Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: expat

  • heart attacked

    I just got a letter from my mother explaining she has been in hospital for five days with bronchial pneumonia. Mum is in Brisbane and I am in Berlin and no one told me.

    She’s 78 years old and had a hip and a knee replaced this year, since my father’s death. This is the sickest, ie closest to death, she’s ever been. It is hard to be the survivor of a 50-year marriage. People often die on the heels of their spouses.

    A few years back I rang my Dad on his birthday. I sang happy birthday to him over the phone. I was in Adelaide and they were all in Brisbane. He told me they had taken him out for a steak dinner. He described the wine, he loved sparkling shiraz. We chatted for perhaps twenty minutes. Then Dad said, “By the way.”

    Casually. “Your brother’s in hospital, we think he’s having a heart attack.”

    I have the feeling one of these bright days I might get an email. Mum died last Tuesday, she was cremated at Mount Ommaney, it was a lovely ceremony. On our first day back from the family holiday on the Gold Coast I got a phone call from the brother whose own heart would later be attacked, or is it attack him. It was the first day of the year ten years ago. “Dad’s had a stroke. He’s still alive.” My brothers and even their friends had all assembled at the hospital, they’d left it so late in the day to call me I could not get on a flight til the next day. I remind myself very many people have these stories that make painful experiences more painful. This morning my heart aches and I am questioning this old ache. I have the feeling by now I ought to be used to it. I always hope it will let me learn to dance more wisely and the creaks be a species of jazz.

  • hand to hand

    I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought of the writer friend whose multilingual office reverts from “Tom,” “Iris,” “Nancy” etc in English to “Herr Geltrausch, Frau Petersilie, Fräulein Kartoffelpuder” when they switch to German again.

    I am learning, with reluctance, the kinds of boring German words which mean “cancellation fee” and “referral” and “health insurance.” She measured the ring finger whose persistent swelling since it was ‘ausgekugelt’, that is, the marble popped out – dislocated – in Brisbane in July, makes it difficult to bend and refrained from making the insensitive joke other hand therapists have made, which is that if I want to marry I will have to wear the ring on my thumb.

    She asked what do I do, and I told her, I used to play guitar, and we both looked down at the swollen sore knuckle and I started to cry. Germans are often so compassionate. But they’re formal. In the waiting room a special chair for children was piled with comical stuffed animals, each in its own way an expressive beast. The sun shone through the window like the first day of Spring. It is cold but the ice cream shops have opened and as I walked home I passed junk shops which have laid out their junk for the first time since September. In the waiting room of the physiotherapist practice numerous framed notices began, formally, “Very Honoured Patients and Patientesses…” then invited us to help ourselves to coffee and tea, therapeutic toys and basins of lentils to sift through, heat pads and cold pads, filtered water, and biscuits.