Being private-school mothers and living on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, we tried our hardest to fit in with the North Shore mothers who dressed well, spoke clearly and were au fait with protocol. Trish and I bumbled our way through school functions, laughing at each other when we put a step wrong. As mothers of boys in the rugby First Fifteen, we were obliged to bring a plate of food for afternoon tea at the home games. On the first occasion, Trish and I met in the clubhouse where a long table, draped in white linen, was adorned with china plates and tiered cake stands. Our paper plates were covered with foil. I lifted the edge of her foil and cackled loudly. She had picked up a bun from the local bakery; the icing had stuck to the foil. She ripped at my foil revealing a pile of burnt sausage rolls and party pies. We were laughing so hard we feared we’d be caught as we quickly hid our plates among the cucumber and dill sandwiches, the salmon and avocado dips and homemade sushi rolls all on Royal Doulton platters (we checked).
‘I know the sausage rolls are yours,’ Murgy whispered in my ear.
I smiled and kissed him on the cheek as Christopher laid a heavy, sweaty arm around Trish’s shoulder. She shook a finger at him and scolded, ‘Don’t you dare.’
Murgy and I share the same birthday and have an annual competition to see who can be first to phone the other to mark the occasion. Nicola, his older sister by a few years, had a close relationship with Christopher but saw little of him during the last year, as he sank deeper into his depression.
Just after the second anniversary of Christopher’s death, she had just returned from a trip to Brazil. She sounded agitated when she called to ask me to meet her in Avalon for dinner. She had something very important to tell me.
It would take me several years to begin to grasp her story. Over that time I had to ask her to repeat its details and then finally to write it down so I could understand the consequences of an experience which deeply disturbed her.
She wrote in a letter to me: ‘I will never forget what happened to me in Brazil and even though I didn’t see Chris much in the last year, I have always felt a connection to him, and still do. During 2004 I went to Brazil with a few close friends including Kristy, a Brazilian girl whom I didn’t know very well. Within the first few weeks of our trip, I got to know her better and discovered she had a sensitivity for spiritual energy. We were in the old city of Salvador in the state of Bahia. We stayed in a very old and historic townhouse in a back street of the city. One night, we were getting ready to go out when we heard Kristy screaming in the bathroom. We rushed in.
She said someone had appeared in the mirror. As we were trying to comfort her she asked if any one of us knew a man who had passed away. I wasn’t thinking of Chris as I didn’t think it could be related.
‘Kristy said the apparition had said to her “Trisha, Ben, Nicola”.
I thought then it had to be Chris. Kristy didn’t know my mother’s name. I asked her to describe him; she said she couldn’t see his face as he had a red cap pulled down over his eyes. [Christopher always wore a red cap—always pulled down over his face.] Kristy said he told her that he had thought by killing himself he could stop his pain and that he didn’t realise how much it would affect everyone close to him as he believed no one would really care if he was alive or not. He also said he really regrets what he did. He told Kristy that everyone must let go of him because he couldn’t move on.’
Nicola sent me a photograph of Kristy who was working as a fashion designer in Bali. She is a petite and beautiful woman with piercing brown eyes, dark hair and olive skin. Nicola says she is a friendly, open, generous person but, beneath the surface, a little fragile. She told Nicola during their two-month holiday that her spirituality deeply troubled her as she felt burdened by the suffering of others, especially in the spiritual sense. Her gift was her millstone as she didn’t want to be the bridge between worlds which brought spirits to her in search of help. She never encouraged it and still doesn’t, hoping this connection will one day subside. Nicola says Kristy was ‘freaked out’ when she saw the apparition in the mirror because she was caught unprepared.
When Nicola realised it had to be Christopher, she was very sad as she knew how depressed and despondent he had felt leading up to his death and that from his other world he was witnessing the devastation he left behind.
‘I also felt happy that I had the chance to reconnect with him and it left me feeling that he must be around all the time, close to us, and we are just not aware of his presence,’ Nicola wrote. ‘I also knew that in some way, he was asking me to speak to you, I suppose in the hope it would bring you some peace and allow him to move on. When I got home to Australia, I had an overwhelming feeling that I had to tell both you and my brother what had happened. It was very hard for me, as it was all very strange and I knew how my story would be received, that is, with disbelief or that I had gone mad.’
My friend Deby, whose son Laurie was born on the same day and at the same hospital as Christopher, told me about her experience.
Our sons had grown up together until Deby moved to Queensland after the death to cancer of her husband Steve and when the boys were in their early teens. She said that a week before Christopher died, she had bought me a card but hadn’t got around to sending it. On the day he died she picked it up to post it and found a dead cricket near the stamp. She flicked it off and it fell behind her chest of drawers.
Deby later told me: ‘On the night it happened, Yaina [Deby’s daughter] and I were at a friend’s house. At 11:15 a strange feeling came over me. I was very unsettled and Yaina could see how agitated I was. I pretended I wasn’t feeling well and we went home. I couldn’t sleep all night.’
A few days after the funeral, Deby bought me a sundial for Christopher’s garden because ‘time is important’.
After she got home she found the dead cricket and buried it under a birdbath I had given her years before.
The sundial is now in my Blue Mountains garden, next to the Chinese elm.
Do not cheat thy Heart and tell her grief will pass away.
ADELAIDE PROCTER
chapter 23
The sand was cold and wet between my toes and the wind skated across the waves, hitting my skin with a slap. The palm trees were bent like bananas. It was the day after the third anniversary.
The beach was empty except for a lone jogger who circled around me on each lap. An oil tanker on the horizon looked like a bath toy as it crept south to Botany Bay.
It was a grey, depressing day. As I buried my feet in the sand I wondered why, after three years, my grief was heavier than ever?
No one warned me how lonely grief would be. I became a stranger to those who loved me and for others, I was the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle they’d already solved. I feared them for what they may say and how they would judge.
‘Are you over it yet?’ one acquaintance said to Phil when he bumped into him in the supermarket a few months after the funeral. And to me, others said, ‘You need to move on’, or ‘You have two other children’.
A few months after Christopher’s death, a stranger asked me how many children I had.
‘Three, no, sorry, two. Three, yes, three. Shit. Okay, I had three, now I have two.’
Happy? Can we move on? She wanted to know how I had lost a child and where in the hierarchy he was placed. ‘I bet it was the middle child,’ she said. ‘It’s always the middle child.’
I told her I didn’t lose him. I told her I knew where he was; in a box in my garden. She walked away.
On the same day I went into Avalon to close Christopher’s bank account. Ben came with me for support. The teller told us it could only be closed by Christopher. I said he couldn’t close it because he was dead.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’
I was shaking and angry. Ben demanded to see the manager and after several apologies, he ordered the teller to close the account. She put $7.45 into my hand and was forced to turn away under the heat of Ben’s glar
e.
A friend’s husband, a former policeman, berated me over the phone: ‘Many parents lose their children. You’ve got to live with it. I have to face that suffering every day of my life. How would you like to have to pull dead toddlers out of mangled car wrecks?’
I couldn’t trust anyone and the deeper I hid the more I became a stranger to myself. I learned to pocket my grief inside the dark cavity which used to house my soul.
By 2005 when we sold and moved out of Avalon, boxed up our past and Christopher’s treasures and ashes, I wouldn’t recognise my face in the mirror.
After we sold, we rented a beach house in Clareville on the Pittwater side of the Northern Beaches peninsula. Nic’s avowal was prescient: If he died, I would have to sell the house because I would see him in every room. He just had the wrong son.
From the front, the white weatherboard was fashioned to look like the bow of a boat and if you sat on the balcony under the giant Port Jackson fig, you could pretend you were adrift somewhere out on the Pacific Ocean. It was a small two-bedroom bug house, the air filled with flies, the bench tops with ants and in every dark nook, cockroaches played Russian roulette with my broomstick. In this rental, Christopher was gone. I could no longer hope he would be coming home. With each day I found it harder to pretend. Loneliness was battering me and the unrelenting fingers of grief were clawing at my skin, ripping open my shell. I was exposed like an injured animal with nowhere to hide.
Nic loved living at Clareville, waking up each morning to walk along the sand, striking up conversations with the locals and visitors. Ben was still living in a small flat in Cammeray on Sydney’s lower North Shore with Sarah to be closer to his work in the city.
It was a popular harbour beach for mothers and toddlers as the waves were small and the sand was free of syringes and butts. A step up from the beach were grassed areas for barbecues and picnics.
The row of cottages along its length were mostly rentals or holiday houses.
I didn’t like living there but during the first few months I made an effort to enjoy the benefits of the relaxed coastal living. It soon became claustrophobic and the noise of people having fun jarred my brain. There were people everywhere, day and night. During the day they milled outside our front gate, drinking coffee from thermos mugs as they searched for the perfect picnic spot in the shade of one of the large pine trees. And at night the car park next to our house was as loud as an amusement parlour. I jumped with every crash of a beer bottle in the council bin. I hated the way the waves roiled in like a greeting, then retreated like a disgruntled guest, rocking tranquil yachts, their stays clanging a cacophony against their aluminium masts. I hated the seagulls which begged for sandwich crusts and squawked when chased by little sandy feet.
I would never be able to listen to the ocean again. Before Christopher’s death, it was beautiful, cool, the azure of a sapphire, a playground for families basking in the sun and tomorrow’s promises. After death, it was a miasma of rotting fish and putrescent seaweed, grey and threatening like a warning. With a relentless nonchalance it crashed over my unconscious son, again and again and again, snaking its way into his mouth and eyes and nose. It made his brittle body rock and creak and crack. It made him cold. It suctioned his blood and diluted it to the grey of the sea, leaving him breathless, bloodless and lifeless. I would never be able to look at the sea again.
After Christopher’s death everything became an ominous presentiment of the agony ahead. There would be no music but discordant bars which grated like a squawking cockatoo; no poetry, but inane iambic gibberish; and the colours—the blue-black of a raven, the rusty hues of a shedding cherry blossom or the coral of a budding rose—would be whitewashed as though viewed with boozy eyes. Nothing was beautiful anymore.
Nothing could make my heart yearn again. Nothing could make me walk out the door. Grief hung in the cage of my mind, a disinterested pendulum marking time with a metronomic thud. When you watch your child die, take their last breath, that moment will be marked forever. It will define who you were, what you are, what you will become. The past, every moment which came before, is a mindless, muted memory, an undesired gift in a camphor chest.
This is what grief looked like. This is how it smelt, how it tasted.
This is what it did to me. I hid in a hole and was sprung like a shock absorber. I had no taste, no sense of smell; my view was blurred.
At Clareville the impact of shock dulled me but also made me vigilant to a doom I wore like a cloak. I tried. I watered the hydrangeas and walked along the beach but when I opened the front door all I could hear were the whispers of a gang of ghosts; all I could see were their silhouettes as they swayed in a heady dance around me.
They mocked me, cajoled me and then with a disappointed groan, disappeared through the locked door, taking their melting smiles with them.
The hours were long and punctuated with panic. The outside was coming for me. I hid behind doors or closed the white plantation shutters but I could still hear the throb of life. I spent more time in my bedroom, at first in my chair then my bed, under the covers to escape the light and sound. In my room I didn’t have to talk, listen or think. I could close my eyes and bring on night. When Phil and Nic came home I planted myself in the kitchen and pulled down my mask. I’d make dinner then plead exhaustion, falling asleep to their laughter. Phil could always make Nic laugh and vice versa.
It was two days before Christmas. I knew I was depressed. I was suffocating with it. I was splayed like prey in a spider’s web, waiting to be eviscerated, begging someone to turn out the lights. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to buy a Christmas tree.
I used to love Christmas. We had a fabric Advent calendar with twenty-five pockets. A grey mouse in a red and white spotted dress was the daily marker and the boys would take turns to move her, Nic having worked out the order so he would always get Christmas Day.
Christmas used to be the highlight of our family year. Phil was home for several weeks and we’d plan everything down to Rudolph’s midnight treat. The boys decorated the tree and placed presents for each other on the fake snow while singing and dancing to Bing Crosby or Dean Martin.
On Christmas eve and before they went to bed I’d sit them under the tree and light a candle for each while Phil took photos, their faces lit with excitement and anticipation. We’d hurry them off to bed with the threat that Santa wouldn’t come unless they were fast asleep, but not before Ben poured a glass of milk for Santa, Christopher washed a carrot for Rudolph and Nic left a plate of gingerbread cookies in case anyone got hungry.
At Avalon in 2004, Nic asked for a Christmas tree. Daisy bought him one but no one could find the decorations and it sagged naked in the corner, and without any presents or carols it became the elephant in our lounge room and mostly ignored. All I could see was a six-year-old Ben in his button-down green pyjamas dotted with sailing boats smiling into the melting wax of a red candle and Nic, in blue, smiling over the rim of his. Between them, I saw an empty space and I heard my heart crack.
December 2001 was Christopher’s last Christmas. He had eight months and four days to live. We spent it at home in Avalon and although we were all stressed and unhappy, we made the most of our annual family day. Phil lugged home an enormous live Christmas tree and, as always, we listened to carols and let the boys decorate the tree. Silver baubles dangled and fairylights blinked in a two-time beat. The cardboard decorations the boys made in primary school made their annual appearance and hung, a little bent and creased then, on drooping pine needles.
It was a very hot day and we decided to eat our Christmas meal on the back deck. We sat around our large wooden table, feasting on ham and turkey and something vegetarian for Nic. He was eight when he stopped eating meat after watching a bullfight on television with Phil.
The pesky kookaburra which I hand-fed every day dive-bombed into the middle of my plate and sat there while it devoured a slice of ham. Everyone laughed—everyone, except Christopher. I took photos that
night. They showed Nic playing the clown as usual, Ben smiling quietly and Phil, open-mouthed, head thrown back laughing at something Nic said. Christopher was staring at nothing. His face was dark, flat, expressionless. His eyes were downcast. He looked like a ghost in the surreal aura of the camera flash. He looked scared.
I thought at the time that he was moody because he didn’t want to be there with his family, preferring his friends or Ally and her family. I was hurt because I didn’t think he liked us. When I look at the photos now, I see so much more. I see everything in that frozen face. His fear, loneliness and desperation. How did I miss it then?
How could I not have seen his turmoil?
At Clareville, Nic asked again for a Christmas tree.
‘Maybe next year,’ I said.
He looked up from his hunched position in front of his computer and sighed. I knew he was disappointed in me.
I didn’t think there would be a next year. Two days before Christmas and I knew I couldn’t bear to live anymore. I was empty, lonely and heavy with guilt and sadness. The four walls of my bedroom were moving in on me. Phil and Nic were anxious. They’d gingerly knock on the door and cajole me to step into their world. I couldn’t raise my head. I’d lost the will to even pretend.
A few days later, Phil begged me to see a counsellor. I refused. Then Nic tried.
‘Drink this,’ he said, holding a steaming mug under my nose. ‘You’ve got to get out of bed.’
Missing Christopher Page 11