The next thing I heard was me apologising. I heard myself say: ‘I have to go now.’ I heard his voice come back at me, but I didn’t catch the words because I was already extending my hand in front of me, placing the handset on its base. Click. I felt something inside me shrivelling up and flaking to dust.
*
A couple of weeks later, I started seeing a new psychiatrist, a man called Jim. Jim came highly recommended by my cousin, the GP. He was short, stocky, middle-aged, with an open yet apprehensive expression that I found instantly appealing. It was an expression that invited my vulnerability, ushered it through the door, stroked it on the shoulder and laid it on the couch. Actually, Jim had an armchair, not a couch – no-one actually uses couches – but it was an unbelievably comfortable armchair, like a grandmother’s hug, so comfortable that if I’d been anywhere near sane I would have asked Jim where he bought it.
I loathe seeing a new psychiatrist. You have to explain everything again, dredge it all up, relay information that you would prefer to forget. Dad’s depression, Dad’s death. His face, his plasticine-like cheek squished onto the kitchen table, the pool of urine by his feet. The guilt. And yet there is also something I enjoy about it. It’s like starting a new love affair – a platonic one, naturally, but a love affair all the same; like meeting someone with whom you feel utterly safe, a person to whom you can say anything and not be judged, a person whose greatest pleasure in life is to listen to you rake over your most banal neuroses, again and again and again. Later, when you fail to get better, this relationship will falter somewhat, or at least become more complex; you will feel as if you are somehow disappointing your lover, letting them down, not to mention exposing their treatment as ineffectual, which is uncomfortable for everyone. But I wasn’t at that stage with Jim yet. We were still honeymooning.
Also, a new doctor equalled new hope. When I told Jim what drugs I was taking – Prozac still, but only off and on – he shook his head and said that the medications had come a long way in the past few years, that there was a whole new generation of SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Serotonin, he explained, is the feel-good chemical. It also acts as a neurotransmitter, relaying information from one brain cell to another. If you don’t have enough serotonin in your brain, you get depressed. What the SSRIs do is stop the brain reabsorbing excess serotonin, the stuff that is just lying around after it has done all its transmitting business. If the excess isn’t reabsorbed, there’s more serotonin available to make you feel good.
This all sounded plausible. As a doctor’s son, I am particularly susceptible to clinical explanations. I told Jim about the whole phone episode, the freezing up, the blankness. Cognitive impairment, Jim called it. Quite common, apparently. ‘Speech latency, not being able to find the words, thought blocking. It’s all part of it.’
Jim told me depression was hereditary, and that I probably got it from Dad. He put me on a regime of drugs: one of them was an SSRI, and the other was Epilim, a mood stabiliser. ‘It’s the drug they give to epileptics, to stop their seizures.’
It was a lot of drugs to be taking. ‘How long will I be on all this?’ I asked. ‘I don’t mind taking the drugs, but I want to get back to normal, like, you know, as soon as possible.’
‘Oh, no,’ Jim said, not missing a beat. ‘With your history, you’ll probably be on drugs for the rest of your life.’
*
A lot of talk about depression centres on the mental anguish and the melancholy, the stuff that goes on inside your mind. But there was also a substantial physical component to it. In my worst moments, when I had been in the grip of an episode for a week or two, it was as if I’d suddenly put on ten kilos. My limbs felt like lead; but more than that, the air itself felt heavier, as if some sinister meteorological phenomenon had, overnight, increased the pressure on earth by several atmospheres. ‘Psychomotor retardation,’ Jim said. A physiological winding down; a slurry-worded, speech impeded, mushy-limbed entropy, like a robot running out of batteries. Some people got it so bad that they stopped moving altogether; they stopped eating, they even stopped going to the toilet. Get to that stage, and the words electroconvulsive therapy start popping up.
Not only that, but I itched all over, a persistent tickling tingling, in my hair, on my forearms and, most disturbingly, on my face. Maybe I have lice, I thought. Or early stage melanoma. Eventually I became convinced that I had little bugs, tiny creatures, skin parasites, crawling on my cheeks or under my skin. I couldn’t get rid of them. When I scratched or rubbed them the itching stopped, but only for a moment. I told Jim that I needed to see a dermatologist, but he told me to take it easy, that it was just part of the disease.
And then there was what I called the Elevator Shaft. This wasn’t, strictly speaking, a physical symptom, but it sure felt like one. I’d be on the bus or at my desk when suddenly the whole world, time itself, everything, would sluice out from underneath me, and I’d find myself falling, plummeting down a long dark shaft, feet first, into the unknown, out of control, grasping for the sides, grasping for anything to arrest my descent. This feeling could go on for hours. For days. Try sleeping like that. I’d lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, into the blackness, concentrating on my breathing and talking to myself, just as Mum always told me to do.
It’s just brain chemicals.
It’s just neurotransmitters.
I went to see Jim and I sat there, in his perfectly still armchair in his perfectly stable room, and I explained the falling thing, the Elevator Shaft. I heard my own words and realised that I sounded exactly like I felt, which is to say: insane.
Then came the sadness: it was everywhere. It leaked out of my head and onto the streets, where all I saw was suffering: the man with Down syndrome struggling to make himself understood in the café; the guy with MS dragging his twisted legs underneath him; the gay man, white as ash, stricken with AIDs, sitting by the window in the bar, his arms scrolled with scabs. I saw a young girl in a wheelchair, drool dripping down her chin and onto her chest. Her life was pain. She soon would be dead.
Death. I thought about that, too. Just death. What it would feel like, the blackness and oblivion. I thought of suicide. Not necessarily committing it, but just the idea. That it was a possibility, a solution. I felt it waiting for me, patiently, quietly, biding its time at the bottom of everything, like gravity.
Jim put me on lithium. ‘Give it time,’ he said.
*
The lithium made me feel better; I was no longer falling down an elevator shaft, and the permanent-doom thing wound back a couple of notches, to a more or less acceptable level, to the white noise of existential dread that most people live with day in, day out. Unfortunately, the lithium made my mouth taste like a swamp; murky, mossy, stale and deoxidised, as if I’d been gargling pond scum. (Who knows, maybe lithium is made from pond scum. Maybe pond scum has antidepressant qualities.)
I still relied on alcohol, though. Indeed, I understood like never before why Dad drank so much. When anxiety busted its cage and was tearing through my head like a pack of wolves, I’d belt a couple of straight scotches, feel them burning down my gullet, dissolving the present. Then I’d lie on the floor, somewhere solid, looking up, with my hands on the ground.
Thank God for booze. Such reliable oblivion. The SSRIs were all well and good. But two stiff whiskies weren’t bad either.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I once asked Mum if, when she married Dad, she had known for certain that it was the right thing to do. She said no, she hadn’t known. She was ‘pretty sure’ though, and that was the best you could expect. At the time I thought this was a terrible answer. But then it occurred to me that she was right: if you waited to be one hundred percent sure about stuff, you’d never do anything.
Margot and I were married on Cremorne Point, one Saturday in January 2001, on a patch of grass near our old picnic spot. Boats rocked on the water, their rigging ma
king the mournful clinking I so loved as a boy. Someone had sprinkled a corridor of red petals on the grass as a kind of pathway that Margot and I were meant to walk down. Seen from a distance, this pathway appeared to lead right off the edge of the rocks, as if we were about to take a running jump into oblivion.
My primary emotion that day was a momentous, almost narcotic joy blended with constrictive self-consciousness, stiff and shiny, like enamel: any sudden moves, I thought, and something might crack. Standing there, waiting for the vows, I found myself drifting off, blissfully dissociating, as if the gravity of the occasion and the prospect of spending the rest of my life with this woman had conspired to switch off my frontal lobes, plunging me into a moment of weightless euphoria. In photos, I look like a happy idiot, a simpleton in a suit, mesmerised by the sun.
It wasn’t a fancy wedding. There were no church bells, no white tulle or black Bentleys. We pledged our troths, or whatever you call it, but we did it before friends and family, not ‘God and man’. Our vows were plain and simple, the only tinkering being the excision of the ‘honour and obey’ clause. Margot is not the obeying kind.
I also felt embarrassed. Everyone crowded around, close enough to touch us, staring at Margot and me as if awaiting the start of some intricately choreographed dance routine. I felt the same way I had at other people’s weddings: hubristic, that we were tempting fate, even being a little self-deceiving. All the solemn oaths, the loving looks, the bold promises. Did anyone really believe them? Or was it just something you said? I’d recently been to a friend’s wedding where the celebrant read the Apache Wedding Blessing – ‘Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter to the other’ – and I thought: what horseshit. If Mum and Dad were any guide, marriage involved plenty of rain. And hail. There would be flash floods, lightning strikes, near drownings. As far as I was concerned, every marriage certificate should come with a life jacket and a whistle.
I was up for it though. I loved Margot. I had loved her all along. In my wedding speech I described her as a cross between Attila the Hun and Mother Teresa. I said I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. If there were any floods coming, we’d get swept away together.
*
On 11 March 2003, Margot and I had our first child, who we decided to call Mia. I remember driving Margot to the hospital in our blue Mazda. It was confronting, and fun, and rather grown-up: I felt as if we were in a movie about two young adults who were driving to hospital, about to have their first baby. I was having a great deal of trouble assimilating the reality of our situation, that it was really happening, really, truly, right now. Today.
Margot turned to me. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for this,’ she said, not joking.
‘Me neither,’ I replied, also not joking.
Margot was having a caesarean, because her doctor told her that Mia was in a breech position. Margot was upset about this, feeling it would rob her of the experience of ‘natural’ childbirth. I also felt a bit robbed: I wanted to see what natural childbirth looked like – mainly so I could tell other people about it, make a good pub story out of it. But caesareans had their pluses; they were very orderly, for one thing:
2.30 pm: Prep and anaesthesia
3.30 pm: Baby extraction
4:30 pm: Champagne and handshakes in recovery.
When I got to the hospital, they took Margot off for prep, and put me in a baby-blue hospital gown with a little white surgical mask that I couldn’t help thinking was there to stop me saying anything stupid. Then they ushered me into the delivery suite, where Margot was lying on a gurney, just her head poking out of a boxy screen-like arrangement that obscured everything below her neck. It looked as if they were about to saw her in half. She looked brave yet terrified, and slightly green.
From all around us came the chilly clink of metal instruments, and bleeping screens, and doctors saying things like, ‘Hey, Dan, you got the IVC on two thirty-five bps by one over eighty, correct?’
I was reminded, as never before, of my inherent uselessness. I brought precisely nothing to the table in here. I was a tourist; I even had my camera. I did not have a womb containing a foetus that required removal; I did not have obstetric expertise. I could not administer anaesthesia, and I was not a nurse. All I could do was hold Margot’s hand, which I doubt she even noticed, whacked out as she was on anaesthetic and muscle relaxants and her own fear-induced endorphins.
Then, before I knew it, the most incredible, and terrible, moment arrived: the moment when Mia was hauled, kicking like a frog, red and glistening, from Margot’s stomach, the moment when I suddenly saw – What? No! It couldn’t be! – that she had no . . . that she had no eyes. Good Christ! My child had been born without eyes! My heart stopped. My mind froze. I was in an airlock of pure terror. Until I stepped closer and saw that Mia was slathered in a layer of slimy white goo – vernix, they call it – and that this goo had, together with the uneven lighting, produced a horrifying optical illusion, making her eyes look like gaping sockets.
What was I thinking? No eyes?! What a fucking idiot!
The nurse then handed Mia to me, my warm little bread-loaf-sized Mia, and I held her for a moment, which was not a moment as I had previously known moments to be but a parallel pocket of time that sat outside normal experience, and I stared, stared, just stared into her beautiful, gorgeous, perfect, slimy little face, before being asked by the nurse to hand her back. And this nurse, who just moments before had seemed the very epitome of care and professionalism, now seemed to be handling Mia in what struck me as a shockingly cavalier manner, flipping her around like a sack of oranges and plonking her on the scales. It was all I could do to stop myself from snatching back my child and running out the door with her.
I cried with happiness, which was a first. I’d previously assumed that crying with happiness was rubbish. Nobody really cried with happiness, did they? Crying with happiness was like laughing with agony. It was physically impossible. But then, standing by the window of the observation bay, looking at Mia in her crib, I did it, I cried with happiness.
I expected it to wear off, but it didn’t. For weeks I experienced total and complete happiness, whole-body happiness, happiness like a drug, only better, because there was no comedown, no hangover. It was pure, unconditional happiness, calamitous and life-changing and almost palpable, as if someone had grabbed me by the legs and dipped me head first in a big barrel of happiness and it was all over me. Like the gilded man of Andean legend, I dripped happiness from my fingertips and feet, I trailed it like glitter when I walked down the street. I filled the hospital lift with happiness; in the newsagent, where I bought a New Idea and a Mars Bar, the sales assistant sat helpless as it hit her like a shockwave, like a superhero force field. I was shedding the stuff, sloshing it about; I was a happiness billionaire. Everyone could have some; I had more than I needed.
I returned to Mum’s place to sleep; it was closer to the hospital. At night, I lay in my old bed, so freighted with memories, the good, the bad, the abysmal. But now was a good time. I woke in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and then lay, beaming, in the dark, glad for my wakefulness, because it meant I could appreciate my happiness. Sleeping through it would have been such a waste.
‘My little Mia,’ I said to myself. ‘She’s my little Mia.’
I had vaguely expected my experience with Dad to have scared me, to put me off becoming a father. But when the moment arrived, it was quite the opposite. Fatherhood felt totally instinctual. It was something all mine: only I could be a father to my kids. I might not have been the best surfer, the best lover, the best writer; I may not have played rugby for Australia or been a top doctor. But I could be a really good dad, maybe even the best dad the universe had ever known. Certainly I would be the best dad my kids would ever know.
I could do this. Love was all that was required, and I could love. I had that within me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEE
N
The two laws of childhood: 1) Parents are not permitted to die, ever; and 2) The more you love them, the less permitted they are.
In 2009, Mum flouted these rules by getting cancer. Nan King and Aunt Joanie had both died of cancer, but Mum’s diagnosis still came as a shock: like a child, I’d assumed she was immune. Or, rather, I had shelved the possibility of her death, quietly ignored it and got on with my life, which included having another two daughters, Rosey (who we named after Mum) and Sunny.
In October Mum began having stomach-aches and was diagnosed soon after with ovarian cancer. Ovarian is a real sleeper: it can sit in there, growing undetected, for months, and by the time it’s discovered it’s often too late. It wasn’t like we weren’t being careful. Mum was getting six-monthly checks. She had been cleared as recently as July. By October, when the cancer was spotted, it was already too big to treat.
At first we were told it was operable. Then it wasn’t. Then it might be. Then it definitely wasn’t. She tried chemo, but couldn’t tolerate the side effects: they made her violently ill. We all took turns going into hospital to hold the bucket under her chin. After about two weeks of that she told us she was quitting the treatment. The others accepted this, but I was more selfish; I begged her to keep going with it, not to give up. I put my head in her lap, just like I used to as a boy. I hugged her hand and made it wet with tears. She looked at me and said: ‘I love you, darling. But I love myself more.’ She was going to let herself die, and she was going to do it with grace, not spewing her guts up in a bedpan.
Mum was proud. She always liked to look her best. She wanted people to remember her with her hair freshly done, in a nice outfit, with a smile on her face. Lying in bed, bald, with sunken cheeks – that wasn’t her. And so after her diagnosis, she decided not to see any of her friends. It would be just us kids till the end.
Farewell to the Father Page 19