Eating the Underworld

by Doris Brett

  If I was in shock beforehand, I am in triple shock after the phone call. I cry a lot that day. It is almost as if I have experienced a death. Who is my father? I keep thinking. Do I still know him? Did I ever know him? Is he still there? There’s a kind of insanity in the split between the loving familiar father and this stranger I have just encountered.

  Am I over-reacting? I wonder, in between bouts of tears. I ring friends. They are appalled. They can’t believe it either. It’s reassuring to talk to them and I am keenly aware of how good they have been during this crisis—thoughtful, caring, available. It’s an odd contrast to my experience at the beginning of my recurrence, and I feel touched. Strangely, it is as if I have come full circle.

  A couple of weeks pass. My father doesn’t contact me. As usual, I know it will be up to me to patch things up. I have theatre tickets to two shows that I bought weeks ago for all of us. I don’t know if my father will still want to go. But when I contact him, he is just as he was after the last crisis—acting as if nothing has happened.

  This is his way of dealing with anything emotionally difficult. I know from past experience that he will dismiss any attempts to talk about it. It’s ironic that I, who spend my working life exploring unpleasant and difficult issues, find myself stymied in the grip of this bland denial.

  I find it intensely uncomfortable. And yet, in the end, I go along with it. He’s my father whom I love. The last years have shown me aspects of him that I would rather not have seen. I have fought not to see them, fought off the sadness that comes with the loss of the idealised father of my youth. At times, I have felt that this father and that father were two different beings. But I know now that they are the same; that we all have a multiplicity of shadings and that to some situations we bring the best of ourselves and to some, the worst.

  I feel enormously sad about my father. I imagine that he is warding off a pain which is unbearable for him to know about. In different ways I have tried to make it better, but I have finally realised that it is not within my power to do so. This has been one of the hardest things to come to terms with—the knowledge that I cannot ‘fix’ things. And that the sacrifice of one’s own integrity does not, in the end, heal the other.

  I have found it extraordinarily difficult to write about these recent experiences with my father and yet it has felt imperative that I do so; to speak for my own truth. I am locked in struggle. How can I possibly write about these things, I think? And then, remembering his pledge to denounce me whenever I write of my experience of the family, how can I possibly not? If I say nothing of this conversation, I leave myself open to his denunciations, with no way to speak of where they have come from.

  If I protect my father, I sacrifice myself and my mother’s memory. But surely one should protect those one loves? And yet, where does protection become folly, deceit, cowardice? Where does sacrifice become collusion, a masochistic act of self-destruction?

  The questions keep going, rows of them, elephants, tail to tail. With what does one align oneself—the protection of truth or the protection of loved ones? To what do we owe our allegiance? For what do we stand? Questions that are both beyond the personal and yet intimately personal. Where are the answers?

  And I am aware in this as well, of the impact of words, how they can be wielded as a weapon. This is not a use I wish for them. Another dilemma—how does one write about unpalatable experience without it being seen as an attack? Should one not write? Deny or distort experience? The questions keep marching on.

  And I keep wrestling with them. I have restricted my stories of my family to those which directly impinge on the journal material and even there I have limited myself still further. I don’t have a resolution to these conflicts. It’s the hardest piece of writing I’ve ever done in my life.

  And yet I keep writing. Because in the end, one of the things I have been learning about is the cost of appeasement. I have spent a great deal of my life trying to protect people, trying to give them what they want, trying to meet their needs. It is only now that I have been forced to question the real meaning of this. When does placation move from being caring and good to being foolish, cowardly or weak?

  That boundary is subtle and difficult to delineate, but when it is crossed over, the cost is deadly. The price paid for placating, for forming yourself to suit the other’s needs, is to become one with the other; to submerge your own integrity so completely that it may be lost to you forever. Instead, you become a part of what you fear.

  Tidal Wave

  I remember reading how the sea

  first rolls back and withdraws,

  slow as an indrawn breath,

  a recognition, slow as taking

  off clothes and turning

  back. Slow as … Back, the sea is curling

  back like the crazy beginning.

  The sea is pulling up

  anchor, it’s gone out looking

  for doves, it’s put on its fancy

  clothes, it’s out there looking for love.

  It’s leaving its cupboards and cash,

  it’s cleaned out its shells

  there is now nothing

  left to define it,

  it’s headed out west

  it’s heard something

  over the horizon.

  And so you find yourself

  here in the strangest of tides,

  the whole world wet

  as memory, the developing

  sands shine. The kingdom of salt

  is behind you, a stranger’s ghost,

  a thought. You have been warned,

  this is the sifting edge of things

  and you stand still, here at land’s-end,

  consider the tender possibilities

  of gills. The whole earth’s paused.

  And what can you do but move forward,

  the whales are calling from the horizon

  and somewhere, born in the floating

  distance, the whole new sky is rolling in.

  I HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT TO myself how ironic it is that after my initial diagnosis, I had two of the happiest and most creative years of my life—and the cancer came back. After the recurrence, I had two of the worst years of my life and then … And here is where I should be able to write, ‘and the cancer didn’t come back’. But I can’t write it.

  I cross the path of black cats to pet them. I would happily invite thirteen people to a dinner party. And yet I can’t say that sentence out loud: ‘and the cancer didn’t come back’. It feels too much like tempting Fate; as if I am getting cocky, thumbing my nose at the three sisters who sit and spin. And that they will get angry, punish this upstart with her arrogance. Hasn’t she learnt anything yet?

  And then I realise that a part of me has learnt. While most of me has put on the comfortable clothes of denial, there is a part of me—a small, sequestered part of me—that is staying clear-eyed. It is the part of me that remembers what the rest of me doesn’t want to. It is the true witness. Bribes and threats mean nothing to it. It knows what it saw and in the courtroom of complacence, it is willing to testify.

  Other changes have been more apparent. I have far less energy than I used to, less physical staying power and resilience. I ask John about the lingering tiredness. ‘For a lot of patients, post-chemotherapy fatigue continues for years; for some, it never eases,’ he says. ‘The chemotherapy drugs you’ve been given are powerful and toxic. Their effects on the body are complex. We don’t know everything yet.’ Researchers are indeed just now beginning to study the issue of chemotherapy-related fatigue and to discover that it is pretty much universal, significant in intensity and can last for many years longer than previously thought.

  Although I don’t look it, I feel as if I have aged physically—in a jump, instead of the more gradual process. But I also remember the story of an old friend and colleague. One of his patients was describing her distress at her increasing years. One by one, she listed the things she hated most: wrinkles, grey hair, loss o
f stamina. The list went on and on. My friend listened attentively as she described the detested tribulations of ageing. Finally, he leaned forward. ‘Ah,’ he said, in a thoughtful voice, ‘but think of the alternative.’

  I have changed, of course, in ways other than the physical. Cancer changes people. It is one of those marker events that delineates a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in our lives. It forces us to define and redefine ourselves. And then, because the experience of cancer is an extended process and not a static event, it forces us to do it again and again.

  And it is right that we are changed. As with any descent into a feared and terrifying country—whether it is the country of illness or the country of a grieving heart—we have entered the underworld. And we have eaten of its fruit. I remember all the mythical stories of those frightening journeys, and with each one, the rule is inviolable. Those who ingest the food of the underworld are bound to it in some way. It is not the binding of instruments of torture and the roastings of hell. Instead, it is the binding of that terrible, clear sight that can only be gained in the depths. The knowledge of ourselves, the knowledge of others. We cannot remain unchanged.

  The end point of the cancer survivor’s narrative is inevitably the ‘what I learned from cancer’ finale. We expect it in the way we expect swelling music as the movie ends. It is more than an expectation, it is a need. And we need what is learned to be good: ‘I learned how loved I am’, ‘I learned I am a survivor’. It is a way of waving away the dark; a way of reassuring ourselves; a way of saying that even though it was hard and punishing, it was worth it. It meets our deep and often unspoken need to complete the story; the familiar, bedtime story that tells us that everything will be alright in the end.

  When I began my dance with cancer, I imagined that this was what I would emerge with. That when it ended, what I would hold in my hands would be the silver lining. I imagined that I would be changed, but that was the point at which my imagination failed. All I could imagine was a better, brighter me—the steel that is finer for having been tempered in the fire.

  What I learned is very different from what I expected I would learn. I have learned I am loved. I learned it from old friends who stood by me and from new friends who helped in unexpected and touching ways. I learned it from my family, from Martin and Amantha.

  I remember that when my mother was dying, she held my hand and said that her wish for me was that my daughter would be to me what I had been to her. And her wish has been granted, as we both knew it would be. However dark the night became, Amantha has always been the constant star.

  But I have also learned from others that where I thought I was loved, I was not. I have been attacked when I was most vulnerable. I was deserted by those I thought would gladly stay with me.

  I have learned that things turn out well. And that they don’t. I have had moments when I thought I would die from the sheer physical beauty of the world. And moments when it merely seemed to mock what was happening to me. I have had wonderful things happen and terrifying things too.

  How I have been changed most of all is not visible. It is not to do with the recognition of mortality. That, I have discovered, is intense and excruciating, but fades eventually, as the threat of death fades.

  Once, many years ago, when I was walking in the city, I was dawdling along a narrow laneway. A boy my age was walking behind me. I stopped, caught by something in a shop window and he walked past me. Just at that instant, a worker on the ledge above dropped a slab of concrete. The boy fell, bleeding, to the footpath. The ambulance men carried him off and I never heard what happened to him. If I had not stopped to gaze in the shop window, it would have been my body in the path of the falling missile. I was in shock. I had never dreamed that death could come out of a clear, blue sky. For months after that, wherever I went, I checked roofs, verandahs, awnings, eaves. Whenever I walked under anything, I would look up to make sure that nothing was going to surprise me, that I was safe. And then one day, I forgot.

  I can best describe the change in me as a loss of innocence. I have been propelled, often unwillingly, into difficult recognitions about my family, friends and self. Cancer has been the apple that expelled me from the garden. I used the image in a poem I wrote, long before I understood what I meant. I know now that when you partake of the fruit of knowledge, you have to bear the knowledge of both the dark and the light. It is what growing up is about—the letting go of idealisation and innocence, and the recognition of your own truth, however complex and shadowed that may be.

  I had always believed, along with all those magical characters of childhood, that if you were good and kind, worked hard and persevered, you would eventually win through. You would get your just rewards—the princess, the gold, the kingdom, your heart’s desire—whatever you had struggled for and deserved. I knew that this was not true, of course. The evidence was all around me—in the news, my patients’ stories, in people and events everywhere. And yet, in some secret part of myself, I had persisted in thinking it was true for me, for my own personal universe. It was what kept me going through all manner of difficulties and disappointments. It was the light at the end of every tunnel. And it is this that cancer has finally forced me to relinquish—my own private fairytale.

  What I have in its place is difficult to describe. I am clear-eyed in a way that I wasn’t before. I know the world is not fair and not predictable. I know that there is ambiguity everywhere. I know that working hard for something does not mean that you will get it. But I know that you have to work hard for it anyway.

  I have learned about illusion and idealisation. My journey through cancer was supposed to be a simple one, picturebook-style, along the lines of St. George fighting the dragon. Instead, it led me to revelations about the underside, the flawedness, of all things—myself, my family, my friends, my world. Recognising and accepting these has required far more courage than facing cancer. It is what I never expected; fought hard to avoid—and yet perhaps it has been the truest gift to come out of all this.

  In many ways, it is hard to live in the real world with its lack of delineations, its inequities, its ambiguities. How do you keep going in the face of such uncertainty? Not just the uncertainty of mortality, but the day-to-day slogging on your dreams, unsure that they will ever come to fruition; the investment in relationships, unsure of what they will turn out to be; the tender nurturing of hopes, aware that they may be shattered; the knowledge that nothing is purely one thing or another.

  But it is only in emerging from the shimmery world of make-believe that we have a chance at finding our true lives—our strength, and with it our authentic capacity to love. Because love must be about seeing the shadow as well as the light, otherwise it is merely the love of a fantasy, an image created to soothe the wounds in our soul. And strength must involve recognising one’s own fear and vulnerability, but standing up anyway.

  This morning, while rummaging through a bookshelf, my attention is caught by a small volume tucked dwarf-like between its two taller neighbours. I extricate it, to discover that it is The Book of Runes by Ralph Blum. My mind immediately flips back to my Perth rune, the talisman I bought to commemorate my cure all that time ago, just before my recurrence.

  Curious, I turn the pages until I come to Perth. And then I stop, transfixed. My memory has been focused on the rune’s meaning of rebirth. But here, although rebirth is mentioned, the major headings are: ‘Initiation. Something Hidden. A Secret Matter.’

  Phrases from the text jump out at me. ‘Perth signifies an intense aspect of initiation … deep transformational forces are at work here … what is achieved is not readily shared … If need be, let go of everything … Nothing less than the renewal of Spirit is at stake.’

  I read it, astonished to recognise the path I have traversed. I had forgotten that initiation is the necessary stern precursor to rebirth; that it involves danger, physical restrictions and the revelation of hidden knowledge or secrets. That the initiate is often isolated, their body scarred, and
that the substances they must ingest are hazardous but necessary for the transformation. I remember that initiation represents a crossing over—from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to knowledge, from freedom to responsibility, from weakness to strength. And I realise that what I have been is an initiate.

  I have the urge to dig out that pendant from the drawer to which I consigned it years ago. I think back to how innocently I bought it, thinking I was at the end of a transformation, not the beginning. And then, although I am not normally a jewellery aficionado, I remember another piece of jewellery that I bought during that journey—a brooch, consisting of a plain pewter rectangle. On it is printed, in uneven capital letters, ‘TO LIVE IS TO BE SLOWLY BORN.’

  THE GOOSE GIRL

  ‘A story about princesses,’ said the head librarian, ‘everyone loves princesses.’

  Rachel wasn’t so sure about that. She knew that most people thought of princesses as the beautiful girls, pampered and cocooned in the lap of the palace. Sometimes they were born to royalty, sometimes they married into it. But whichever it was, from that moment on, their lives took on the luminescent glow of moonlight, softer and dreamier than anything that the sun, with its intricate daylight detail, could offer. People talked wistfully about the life of a fairytale princess. Little girls longed for it and even adult women harboured the odd yearning, tucked away in an inner pocket of their board-room business suits.

  Rachel had never entertained these fantasies. Even as a child, she had understood that the richest castle comes with its own shadows and that being a princess might not be all that it was supposed to be.

  Rachel often thought that she and her sister had been brought up as princesses. Whatever their parents could afford was theirs—services, goods, attention, love. Nothing was too much; nothing was denied. Rachel took all of this for granted within the home (the castle?), but once outside, she changed, bewitched, in an odd reversal of the fairytale. She became shy and clung to corners, hidden in invisible soot—a Cinderella who did not want to go to the Ball.