Category: Reflecting on life

30 April 2021: I happened upon this yesterday, written three years ago. I haven’t completed but I plug away…

It was hard to fathom why a 64 year old woman (in two weeks), slightly overweight (25 kilos in truth), who drinks wine every night (two standard drinks too many by all the health advisories), who has moved back to the town she had fled forty-five years before, and has resumed smoking after a six year break, would part with a few thousand dollars to sign up for a First Draft Novel writing course.  Talk about making a late run.

Any early potential she had been gifted had long been pissed up against a wall, to her mind at least:  a ready mind, a facility with language, and keen ability to read people.  She explained it as an inability to successfully traverse the cultural divide; between the culturally deprived circumstances of her family and the offerings available to her by virtue of her ability.  A sophisticated explanation for sure, but failure is failure after all.

So instead, her life followed a pathway carved by a series of decisions, or no-decisions, which took her down a very different path than that offered by her early promise.  Instead of the law and the Bar (she had imagined the United Nations at the very least), she opted for the bar, the racetrack, the building site and the characters who resided therein.  In fact she married one, but that’s a whole other story, about passion’s insufficiency in overcoming intellectual and cultural divides.

The first real existential jolt came when her two year-old son became seriously ill.  Recognising that she should take her fate into her own hands where she could, she resumed studies, psychology and counseling this time, and got herself into a decent career stream.  Divorced now, she did OK; making her way through support organisations working with people with cancer, brain injury, sexual assault, women’s health and landed in government.  After 16 years she had enough for a comfortable retirement and embarked on making up for lost time with travel and the arts. 

The second existential jolt came this year, when her 60-year-old brother sustained severe spinal injuries in a farm accident.  With their parents now frail and elderly (but no less difficult), she pulled up stakes and moved back to the small town to care for them and support her brother and his wife through his rehabilitation.  

And so here she finds herself, among all the broken people, stripped of the pleasurable distractions of her usual life, a world away in the parallel universe of her family of origin.  She wonders why it seems to take a disaster to stir her into action, but she can’t afford to dwell.  Best get on with it, she says, no looking back; just begin from here.  She loves writing but has never persevered, so this is what she will do.  Take her interest in people, good and bad, whatever talent she’s retained and turn this time into something constructive and enriching.

By evening, she will have ferried the parents to multiple medical appointments, dressed suppurating skin cancers, fitted compression stockings, entertained equally ageing relatives and friends, cleaned the house and washed up after meals they barely touch.  Then she’ll sit down and try to write. 

She is both excited and terrified but knows that writing lifts her out of the noise in her head.  She has a collection of fragments of things she has written – confetti really.  Now is a perfect opportunity to show up and do the work.  Finally, she might have run out of excuses.

She wants to learn how to craft and build an engaging story and she can tap into a lifetime of learning about herself and others.  Who knows, she might pull it off.  Completion will be her main achievement (she admits herself that finishing has never been her strong point). Anything else, who can tell?  I certainly wish her well. 

This poem by Derek Walcott (Collected Poems: 1948-1984) came to me from a Facebook feed from Brain Pickings (https://www.brainpickings.org). To me it expresses the work of the third act of life. Some achieve it, some don’t. I’m still working on it.

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own front door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror

Sit. Feast on your life.

My parents both died at ninety and within ten days of each other. Unfortunate (or careless) enough to lose both parents in ten days, I had an intense insight into old age and dying in a small country town.

They had something I am unlikely to have, in that their final care and rites were delivered by people who knew them.  Ageing and dying in a country town is experienced in community, in a network of relationships that cushions both the person and their family from the isolation so often experienced in larger places.  To be known and ‘seen’ by the institutions of old age is a privilege afforded to few.

There were few strangers involved at any stage of their final months; community nurses, hospital staff, and the carers in the nursing home were more likely than not to have known them for years.   Fellow nursing home residents were old friends or acquaintances.   With the network of relationships surrounding them largely intact, their move into care was less of a rupture than a move to a more suitable location.

It is comforting when the person caring for your frail parents shares your history and theirs; someone you went to school with, or whose parents or grandparents were friends of theirs.  My father’s progressive vascular dementia and deep depression made him withdrawn and at times resistant, but because many of the staff caring for him had known the man he had been, they retained their affection and respect.

My mother’s time in residential care was only a few weeks, and she quite enjoyed it.  Dad was in the same building, she had friends in adjoining rooms and even became reacquainted after seventy-five years with a girlhood friend from a neighbouring farm in the isolated upper reaches of the valley.  Like many of the old women living there, she relished the luxury of having everything done for her – no meals to cook, no washing to do, no beds to make.

The sense of being enveloped in community did not end with their deaths.  When I rang the funeral director the morning after my father died, the manager Ken, a local boy and former neighbour of theirs, said simply, “We know.  We already have him with us.” Tina, who came to the house help my brother and me with the funeral arrangements, was the daughter of man I’d known my whole life.  Their funeral notices were posted in the windows of two key shops in town – the newsagent and Dougie’s Takeaway – vital elements of the local informal information distribution network. Their shared grave, in which Dad’s ashes were interred, was dug by my brother’s childhood friend.  

Choosing the headstone was another step in a journey among the familiar.  The options were displayed not in anonymous mock-ups, but in an album of photos of local graves, some of people I had known.  When I stated my preferences for stone and design, Ken said, “I know what you’re after.  You want what Mickey’s got.” Present tense, as if Mickey were still around.  And ‘what Mickey’s got’ was exactly what I had in mind.

A year to the day after my father’s death, the funeral director delivered a floral arrangement to my door, with a printed card that said:  Just a note to let you know we are thinking of you on the anniversary of your loved one’s passing.  Kind wishes.  Ten days later, another for my mother. 

Unexpected but, on reflection, not surprising at all.

My birthday started here yesterday at 7am, shaded and cool in Captain Burke Park, taking respite on a warm morning walk. And a couple of sneaky cigarettes. I am indeed fortunate to have this literally at my back door.

My birthday lunch is with the ‘usual suspects’, again looking over the river but this time from the Brisbane Powerhouse around the next bend. A lot has changed since our last get-together a couple of months ago; two of the six friends present have been diagnosed with cancer in the past 3 months, and serious cancers at that. The impacts of their diagnoses, prognoses and treatment, for them and their partners and us as friends, lingered around us. And none of us can deny that any one of us might still be the first to go; that being ‘undiagnosed’ is no safeguard at all.

For me, everything has changed, irrespective of the outcomes for them. Mortality and loss have taken a place at the table and will be an ongoing presence, whether foreground or background, from now on. However long and rich our individual paths ahead as we move into our late 60s (and hopefully our 70s and beyond), our decisions and actions are backlit by this incontrovertible reality.

Our aspirations for the future reflect both our perceptions of a foreshortened horizon – “get back to golf”, “go horseriding at least once”, “live each day fully”, “get to California in 2020”- and our good fortune in having had sufficient resources to realise many goals already.

So what do I take from this? I think it’s to go deep rather than wide. Oliver Sacks, on learning that he was terminally ill, wrote:

“It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking: trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness as well ). …

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming. … This is not indifference but detachment – I still care deeply about the Middle east, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.” from My Own Life in The New York Times Feb 19, 2015

Detaching from politics would be easy for me; I have opinions but have never been a very committed or active participant . In any case, the current venal state of politics fills me with such despair and hopelessness that I am often relieved that I won’t be around for too long. However, I need to at least consider what that means should I live as long as my parents and many aunts and uncles; I could well be around another 25 years.

Strengthening and nurturing relationships, as well as being open to new friendships, will be a focus. My son is nearing 40 and I hope would appreciate a more equal and attentive focus from me. My attachment style has always tended towards the avoidant under stress and I probably have a bit to make up for. My avoidant attachment style has been evident in intimate relationships as well, so I have some work to do there.

Having the privilege of homes in both the city and a country town, I want to immerse myself in my surrounding environment and, in the case of the town I will soon move to, I want to understand it as fully as I can: its geography, history, Indigenous heritage, culture and people.

I have a goal to write, although I was too embarrassed to admit that in the discussion yesterday at my birthday lunch. I have made a start but wrestle every day with my output, judging it lame and amateurish. So be it, I’ll write it anyway. And this blog is a start.

At sixty-six I am deliberately tossing myself into an unknown environment, just to see what happens. It may work and it may not, we’ll have to see…

In four days I turn sixty-six and can barely believe it. I know how fortunate I am to be able to say that, in relative health and with sufficient resources to live a comfortable, if not grand, life. On my birthday, I will take ownership of a new (old) house in a town I’ve only visited once and where I know no-one.

Three years ago, I moved from an inner city apartment in Brisbane to the small town where I grew up in order to care for my 89 year old parents. In addition, just after I moved there, my brother, who lives in the same area, sustained severe injuries and spent eighteen months in rehabilitation in the city. So, supporting him and his wife and our family during this difficult time became an important addition to my commitments back home.

My former career in the helping professions and as a bureaucrat provided a very useful skill set for advocating and negotiating on my brother’s behalf with health and rehabilitation professionals and NDIS, newly rolled out in the local region.

My parents died a year ago, within ten days of each other. My brother and his wife are now back on their farm, in a home modified to allow him to live his best life after such catastrophic injuries.

So, I’m moving on, but not exactly to my previous life. Like all transitions, this one has changed me and taught me much. The person who came home three years ago was not the person who left thirty-six years before and now the person moving on is different again. I’m not ready to move back into an apartment, with my trusty dog Ned. I’ve bought a home in a river town (like my home town but larger) in Northern NSW. It provides space, quiet, and a garden, which I’ve delighted in in the last three years. An hour and a half’s drive from Brisbane, it is also close enough for me to enjoy what the city has to offer that country town living can’t.

In the last three years, I have: moved states, leaving my son and close friends; absorbed myself in a caring role; lost 2 parents; bought, renovated and now sold a home; sold the home I inherited; bought another home in a new town; rediscovered family and older friends, and made a couple of interesting new ones.

All good. Now to see what the next stage offers….