Missing Christopher

by Jayne Newling

  Reading this for the first time eleven years later, I burst into tears. I can’t help but grieve again for Phil’s deep pain and for the way our lives are ruptured by Christopher’s sudden death. The ache and longing is never dormant but pounds when I look at Phil’s pain, even now. During those early years we could see each other’s grief but we couldn’t touch it. We were scared of it for ourselves and for each other. We couldn’t help or save each other.

  We have the strength now to touch, with delicate strokes, the grief which has blanched our souls. Our love has saved us.

  chapter 42

  My phone woke me at 5.00 a.m. on December 27th, 2011. In seven hours twenty people were arriving for lunch to celebrate my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary. Nothing but the desserts had been prepared. We still had to set up the tables and chairs, make a beef hotpot, prepare salads and fruit and decorate the lounge room with balloons and photographs. But it all had to wait.

  ‘Mum—are you awake? Sarah’s in full labour. You’d better hurry.’

  Phil and I showered and dressed in record time. It was at least an hour-and-a-half’s drive. But Zachary couldn’t wait. He was delivered at 5:42 a.m., weighing just over 3 kilograms.

  When we arrived at 7.00 a.m., a healthy and contented baby was wrapped in the arms of a weary Sarah while Ben looked on, a little shell-shocked but with pride.

  When Sarah first told me she was pregnant, I cried. I’m not sure whether it was for joy or my absolute fear that I didn’t want to or couldn’t be responsible for another child, especially if it was a boy.

  I already knew they wanted me to be an active part of his life. How could I love him? How could I open my heart again—take a risk that I’d love and lose another child? I was terrified.

  When I first held him in my arms, I cried again. I’m not sure whether it was for joy or that I feared I could never love him in the way that would satisfy him or me. I gave him back to Sarah. And then he cried and my heart jumped.

  I cradled him in the crook of my elbow and then, just before his body slumped into slumber, he opened his big, blue eyes and gazed up at me. Just for a second or two. My body warmed and my heart throbbed.

  In that instant, that ethereal pinprick of time, I fell in love.

  I cried again.

  During his early months I visited once a week, mainly to help in the house but also to get my fill of cuddles. He is now eighteen months old and our bond is euphoric. I still see him every week to give Sarah a break and for me to get my Zach fix. He runs to me when I walk in the door. His kiss is open-mouthed, his arms tight around my neck. We dance a waltz around the kitchen; he, the partner, in my arms. We sing ‘A Frog Went Walking on a Summer’s Day’—our special tune. I taught him how to answer ‘rah’ when asked what a lion says, although Ben and Sarah have each told me independently that it was for them he said it for the first time.

  Our few precious hours together are filled with building blocks, Thomas the Tank Engine and wooden Brio train tracks, his obsession. I blow bubbles and he runs to pop them. I crawl from Ben and Sarah’s bedroom to his room to hide behind the door or cot, shouting boo, as he first catches sight of me. With an uproarious laugh, he throws himself into my arms. We wrestle in the grass, tumbling over each other, the final fling a full-bodied flop onto my stomach. I grunt, he giggles. I pull funny faces, put his socks on my ears, saucepans on my head. Making him laugh fills me with life.

  I make a tunnel with my legs and he never seems to tire of going through one way and then back again. He doesn’t want to sleep but often constant play tires him, much as he tries to pretend it doesn’t.

  I wrap him in his sleeping bag and hold him against my chest as we read a book, swaying in a rocking chair to the gentle beat of a lullaby emanating from the tummy of Leroy the bear. He fights it and then looks up at me as his eyes flit and flutter and his body goes limp.

  We play in the park, go to the zoo and on countless suburban train rides. When I have to leave, he often cries and my heart cracks, just a little. I miss him when I’m gone and I can’t wait to see him again.

  He is blond, blue-eyed and chubby, just like Christopher was. But he doesn’t remind me of Christopher and perhaps that was my greatest fear. He is just as smart, sensitive and loving but he is Ben and Sarah’s child, a mixture of Sarah’s great beauty and Ben’s good looks. He has Sarah’s warmth and inquisitiveness and Ben’s strength and stoicism. When he falls over and hurts himself, he wants to cry but an urgent cuddle and a kiss is all he really needs.

  My deep love for him shocks me. I used to wonder why I dared to take the chance but now I know I had no choice. He weaved his way into my life, my soul. He chipped away at the ice encasing my heart with his unconditional love. He is my greatest pleasure. I’d give my life for him.

  The wind is howling outside my study window, upsetting the currawongs in the sycamore tree and the male bowerbird who stole my blue tealight for his nest underneath the oyster plant. The screen door bangs against its flimsy hinge and the hanging chimes sound like an urgent fire drill. Doors thump, windows rattle and the shallow-rooted pittosporums threaten to topple in the strong southerly screaming in a westerly direction and over the high ridges of the Central Tablelands.

  I have the fire lit and have buttressed the Edwardian doors leading out to the deck with draft blockers, one in the shape of a long sausage dog. On my antique desk an orange dragonfly stares at me with green eyes from the shade of my leadlight lamp. There is a photo of Christopher, the same one used on the memorial service sheet, and one of Nic, Zach and Sarah and Ben.

  Ben still works in the banking industry and is getting ready to sail in the Moth World Titles in Hawaii. While he is away, Sarah and Zach will stay with us.

  Ben is anxious we all have a Christmas together. He wants Zach to experience the joys of Santa Claus and the excitement of a tree with fairylights, baubles and gold and silver tinsel. And he wants Phil and me to be there, to be happy, to recover to build our new lives around his son.

  This year, Phil and I are going away to New Zealand but I’ve made a promise we will have a ‘real’ Christmas next year and I know, then will be the right time. Then, I won’t have that image of Ben and Nic sitting under the tree, each holding a candle, with a space between them where Christopher should be. Then, it will be just Zach and maybe a little brother or sister cradled next to him.

  This is what my future looks like. I now know why I’m still here. To watch my beautiful sons forge their careers, have children, be happy, and to watch Zach grow.

  After I spent another beautiful day with my grandson recently, Sarah and Zach walked me to the train station for my trip back to the Blue Mountains. Sarah had put Zach into his stroller and I kissed him goodbye as the train rolled in. Distracted by the noise and the opening of the train doors, he hadn’t realised I’d hopped on board. As I waved goodbye he caught sight of me and, realising I was leaving, flung his arms out to me and screamed as if to beg me not to go. As the doors closed his scream became shrill and my heart broke. Everyone on the carriage was watching the drama and felt my despair as I wiped my eyes and took a seat.

  I can’t wait to see him again. I can’t wait to feel his pudgy arms around my neck, his lips on mine, his aqua eyes, framed with long, blond eyelashes, fluttering against my cheek. Having Zach in my life will never fill the void of losing Christopher, but through his love I now have hope for the future and a desire to love again. His existence helps me to search for a deeper meaning to life and death. Watching Christopher die was shocking and frightening. No one should die alone and in fear. That, along with my experience with George, is why I did a volunteer course to become a palliative carer, and that’s where I met Deane.

  chapter 43

  2013

  Outside the old church chapel, down a cobbled laneway, through a jasmine-scented arch, Deane sits hunched on a bench under a pine tree, waiting for something, expecting nothing. He rubs his knees then pulls at a dandelion, counting the petals as
he tosses them to the wind. He closes his mud eyes and sighs the sough of a tortured soul.

  He twists his yellow rubber wristband then scratches at the branded word HOPE, stabbing each letter with a jagged fingernail. He lets himself go, his back to the boards, his head to the heavens and his heart to winter’s insipid western sun.

  Deane knows death—death is his friend—death waits patiently, each day, for a falter in his footstep. Deane is only twenty-eight, the same age Christopher would have been. I watch his movements, a hand through hair, a raised eyebrow, the jiggle of his right knee, a sign of anxiety or despair I’ve cringed through many times with my three sons. He is a man but still the boy who put his head through a leather noose and with one long limb kicked at his father’s stepladder; still the eighteen-year-old boy, who, two months later, was forced to remain naked after being yanked from a rafter in a locked psychiatric unit, his pyjama top around his neck.

  His skin is still smooth and his dark hair still gleams but it is thinning and the boy unwittingly becomes a man.

  Deane knows about death. His aunt killed herself a few months ago. It must be in the genes and he wonders if I want to die.

  ‘I did,’ I confess.

  He nods—he knows how his mother’s heart cracked after each of his failed attempts to die. He sees the way she stoops and shuffles and distrusts his proffered smile. He hears her anxious sobs and the fracture of ice as an amber river winds its way through the frozen cubes.

  ‘Do you?’ I ask.

  ‘Want to die? Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes, often. It’s there for me if I want it. I don’t have much hope but I’m trying to find it.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’

  Here is the church, the dining hall, the small chapel of the sisters of Our Lady of the Nativity where Deane and I have been learning to become palliative carers. The course is held over eight weeks every two years and volunteers are screened and interviewed before being selected.

  ‘I know death,’ he says. ‘I think I can help’. He smiles at me, the lines smoothing a second before the turn of his head. He sees in me what I see in him and sometimes, when unmasked, we are frightened by what we see. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Because death is just as important as birth.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No one should die alone, in pain or in fear.’

  ‘Like Christopher?’

  ‘No. I meant the dying, the terminally ill.’

  He smiles and looks away again.

  ‘It’s the same for you?’

  He shrugs. ‘I know death,’ is all he says.

  And he does, as do I. Death for us is hideous and ugly and violent like a rape. It slams into you, sprawls and flattens you like a paper doll.

  ‘Why did you want to die?’ I whisper.

  ‘I was meant to,’ he said. ‘I’d been in bed, in the dark for two years. I didn’t leave my room. Every day was getting worse, everything was unravelling. Ironically, the only thing which forced me out of the dark into the light was to die.’

  He was cut down from the giant Japanese maple—saved—choking on the breath he didn’t want to take. He went back into the dark, his room, his bed. Then he went mad. He was placed in a locked room with ‘neon’ lights, moaning ‘cell’ mates and nosey staff who parted his scalp to peer into his brain. He was dazed and doped but nothing could slake his fear.

  ‘I couldn’t think about anything in the outside world. I was in an altered state where my world, even though filled with pain and misery—was all that mattered. I was disconnected to life and the people around me, my family, friends. I didn’t care about anyone.

  There were no consequences.’

  ‘At that moment, when you decide, at that exact second—what is it like?’ I asked. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘It was different—for me and your son.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Maybe it is the same in that we both wanted to die, to be rid of the pain forever. But for me it wasn’t impulsive: I planned it—meticulously—twice. Everything was slow and calm. A peace came over me. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than not to have to take another breath. I wanted to die and I believed I was meant to die.’

  ‘Are you glad you didn’t?’

  Silence. He gazes out to the vast valley beyond a row of eucalyptus trees. The red fingers of the sun’s dying rays splay like knife wounds on the rock face, in the cracks of secret caves and under the ledges where the homeless will light fires to keep warm tonight. He turns to me and smiles, a tepid expression of lost faith. He shrugs.

  ‘It’s different for everyone,’ he says. ‘The answer isn’t always in the act. Sometimes there is no answer.’

  ‘But are you glad you didn’t die?’

  ‘I still can’t see the future but it doesn’t scare me like it used to.

  The future is always worse than the present. I have no idea how I got here. I don’t know how I’m still alive. But I am and for now it’s okay.

  Everyone still watches me and my mother sometimes gets angry but there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘Tell her she’s lucky. She still has her son. Tell her she has a second chance.’

  He smiles and, with the delicacy of a spider’s creep, flits a consoling hand across mine.

  I understand, just a little more, why teenagers decide the interminable future is too hard to bear. Their lives are lived for each day and when each day is wracked with angst, uncertainty and a heartbreaking pain and belief that nothing will get better, death can be their only way out, the key which opens their crypt and sets them free.

  Deane saw no way out; he planned his death with spirit and, with an energising zeal he never felt with living, stumbled towards oblivion. For Christopher, life was deteriorating quickly. His body was failing him and his tenuous hold on his mental state was plummeting into a disquieting realm which housed his greatest fear.

  He didn’t plan it like Deane, but the pain was as intense and as he climbed the cliff and neared the top, there was a moment, an impulsive second, where death was desirable. For Christopher, it was easier to let go than to hold on.

  Deane and I walk back into the course’s final session adjusting our faces. I thank him.

  ‘Anytime,’ he says as he throws his lanky frame into the seat next to mine.

  While the others are settling he whispers to me: ‘Dying is a release whether you’re sick or in pain. It’s a relief—sometimes, life’s raison d’être.’

  And then I realised why I was here. I wanted to have some control over death, smooth it, warm it, care for it. I wanted to blunt the barbed brutality of it. I wanted to lay death on satin sheets and stroke it while humming a lullaby. I wanted death to fade, not be pulled through a pane of shattering glass.

  chapter 44

  It has been raining for a week in the mountains and the last of the red autumn leaves have dropped from the giant limbs of the liquidambar. The bluebells, grape hyacinths, freesias and snowdrops are grateful for the extra drink and in a few weeks time, so too will the tulips, daffodils and crocus. I collect the crocus stamens—saffron—after flowering and dry them to use in next winter’s tagines and curries. The birdbaths are full and it is cold enough in July for their surfaces to ice over into mini skate rinks. The grass is white with frost and the six chickens down the back of the yard aren’t as keen as usual to leave their roosts.

  The Great Western Highway is wet and slippery as I make my way to Peter’s house in Wentworth Falls. My first palliative client, he is eighty and has brain cancer. He is strong, brave and funny.

  We have a great bond and much in common. We love grandfather clocks and antiques and both of us wish we had lived a hundred and fifty years ago when life was simple. He has a photo gallery of all his dead relatives on his hallway wall—so do I. We love to read—he on his Kindle, I with real books.

  ‘You should try it,’ he says as we sit by the fire in his small lounge room. ‘So much easier. You can change the font
and the size of the type.’

  ‘Don’t you miss the smell of paper?’

  ‘Nah. Had a lifetime of that.’

  Peter lives alone. His son lives interstate and his daughter in northern Sydney. His wife died twenty years ago. He is intelligent, interested, thoughtful and kind.

  He doesn’t like taking up too much of my time but is glad when, after the chores, I make a cup of tea and we sit across from each other in his leather chairs, talking politics, family and the past, his and mine. He reminds me of George and I have to work hard to keep a professional distance.

  On the way home from Peter’s house I pull up outside our old Wentworth Falls cottage. Built in 1885, the two-bedroom, one-bathroom green weatherboard has now been painted grey. The clematis I planted on the arched entranceway is in hibernation, its twigged fingers twirled and twisted through the wooden canopy. The paths are fringed with winter roses and daffodils and I can just see the old plum tree through the purple-spiked echium bush. Each year we all watched as the plums turned from green to pink to red and we were ready for the annual dash to pick them before the rosellas and king parrots took up residence in its arched branches. I made jam and stewed fruit and Christopher ate them straight from the fruit bowl, not minding the tart twinge on tongue.

  The boys were young when we owned this house which we used as a weekender. They used to bring their friends and bunk down on mattresses in the enclosed balcony. They’d play monopoly or Uno on dark days but when it shone, we’d bushwalk to the valley below searching for the woody fruit of the mountain devil. I had a birdbath surrounded by miniature frogs and ten opium poppies. I waited all year for the double mauve petals to come into flower.

  Christopher was thirteen when he and his mate decided to harvest opium. They beheaded all ten poppies, cut them open and scooped out the poppy seeds to dry in the sun. I scolded them but secretly giggled. It is the latex (the thick juice with seeps from the incision in the pod) which produces the opiate. Disappointed by the seeds of his labour, he left them alone the following year.