle of the table with a triumphant ‘tah-dah’. They looked at each other then burst into laughter as the liquefied sauce leaked over the plate’s lip and into the extender crack of my mother-in-law’s Jacobean dining table, onto the newly laid cream carpet. Murgy gave me a hug saying how delicious it looked. The others were giggling like little girls and I told them so. I never made spaghetti again.
These memories, the good and bad, crush me, the weight of them. Too heavy, oppressive like a crowded lift. It takes a long time to get to know grief, to understand it. It is like a lonely, unwanted friend who brings cupcakes and settles herself beside your fire, sipping tea with empathy. You want to strangle it, beat it, toss it on the funeral pyre. But you can never grab hold of it; it’s always just past your reach.
Grief is a pain, a stab wound which reopens with each day’s awakening. Without you realising, it defines you. Everything you were before is gone. The happy you, loving you, funny you, interesting you.
For a long time I felt like a morose, bitter and dried wastrel going about banal duties I resented, the weight of it electrocuting my nerves. I still had two children, everyone was anxious to remind me, but my arms felt empty. There was no going back. I couldn’t say I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake, I’ll do it right this time. Robbed of that, life felt like a prison sentence. Grief was the enemy within my soul. It assailed me, hit me, battered me and it always wore a smile.
My heart was broken and for many years I felt I couldn’t live without Christopher. I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing him again.
I couldn’t look at the photos Phil wanted to keep in every room.
I didn’t want to open my eyes in the morning and I couldn’t wait to close them at night. I felt resentment that with each dawn the sun insisted on rising. It should have rained, thundered, hailed. I naively thought that after the viewing, the cremation, the memorial service and after my house had emptied and I could be alone again, this thing called grief, the razor edge of this deep pain, would soften and, given enough time, lie just behind memory in a milky bubble.
I didn’t know then that I’d be in shock for years and that by avoiding grief, it would send me mad.
I would look at Ben and Nic and my guilt and shame would crush me. I felt numb and a stranger in their hearts. They still hugged me—all the time—just in case. They held me because they didn’t want to let me go. They would tell me they loved me to cement me to this life. Phil’s grief was palpable but he was better than me at getting through a day. He could touch hope, strive for his survival. Life still had meaning for him. He broke down many times but then he’d suddenly smile at a memory—‘beautiful memories’, he’d tell me.
‘Remember the time when Christopher . . .’
I couldn’t and I didn’t want to then. I was angry. Angry at the buzz saw destroying my solitude, angry when the phone rang, angry when I dropped a lettuce leaf on the floor and would have to decide whether to wash it or throw it in the compost bin. I was angry when a queue of ants wound their way around the curved back of the Buddha in Christopher’s memorial garden.
I was pinned between misery and responsibility and the inanity of constant advice. I knew I had two other sons but that didn’t fuse the fissure in my heart. It was just another avenue of guilt.
I would be fine if everyone had left me alone. I would be okay because I had two other sons and a husband who would probably end up hating me. I’d be fine as long as I could be alone and for as long as I could pretend that I wasn’t insane. I would be fine if the phone would stop ringing and I sprayed the ants; fine, if I could hold on to a lettuce leaf.
But now I know grief. Time has, in some ways, eased the torment, but the melancholia of loss never leaves you. It bubbles deep down within but is flat and inert just under the first layer of skin. No one can live with that early, shocking grief. To survive you have to find a way to live with it, allow it in and then close the door behind it—just long enough to breathe.
As I made my way home from the headland a week after Christopher’s death, grief was just a word.
I closed the front door behind me, quickly undressed and slipped into bed quietly. Phil was sleepin
g peacefully on his back. I searched for his hand in the dark and knitted my fingers through his. He squeezed my hand tightly. I felt so sorry for him, this wonderful, gentle, loving, kind father. I knew he would never recover from this. I knew our marriage would probably not survive. I knew I could never love him or anyone else again. Anger and bitterness would consume us and we would end up battling our demons on our own.
chapter 15
We were married on July 3rd, 1981, in an historic church on Phillip Street in the heart of Sydney. I was twenty-three and Phil was a year older. We met at high school when I was just fifteen and despite a couple of dramatic, angst-filled teenage splits, we always knew that we’d get married and have children. I was attracted to his gentleness, morality and sense of humour and although he was an inch shorter than me, I perfected the art of bending my knees just a little to give the appearance we were of complementary height.
He was a gentleman who always opened my car door, and still does.
He was smart and loving and protective. When another man looked at me, he’d eyeball them then wrap a possessive arm around my shoulder. I’d never been loved in this way. When I asked him recently what attracted him to me, he said my thighs.
‘Be serious,’ I said mock-punching him on the arm.
‘I am.’
I did have big thighs. I was a sprinter and played hockey. The school’s rugby players would tease me that they were jealous of my masculine bulging muscles. Phil played rugby. We cemented our romance on an interschool sporting exchange with a Canberra school. He’d watch me play hockey and I’d watch his rugby matches. We’d sneak out each night from our billeted families and meet by Canberra’s War Memorial. He’d walk me back and kiss me one more time as I snuck through an open window.
Missing Christopher Page 7