She moved into a hospice at Greenwich for the last four weeks. Her hair fell out in tufts, so one day Cam shaved it all off. Mum didn’t look too bad bald – like Sinéad O’Connor with sun spots. Her face thinned out, her neck became longer; those big round dark eyes of hers became bigger and rounder, like searchlights, beaming out, all-seeing. She was tough, and under no illusions. One day we were all visiting, me and Rob, Cam and Gina, when a senior nurse came in to discuss emergency contingencies. If Mum suddenly went critical and none of us kids were here, did we want ‘another person’ to come into the room? ‘Under no circumstances!’ Mum bellowed, rising up off the bed, waving her hand. ‘There is absolutely no way I am having a religious man anywhere near me when that happens!’ Mum had misheard: she thought the nurse had said ‘parson’.
Letters poured in. All my friends wrote to her. They called her Rosie, because that’s what Mum had always told them to do. The grandkids drew her cards that we pinned to the wall at the end of her bed. She said she wanted them in her casket. She became exhausted, and stopped eating. We took turns spending the night with her, sleeping on a cot beside her bed. One night when I was there, she sat bolt upright, moaning for water, so I grabbed the pump spray and squeezed some into her mouth and then lay her back down. She was trembling and tiny, my hands beneath her ribcage as light as a bird’s nest. And I did what she had done for me when I was frightened or worried: I ran my fingers over her temple and made soft, kind noises. I soothed her. Or I tried to.
She died three days later, one humid morning a week before Christmas. We were all there (no parson required). She struggled for breath. Then she stopped. Then she started again – she’d always had trouble with goodbyes; it used to drive Dad nuts. We all spoke to her in her final moments. I got up close and whispered in her ear: ‘I love you, Mum. I will always love you.’ Then she stopped for good. I sat and held her hand until it went cold.
One of the last things she asked me was whether Dad had left a letter. She was still thinking about it, still thinking about that day we found him. She looked in my eyes, and I lied and told her no.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lying. It’s such an underrated skill. In the years after Dad’s suicide, I lied about him all the time. People would ask how he died, and I’d say ‘heart attack’. I found it impossible to say ‘suicide’, not just because of the stigma, but because such an answer would make the other person feel uncomfortable, or worse, invite more questions. Now I was lying about myself, and about my depression. Lying about it, and hiding it too. I hid it from my friends, and I hid it from Pauline – our ‘other mother’, as we all called her – because I knew that Pauline wanted nothing but for me to be happy, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. I talked about it to Cam and Gina, but I hid it from Rob. I believed, incorrectly as it turned out, that Rob thought being depressed was ‘carrying on’, that it was self-indulgent.
At work, it was easy to hide it. People don’t like to pry, and what do you tell them anyway? (More often than not, clinical depression comes out of nowhere, so there is, quite literally, nothing to tell. Nothing has happened.) I hid it from the kids, and Margot, too. Or I thought I did.
All this lying required a degree of acting. Or not acting, exactly – ‘acting’ implies a degree of agency, which was something I felt I almost completely lacked when I was with people, friends, family. I would find myself, despite my best efforts, becoming bolder and brasher. I would show off, talk louder than normal, crack jokes; I would be aggressively sarcastic. I filled up silences. It was as if my ego, sensing imminent defeat, had sallied out in a pre-emptive strike to slay anything in its path. I had no confidence, but I was all confidence. If I was with family, Rob would roll his eyes, and Gina would shake her head. ‘You have to be the centre of attention, don’t you?’ Cam said.
I began experiencing manic episodes, little spiking highs, when everything went too fast. I had always had these, to a lesser or greater extent; I was aware of them, too. But they were functional: they allowed me to get through more work; they made me ‘good company’, as Mum might have said. Margot could spot these a mile off. ‘Calm down,’ she’d say. Or: ‘Stop shouting.’ The girls loved it: they just shouted along with me.
Now the highs were becoming more pronounced, brought on, Margot believed, by stress. I had taken a full-time job at The Sydney Morning Herald as a staff writer, and was desperate to impress. The first weeks I sat in my seat, drenched in the rainy pitter-patter of two hundred keyboards being assiduously typed upon, people all around me, everywhere, belting out stories. Until now, I had been in a room by myself, with no-one but me to make me feel paranoid. Here I had two hundred other journalists to do that as well.
I was doing a story on a religious group that used ruthless, possibly illegal, tactics to boost their business activities. There was talk of a government minister being involved. It was complex; there were dozens of people to chase down, threats of legal action. I worked like a demon, all day long, for two weeks running. I never flagged. I made fifty, sixty calls a day; there were ninety-six pages of transcripts and a folder of clippings and internet searches and books, plenty of books, books about religion and politics and cults and charities and also a two-and-a-half-inch-thick wad of company searches from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. My adrenaline was in the red; I could feel it, taste it, thin and coppery, like petrol, super-heating my veins, dilating corpuscles, rinsing through neurons, making them trill at an inaudible pitch, like a pinged fork, like a supernova wrapped in a skull, like something combustible. Then, on Friday afternoon, I found myself in my boss’s office, in a state of rapture, trying to explain the story as a horde of impatient thoughts bullied each other to get out of my mouth, words elbowing words, consonants gluing up my throat, my mouth twitching now with the effort. Unfortunately, I started describing another story I wanted to do at the same time as this one, an even bigger story about—
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ she said, holding up her hands.
Her name was Amanda. I felt we had a connection, just us two, right now, something that joined us across the table; nothing sexual, God no, more instinctual than that: a shared respect, a bond at the level of blood, like that shared by jungle animals or boxers, yes, boxers, just as they enter the ring to—
Suddenly Amanda was talking – I must shut up! I made a conscious effort to close my mouth. Just to make sure, I put my hand over it, as if I was rubbing my chin.
‘Go home,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk on Monday.’
*
That night I drove to Avoca Beach for a mate’s bucks’ party. I had bought cocaine, which was stupid. I hadn’t taken cocaine, or any drugs, for years; they made me too depressed. But that night I went insane with it; I snorted a gram, then more of other people’s, and I stayed up all night drinking beer and vodka, smoking pot, smoking cigarettes, ranting, my mouth a yammering jackhammer. I walked around the house, searching for sleep, but it never came. At dawn, I lay in bed wide awake, my head roaring like a jet engine.
I had made a colossal mistake.
*
I went to work on Monday, but I was not feeling normal, whatever that should feel like. By mid-morning I found myself shaking, anxious, standing in the corridor in front of the lift, brain shot, unable to move. I felt – I knew – that I had done irreparable damage. The coke, combined with my mania, had lifted me up astonishingly high, beyond reason, but now it had dropped me.
I was falling. Down I plummeted, head first into a drowningly deep unwellness, into a neurochemical hell, where I was beset by catastrophic images, visions racing randomly into my head. Illogical catastrophes, like Sunny being run over, or speared, or having her head crushed in a bowl. I had done a story on a Sierra Leonean man who was forced at gunpoint to grind up his baby daughter’s head with a mortar and pestle. Now I had that image coming into my mind, over and over, me grinding my kids’ heads to paste. It wouldn’t go away. Whe
never I thought of the girls, these vision appeared, baffling, agonising. I became breathless; I had panic attacks. Why was this happening? What did it say about me? What was wrong with me? I was sick. I was evil. I deserved to die. I told no-one, not even Margot.
What would Margot think?
At night, I lay in bed, these images coming around and around, unbidden, poisoning everything, wheedling in through the cracks of my thinking. My thoughts were no longer mine, they were independent of me, they were someone else’s.
My heart hammered, I shook and jittered; my legs kicked out. Lying in the dark, entombed by the black, I felt my face, which I wanted to tear off. I dug my fingers into my eye sockets, felt the plumpness of the eyeballs, which I squeezed now, to distract myself. I wanted to pluck them out, I wanted to reach in and rip out my brain.
I was losing my mind.
*
‘It’s quite common,’ said Jim. ‘Intrusive thoughts, they’re called. It’s an aspect of OCD, which you don’t have, but your condition shares some of those traits.’
I was sitting in Jim’s new office – he’d moved to a terrace in Rozelle. He was older. I hadn’t seen him for years. I was now beyond desperate. I hadn’t slept for several days, and I trembled constantly. I had my hands over my face in shame. The night before I had spent four hours staring at the ceiling, trying to control my breathing, clawing against the anxiety, while these images – these ‘intrusive thoughts’ – scrolled through my mind. And so I got up, I paced around the house. I tried to read, I stared at objects: mindfulness, it’s called. Get in the moment. Stare at a bowl. Tell yourself, This is a bowl. This is a cup. This is a fridge. I am standing here, looking at the fridge. But always the thoughts returned. And so I went outside and looked up at the sky, at the moon and the stars, the oblivion of the infinite. I wanted to be among those stars, away from this planet, away from me.
*
Jim put me on Seroquel, a powerful anti-psychotic, which succeeded in calming my mind. No longer was there a ceaseless howl of cross-talk and noise, interspersed with images of crushed skulls and mashed brains. But the Seroquel was cripplingly claustrophobic, like a wet rug on a bed of coals. It also had the unfortunate side effect of both drawing out and deepening my melancholy, so that I spent the rest of the next day scoured out by intermittent whirlwinds of weeping.
Jim explained that the intrusive thoughts were an extension of my natural tendency to catastrophise. What was the worst thing, the most painful, shameful thing that a father who loves his children could possibly conjure?
That’s where I went when I got sick.
I got back on the Epilim and the SSRIs. I drank nothing for the next month. I even laid off coffee and tea. I didn’t want anything that might bump my mood, up or down.
*
Everything passes. Good times pass, and bad times pass. Depression also passes. That’s a basic rule of my condition. As with so much in life, I have come to see surviving this illness as largely a matter of stamina. Medications won’t work all the time, and neither will therapies, so it becomes a matter of endurance, of just keeping on going.
I am seeing a new psychiatrist, as Jim has retired. (I have a way of either killing or exhausting psychiatrists.) I’ll call him Victor. Victor says that I have to accept I have an illness and make allowances, just as I would if I had the flu or a broken leg. He’s right, of course. In my notebooks I write the words:
It will pass.
It will pass.
It will pass.
It will pass.
It will pass.
Not that it does much good. I read the words, but I don’t really believe them.
Victor tells me about the actor Stephen Fry, who is bipolar. When Fry feels a depressive episode coming on, he cancels all his work, simply shuts up shop, and has his brother handle his affairs until he gets better. Victor doesn’t expect me to stop working; he is merely talking about the idea of acceptance. An illness. He also talks about the ‘intrusive thoughts’, which have now become the principal symptom of my depression. Now when I get sick, that’s where my thoughts go, just like a bad horror movie. Victor assures me that what I am experiencing is not uncommon: you see it sometimes with depressed mothers, he says, who have visions of stabbing their babies or throwing them off balconies or under cars. You see it with men who suddenly have recurring thoughts and images of other men, despite being with women all their lives. They wonder: does this now mean I’m gay? No, Victor says. It doesn’t mean anything. Thoughts mean nothing. They are neuronal impulses. Electrical blips. People think all sorts of things, Victor says; you wouldn’t believe what I hear. It’s actions that count, he says. My actions are those of a good person.
Have you ever killed anyone? No.
Have you ever robbed anyone? No.
Have you ever hurt your children? No.
I ask myself these questions, and obediently answer them. I understand on an intellectual level that I’m not evil. But what I feel is different: what I feel is culpable; as if I’m to blame. And so the guilt and the dread never really go away.
‘But it does go away,’ Victor says. ‘It goes away when you’re better. And you always get better.’
And so I tell myself: It will pass.
Margot tells me: It will pass.
I read the words in my notebook . . .
It will pass.
It will pass.
Please, God, make it pass.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Before she died, Mum discussed with me the idea of writing about Dad. Her only condition was that I wait until after she died. Well, now she was dead. But it wasn’t that simple. Dad’s story had become so central to my life that it had assumed the power of personal myth, something too precious to touch. If I were to write about it, I’d have to do a better job than I thought I would ever be capable of, and so I let it go.
After Mum died we spent weeks cleaning out the house, sorting through everything. There was plenty of stuff none of us could keep, or felt like keeping; our old school reports – Mum had kept every one – her cardigans, her wedding dress. (Our garbage was overflowing, so I drove around the suburb, in tears, dumping swathes of yellowed organza in public bins.) Then one day I was going through Mum’s sock drawer when I came across a plastic bag stuffed with letters. They appeared to be from Dad. Looking more closely, I realised they were the letters he had written to Mum after she and I fled the house. There must have been dozens of them, well over two hundred pages, tens of thousands of words. Rob told me to chuck them. ‘They’ll only upset you,’ he said. I walked up to the bin in the street. I opened the lid, and stood there with the letters in my hands. Then I stopped. We had thrown out so much already. And these letters were different. Only Dad could have written them, and only Mum had read them.
Rob was right: the letters were upsetting. I glanced at them a few times before stuffing them into my bottom drawer. Occasionally I caught sight of them when I went to get a T-shirt, a corner of the plastic bag poking out, goading me. Once I even got in touch with the coroner’s office and requested a copy of Dad’s file. Two weeks later I received an official looking envelope. It was intriguingly thick, but I didn’t open it. Instead, I slipped it into my drawer, deep down, beside the letters.
*
By now I was working for Good Weekend, which is the Saturday magazine for The Sydney Morning Herald. Mum used to love Good Weekend: I imagined her being proud of me, beaming away, somewhere in the ether, cutting out all my stories, just like she used to.
One day I was standing with the editor, Ben. On his desk were a bunch of story proofs, one of which was about a celebrity whose father had killed himself.
‘It’s so common,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Suicide. My father did the same thing.’
I couldn’t believe what I’d just said. Ben was a relative stranger, and
I had come out, just like that, and told him about Dad.
Ben’s immediate response was: ‘You should write a story about it.’
He badgered me about it for a year. You should write about your dad. Where is that story about your dad? Then, as it happened, I found myself with no stories to write, and nothing on the go. One night I went to my bottom drawer: I pulled out the letters, and opened the envelope. Inside: the post mortem, two police reports, a letter from Dad’s psychiatrist. There was also the last letter Dad wrote, the one Rob had taken the day we found him and stuffed into his pocket. I had never read it. It was ten pages long. I read it impatiently, racing ahead to the last page:
Sorry darling and family. I couldn’t take it any longer . . . I couldn’t stand the thought of winter alone, and I can’t look after myself any more . . . LOVE YOU ALL . . .
Then, the very last line:
I would have stayed alive if you had come back to me.
*
It’s commonly assumed that writing about personal trauma must be ‘cathartic’. But cathartic implies a purging, a kind of steam bath for the soul, from which you emerge leaner and lighter. Writing about Dad didn’t feel like that. In truth, it felt remarkably easy, almost natural, as if I had on some subconscious level been writing drafts of the story all along. All that remained was to get it on the page.
That’s not to say there weren’t surprises. I’d always been so loyal to Dad. (‘You idolise him, but he was such a shit to you,’ Gina once told me.) But writing the story forced me to look at Dad for who he really was, which is to say, loving and beautiful but also narcissistic and manipulative and occasionally cruel. Writing about Dad in these terms felt vaguely treacherous, and yet, with a ruthlessness I barely recognised, I went right ahead and did it anyway.
Then there were Dad’s letters. Only after having written the story and embarked on this book did it occur to me that using them might be wrong. They were, after all, addressed to Mum. They were deeply, excruciatingly intimate. I had a feeling Mum wouldn’t have minded me using them in the book, but Dad most definitely would have. As I wrote about them I imagined him, clambering doggedly out of his metaphorical coffin to rebuke me, while I stood there, with one foot on the lid to keep it closed.
Farewell to the Father Page 20