After

by Nikki Gemmell

  24

  The first Christmas after Elayn’s death Paul is with us. For the first time in my children’s lives. Drawing the family in close. It will always be this now. It works. We have learnt.

  *

  A long time after the funeral, what feels like too long, a phone call. Elayn’s ashes need collecting from the crematorium. The official voice on the other end of the line is practised in its compassion towards the stranger.

  The enormous complex on the fringes of Sydney’s Botany Bay is a still, odd, removed place; a city of the dead with few signs of human inhabitation despite a full carpark. Gardens and roses and tiny plaques straddle a wide road. And most heartbreaking of all – a children’s garden. Can’t bear to look, dwell, read. My grief is nothing compared to this. It veers the trauma into perspective.

  The administration building is all corporate efficiency and compassion. Promptly I’m ushered into a side room. A woman asks for a signature on a release form, she wears a cloak of bureaucratic care. She’s seen a lot of tears, it’s in the careful set of her shoulders and the curve of her compassionate back. It’s over in a few minutes. I’m out. With Elayn. Reduced to this. An oblong foam box. In a smart, shiny carrier like a shopping bag from a very expensive boutique. She’d approve of that. Make a joke. Yet I feel weighted with responsibility. What to do with her? Where was home for her? Need to get this right. Elayn is placed tenderly on the floor of the car in front of the toddler car seat.

  Driving home, it feels like a suturing. We’re together. We’ll always be together now.

  *

  I’ve heard stories of people who’ve left their parents in the car to be constantly with them, of mothers in clothes cupboards, fathers in tool sheds. I can’t seem to move Elayn’s foam box from by the baby seat – she’s with me as we drive, months later, and I’m always driving. Feel eccentric in my ease with all this; my mother my constant companion. When the car needs the mechanic for repairs I finally move her, to the kitchen. This is not right. Her home will be found. It is close to here, to us. Her world. Her vivacious life. We settle on a plaque in a sunny corner of a memorial garden overlooking the harbour, with gardenias in front of her and a tall blue sky above her. It feels right.

  *

  Boh’s birthday. The first after Nonna’s death. We’re all apprehensive beforehand. Elayn had come to our house every child’s birthday with cupcakes and a card with cash in it. Everyone loved the birthday visits – they sparkled us up, gathered us to the table for ceremony. This was the first children’s birthday without her since we’d been back. Beforehand, it felt weighted, addled by absence.

  Yours truly made the cake. Yep. For the first time in fifteen years of motherhood because previously, the supermarket had always let me off the hook. Baking was one of those things, like cooking casseroles and curries, I’d never bothered to tuck into the growing up. It worked. Picture my children’s incredulity. My astonishment. I’ll do this cake thing again, step into this domestic life, become a different mother. Bob is with us on the day, too. We insist. We mention Nonna but do not dwell on her; life is growing over us. We’re moving on.

  *

  A small white box arrives from The Netherlands. Inside, snugly packed, are two thin plastic gloves, one double-sided syringe filled with epoxy resin, a paintbrush, four wooden spatulas and one tiny round jar of gold powder. A Kintsugi kit. Tips: ‘Have some disposable wet wipes nearby if correction is desired.’ ‘Use the weight of gravity while waiting for the glue to set.’ ‘Use on almost any material you like.’ I do. But this is for one material in particular.

  *

  The brittle bits of porcelain have been waiting for this moment for a long time. On the dining table, shattered pieces of ceramic are grouped into methodical piles. Edges pieced with edges. Slivers with shards. Assembling an intricate jigsaw. It takes days. And days.

  Assembling and dismantling. Attempting, stopping. Beginning again. What is quickly learnt: it is no use beginning with two random pieces and gluing them together. You have to start from the bottom of the lanterns, the base widened by hard wax, and work your way up. Slowly, laboriously, lost in this world, pieces are glued together, some so beautifully you cannot discern the join. Others sit uncomfortably but that is so, part of the process; beauty in failure. I wait for two pieces to dry before adding another piece, then another, first-aiding each tiny porcelain tower. The world around me recedes. It is deeply satisfying, this repair of what seemed beyond repair. As the lanterns nudge towards completion the joins, more violently, do not match up. It will have to do. Let go, let go, there is strange beauty in this too. The beauty of imperfection, and an acceptance of it.

  *

  The poet Douglas Dunn urges us to look to the living, love them and hold on, only that. And in a world that seems like it’s darkening irretrievably around us it feels like this is the most urgent thing we can do. Especially as parents. Most of all as parents, because we’re confronted continually by our own raging sense of powerlessness and imperfection. There’s power in the equation, of course, but so much more of a powerlessness in the parent–child relationship, especially as teenage children zoom into adulthood. All our flaws are laid bare to the child, for they see us at our most reduced. We do not want complexity in our parents, want fairy tale, vanilla. For in seeing their complexity we see ourselves – in all our frailty. See what we’re in danger of becoming. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand Elayn’s flaws. I see it more simply now. She was all too human. That is all. May my own children be wiser, and more forgiving.

  Do all parents carry with them the weight of a nonexistent perfection that their children expect of them? An essential component of growing up is accepting the very human fallability of your parents. Only then can you become adult yourself.

  *

  All mothers say cruel and unnecessary things to their daughters in the heat of the moment. All mothers fling words later regretted. Elayn’s problem was that from my teens all my frustrations and furies were recorded; my journal the tape recorder. The writer documents it. Elayn had no hope against the archivist, and knew it.

  *

  Parenting is bloody hard. Andrew and I are still learning, endlessly; and regret that our eldest is the one experimented on the most. We’re feeling our way as each new stage of our son’s youthful existence unfolds in all its stubbornness and vividness, its frustration and exhilaration and shout. He’s blazing the trail for the rest and doesn’t even know it. Boh is close behind him. Even now we’re losing these two boy-men, who are, suddenly, too swiftly, on their own journeys. The complicated death of Nonna has catapulted them on to adulthood.

  That roar of childhood, so brief. Heart in mouth we watch them. Hold them, when we can. But neither of them want it. They will only share so much of their worlds now. And it feels like the nub of me has never been more raw and exposed than as a parent. Everything hurts. The heart is wide open.

  *

  Parenthood feels like an endless process of shoring up the dam – as one area springs a leak you rush to patch it up and then there’s another leak, and another; it’s an endless process of soothing, sorting, fixing. Elayn, eventually, gave up on all that. At least with me. I disappointed her, embarrassed her; sometimes, it felt, to the exclusion of everything else. There are no sureties with parenthood, no matter how much (or little) you love. Who as a parent could guarantee that any of their children will never end up in an invidious position one day? The gutter, the brothel, the jail. Who could judge so smugly? You just have to try and steer a steady ship, and hope. Bail out if you have to. Hold on. Love them in all their complexity. Forgive.

  There are parents who witter endlessly about their successful children; their own standing in life fiercely twinned to their offsprings’ achievements. Yet the mortifying, embarrassing falls are rarely talked about because we feel they reflect on us as parents too. But we all have our battles to face. A reader, Glen, wrote, ‘For me, still in the thick of parenthood, having four kids yo
u can talk about feels more like luck than anything else.’ Oh yes. All of us trying to work it out, hoping everything will be fine, patching up the dam. But it may burst one day. With any of us.

  *

  Laugh with the kids more, nag a little less. I remind myself of this often now, with the on-the-cusp, almost-men in my midst. Who we’re about to lose as they stride into their own lives. We revel in them, just that. So much more so after their Nonna’s death. Looking to the living, loving them, holding on. Just that.

  *

  The lanterns are complete. Nothing like the smooth originals. A pale map of a journey with river lines of gold threaded through them. They cup a tea light candle just as they used to; are once again our little cylinders of stilling light. But they shine a different beauty now. Patched up, scarred, endearing, in their very human scale. They embody a careful, grateful love.

  *

  Slowly, slowly, I am – we are – being put back together. By life. The sheer insistence of it. Whole, differently whole. As Colette said, ‘No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.’ So I do. It’s been too long. Elayn, after all, taught strength.

  *

  Would Elayn have considered her death faithful to the original meaning of euthanasia – the ‘good death’? I’m sure, in her mind, yes. In hindsight though, if she had been granted the gift of after-thought, I wonder.

  I think she had little consideration for all of those who had to deal with the aftermath.

  *

  ‘Look at how Elayn chose to die,’ comments a friend who knew us both. ‘She shut herself off. Did it alone. Removed herself. As she had done so many times in her life.’ The booze and the drugs on that final day. Was it an enormous, furious, fit of pique? Let it go, let it go. We will never know.

  *

  If you were faced with what Elayn was faced with, would you do things differently? I would do it Helena’s way. With dialogue. Thoughtfulness. Instruction. I would not hold my family hostage by secrecy and withholding, would not inflict such a cataclysmic shock upon them. I don’t think Elayn had any idea of the catastrophe she unleashed upon so many lives.

  *

  Imperfection is the egg stain on the poet’s hand-knitted jumper. The hole that resembles a bullet’s trajectory in the back of the moth-eaten tweed jacket. The watery ring-mark left on the antique wooden table. The crack in a ceramic lantern. The flawed but often loving mother. All the imperfections that are maps of living. Living well, living deeply, living.

  *

  A Japanese legend. A young man, Sen no Rikyu, wanted to learn the elaborate ritual that is The Way of Tea. He visited a great tea-master, Takeno Joo. Asked permission to tend Joo’s garden. Rikyu cleaned and tidied and raked, then clean and tidied and raked again. He stepped back. Examined the result. Noted the perfection. Then just before showing it to the great master, Rikyu grabbed a cherry tree’s trunk and shook it. A few flowers spilled to the ground. The look of the entire scene was transformed. In that one swift movement Rikyu had introduced disorder and mess. By doing so, he had introduced humanity. Life.

  Rikyu is revered in Japan as one who understood to his core the concept of wabi-sabi. The art of finding beauty in imperfection. Profundity in earthiness. The art of honouring authenticity above all. Everything that today’s technology-saturated culture isn’t. Wabi-sabi is the jumbly energy of flea markets as opposed to shopping centres, a spiky protea as opposed to a dozen unscented roses. Wabi-sabi celebrates cracks and crevices, ruts and rot, a softening by time and the knocks of life. It embraces both the glory and melancholy of a life well lived; the complexity. Its ceramic embodiment is Kintsugi.

  *

  With jagged edges and sharp textures the shattered ceramic lanterns take their place among their more perfect cousins. Startling in their new beauty. The joins are visible and there are gaps where chips have disappeared and some of the lanterns no longer sit flush on a surface; they are what they were, with visible fault lines. My favourites now, because they have a very human narrative attached to them. They are complete.

  25

  Do I support euthanasia?

  At the fraught beginning of this journey, no. I was drowning in moral uncertainty, shock, anger. At all of it, the entire movement, for whisking my mother from me; too easily and too silently. It had stolen her from us. But now, a softening. Because of the lonely journey Elayn ultimately embarked upon. It shouldn’t have been like that. If we do not reconsider our euthanasia laws we are condemning the person who wants to die to a hideously bleak and lonely death. For if they carefully research the legal and emotional situation, as Elayn did, they will come to the conclusion that the least messy way to enact death is to go it alone. To protect their family. There has to be a better way. Governments have to enable it, or there will be too many future Elayns.

  *

  The embracing of individual choice is the mark of a mature nation. As we advance as a society there’s an inevitability to the embracing of euthanasia; as we become more empowered as individuals, more insistent. As we turn away from our organised religions with their thundering voices and dubious moral authority in the face of human suffering. As we consider a future of a rapidly aging population, with increased instances of chronic pain, and drugs that do not work well enough.

  Elayn had to go underground. Her family never had the chance to have the rational conversation with her about what she really wanted to do. If pro-euthanasia laws had been in place this entire situation would have been far less messy. We need the laws out of compassion for people wanting to die, and out of compassion for their loved ones. It’s too hard, too messy, the other way. If the right to a dignified death had been legal none of this would have been a problem for Elayn. Or for us. Her death would still have been painful, but the aftermath would not have been one of such traumatic entanglement.

  *

  Consider the ethical philosophy that goes all the way back to the Meno, a Socratic dialogue written by Plato. That the reasonable man – the sentient person – has a right to self-determination, which by self-evident corollary, includes a right to die. With wisdom and humanity. As the Western world veers into unstoppable rationality.

  *

  Among our elderly, chronic pain seems like a stigmatised world of silence and suffering where not enough information about alternative methods of pain control is getting through. Doctors need to embrace change, as do governments. The right to die, legally, feels like an unstoppable need that will be embraced by all jurisdictions in the Western world eventually. That will bring openness, discussion. An enabling supported by the medical profession. And most importantly, family. Because we need to listen. To step into the shoes of the chronic pain sufferer, and understand.

  *

  Would I vote for euthanasia if ever there was a referendum on it? Yes. Because I’m in favour of the freedom to choose. And Helena’s way is the best way, and none of us should be denied that choice. If Elayn had had the means to do what Helena has planned so carefully then my family would have had the solace of knowledge. We could have faced the journey together, with preparation and calmness, with celebration and care. My mother went underground. Did it her way, with a despairing loneliness, because it is not a legal right to end your life, with dignity, in this country.

  Elayn has taught me and changed me. Such a fierce seizer of life would not have gone quietly into death unless she was at the bleak, irreversible end of her tether. A raging will to live blazes in most of us. And most will not abuse that gift of choice.

  As Philip Nitschke says, ‘Elayn was reflective of a very deep-seated human desire for individual autonomy; as a highly motivated woman she was clear about what she did not want. None of us would ever elect death over life if we could help it. But there comes a time when acceptance that we will die is complete, and the next stage is about easing that process to the best of our abilities. Far from taking a “coward’s” route, those who seek to exact control over the dying process are pragmatic and directed, and in knowin
g the end result, taking that step is nothing short of courageous; the bitter-sweet end of a life and an immediate end of present pain.’

  *

  Mum, I suspect, spent much of her final days curled up in agony, in the foetal position, just wanting the pain to go away. She was frightened. Alone. Heavily dosed up on her drugs. Her bleak last days feel like they were marked by despair and anguish; overwhelmed by hopelessness. She felt that there was no way out of this.

  If she had had the peace of mind of a Dignitas, here in Australia, she would have lived her final years to the fullest knowing that she had the comfort of a dignified exit ahead of her, at the time of her choosing. She would have passed away surrounded by love. That knowledge would have released her, in her final years of life, to seize the joy.

  As Helena has so carefully planned to do. She has spent her last year on earth revelling in family and mates and concerts and travel and champagne high teas and celebratory tattoos and five star hotels. Everything Elayn would have loved; everything she would normally be diving right in to (except, perhaps, the tattoos; but you never know). Helena wants her last hours to be spent in a room brimming with love, with just her immediate family and her best friend and herself. And in her last minutes they will all be holding hands, until she slips away. Mum never had that anchor of solace in her final years, never had the security of knowing there was a potential release from the anguish. All she had was the pain and the weight of the secrecy. The despair.

  And a Dignitas in Australia might have prevented her from going so soon, as its rigorous checks and balances would most likely have sent warning signals to the medical assessors that Elayn had not thoroughly investigated all avenues of pain relief; that there were alternatives out there. A Dignitas could have saved her, for all of us who loved her so much, for a little longer; saved her from the bleakness of her lonely death. A Dignitas would have given her much needed peace of mind.