Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: illness

  • 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.

  • house mousse

    This week I’m going home to Berlin to find an apartment of my own, via a writing sabbatical in Thailand which I suspect I will sleep through. What was supposed to be two weeks has turned into a six week endeavour. I have worked from dawn til night, busted my finger, worn myself to a shred, and these are my small victories: Dad sat up and asked if he could have a cup of tea with lemon and honey. Dad wanted to sit out on the verandah and watch the sunset. Dad went on his first outing since the hospital and scoffed fish and chips and a giant fresh iced coffee laced with cream. Mum had someone to cry to. Mum went to a really good physio to whom I practically drove her with a stick and in a single visit was able to raise her damaged arm upright, from months of being stuck at a horizontal maximum. They learned how to use their iPad. The living room looks warm and congenial and less like a hospital. The garage has been cleared out and has one of Mum’s paintings hung to greet her when she gets in, as she starts now very cautiously to drive herself about now and again. The garden is healthy and the verandah brimming with fresh plants. The cat has been taught not to wash herself when she’s on the bed, which she was raised (by me) not to do but had forgotten in the local recent spoiling. In between I have packed up 11 cartons of painstakingly sorted and delicately couched feathers, crumples of fabric and shell, shards of perfectly worn wood, and partially assembled assemblages for shipping to Berlin. I feel replete.

    This afternoon I made this for Dad, and he ate two teaspoons of it – victory! It’s velvety and rich. You can replace the honey with maple syrup if you are vegan.

    FREAKY CHOCOLATE AVOCADO MOUSSE

    1 frozen banana
    3 tbsp cacao powder
    1 refrigerated avocado
    3 tsbp cocoa powder
    2 tbsp honey, or maple syrup if you’re vegan
    1 tsp lemon juice
    1 tsp vanilla extract
    2 tbsp iced water
    A tiny pinch of salt

    INSTRUCTIONS

    Blend.

  • watching the sun set

    Mum’s just taken Dad on an outing & waving goodbye to them I began to cry. Soon it will be the long goodbye. My Dad seems so cheerful and excited, sitting up in his passenger seat having been hoisted up by two of us out of the wheeling chair. The carer said he woke up this morning saying, “I have to get up! and get dressed! because today we are going to Jacob’s Well!” I was pining to go too but there is too much intricate and painstaking one-handed assemblage packing to do, for shipping to Germany. In between packing and finger X-rays I have rejoiced in the opportunity to serve, to be here and offer freshly ground espressos and little nightly shoulder massages where my Mum has torn her ligaments by helping haul Dad in and out of chairs; last night Dad’s hand took hold of mine on the guard rail of his hired hospital bed and was making little stroking movements that suggested to me a brand new notion. “Dad, is there any part of your body which might like a massage, too?”

    “Oh,” he said, diffidently, “I suppose.”

    “Maybe your hand?” I said, turning it very gently to palpate the withered meat. When I was done with that hand, his good hand, I said, “Maybe your other hand would like a bit of a rub, too?” And when I drew the clenched stricken left hand out from under the blanket like a miracle it had relaxed in sympathy, all the fingers spread flat and the palm as large as it ever was. I massaged the sweet curling poll of his head where perhaps he has never been massaged before. Dad closed his eyes and let his face unfold. I wish I could be here forever just offering these tiny daily services, these mutual favours. It uncrumples me to relieve his suffering. It filled my heart with heat when he said, three days ago after our first outing which was also to the seaside, “Darling could I have a cup of tea with honey and lemon, please?” Two months back he had to be fed sips of water from a spoon because his swallowing was so bad. This was the first time he had asked outright for anything to eat or drink since we all thought he would die, that night in Emergency. My mother that evening fell and shattered her hip, and they were lying two beds apart in the Emergency room at the hospital. My father said that if he had a heart attack or something else like that he did not want to be revived. Now he has revived, to a certain extent, all by himself. Or, via company. The companionship of the three of us in the house with this wonderful carer who is never too tired to bring him a fresh glass of milk when he calls into the baby monitor at three a.m. has latched him back onto life. The night after the voluntary cup of tea he had a friend visit who had come all the way from Sydney just to see them. It was the first time in all Dad’s friends’ visits I have heard his voice as much as the visitors’ voices, they had a spirited chat and then as it began to grow dark we asked Dad didn’t he want to come inside in case he got cold. “No,” he said, lying on the striped foam mattress on the cane couch which came back from Indonesia when we first moved here. “I’d like to stay out here a while. I want to watch the sun set.”

  • of our elders

    I’m at my parents’ place spending some time with my dying father. He is frail as a leaf. This morning two Blue Care nurses turned up, funded by Australians’ taxes, and hauled him up the bed so hard they bashed his head against the headboard. When he is sleeping, which is much of the time, they sit with their hands folded. But today they tipped over from the useless to the dangerous.

    Two days back on July 11th we passed what would have been the 100th birthday of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who died in 2014. As Tanya Plibersek put it, he was a warrior for fairness. I was saddened to learn when he died that this elder statesman had spent the last months of his life living alone in a tiny room in an aged care facility, separated from his wife of nearly seventy years, Margaret. That even such respected and influential people are not allowed to live together once they are old and infirm shows us how urgently we need more compassion and common sense in this field of endeavour. Why is aged care so brutal and so lonely when it ought to be tender, humorous, concerted, and peopled with small children and teenagers, kittens and dogs? Elders, children, Indigenous communities, people with disabilities, and asylum seekers all have deep sources of insight the middle ground of our society has lost. You would think we would cherish them kindly out of sheer self interest, if we genuinely can’t muster the compassion to care about their wellbeing.

  • the family stones

    Caring for Dad is painful. I love him, naturally, and now he’s very frail and unwell; so it’s wrung from me like dark water out of soaked wood. But Dad tormented me with minor sexual attentions during my pubescence and twenties, and into my adulthood; he would never listen when I said No and always overrode my assertions of sovereignty: so it’s hard for me to get close to him, it’s hard for me to touch him.

    A tilting hospital bed has been hired for the house and made up with my mother’s pretty pink floral sheets. Dad lies curled like a prawn in the arms of this vast apparatus, holding on gamely to the triangle-shaped handle that dangles from the back of the bed. He is half-starved and so thin that his bones stand out. His strong hands have withered into spotted claws. I stand by the bed and stroke his face gingerly. A tube comes from under the quilt and I am so unkeen to know its details.

    A Greek woman has taken up residence with her husband, as Dad’s carer, and she hauls him higher in his bed so that he can be winched upright to face a mouthful of ice cream or a big fat glass of milk which is what seems to be keeping him alive. “Don’t worry,” the carer said yesterday, meeting me at the front door with groceries and holding out her arms, “I come from the village of Hercules.” I hear her coaxing him to swallow. Swallowing is painful and slow. Dad’s swallow reflex is now so weak that he can’t take anything solid, for fear of choking. If he inhaled a crumb it could lead to infection and another bout of pneumonia. Privately Mum said to me a few days back she rather wishes one of these would “carry him off” – “It’s no life.” Then she started to cry and I persuaded her instead of rushing away on her walker to come sit down beside me on the couch and we can talk about it. How she feels and what might happen. Carefully I introduce the idea of what her life might be once she is alone in this house, what she’ll do. Coughed out at the far end of a fifty-year relationship. Death is harsh.

    When I came home from the polling booths Saturday Mum and the carer were seated either side of Dad on the verandah couch, coaxing him to take another mouthful of the egg flip he has for his breakfast. They have to urge him to each mouthful and then, for long moments, sit concentrating with him til he swallows.

    My mother is tired out and molested by sadness, she has cared for him since he had the stroke and now, since he’s had cancer. “It’s not fair,” she says, and this is the thought that undoes her. At some point in the day every day she cries and I try to just listen, I try to offer what small comfort there is. I keep wondering who will listen to her and comfort her once I am gone. Their close friend, losing her marbles, shows up at the house every morning asking for errands so she can help out; she is not someone it’s easy to talk to, she never has been. My mother despatches her to the shopping centre to bring back the wrong kinds of milk or to lose her car. The Blue Care nurse shows up and says piously, “I’m not allowed to lift.” The whole household’s exhausting. My family have never said clearly how they feel and it is difficult for my mother to say, I want this, I need that. She prefers to hint. “We do need some shopping,” she’ll say, and then wait for me to ask, “Shall I go?” Dad used to say, Gee, some cheese and biscuits would be nice. Gosh, I wouldn’t mind a gin & tonic. And then someone would get up and go to the fridge.

    Now he can no longer have crackers or toast or steak or any of the immensely solid English comfort foods that are his core diet. He seems to have lost interest in eating, which when I contemplate the plastic vials of meal replacements and protein shakes in the fridge seems unsurprising. But the kindly carer gets called upstairs four times a night to haul him upright for big glasses of milk. Clearly he’s hungry.

    In the supermarket last week in my jet-lagged haze I tried to guess what might be the various clues which would trigger Dad into his appetite. In the deli aisle I worked out that if I bought him beef sausages he would be able to eat the inner mince, suitably mashed. First I served the sausage whole. He sat up a bit and said brightly, “Ooh!” Then I spooned the meat out of its casing and mashed it up small on the back of a fork. He ate two tablespoons of sausage meat, a triumph. Mum said, inspired, “Hey maybe he could have pâté!” So I brought back some pâté, soft smoked salmon in tenderly thin flakes, a crumbling vintage cheddar and a creamy blue cheese, prawns with their mulchy orange and white striped meat, and the makings of an egg custard. The next night, presented with a parfait glass of prawns, cluttered with a peculiar curry sauce for which Mum had given instructions, Dad turned his whole body to grab after the tray. He had to be restrained until he could be sat up safely to eat a bit. Then it all came up again and I ran away and my mother had to deal with it. By stimulating his appetite I had only put him through more misery.

    At the counter of our local all-night store I showed up toting two giant flasks of milk with one hand and balancing a stack of four boxes of tissues on the other. The Korean guy who runs the store said, “Are youse having a party?”

    “Yeah – a phlegm party. You wanna come?”

    “Oogh,” he said.

    “I mean, jeez,” I teased. “What the hell kind of parties have you been going to?”

    “Ahhh,” he said helplessly, having run out of banter. With some difficulty I prevented him from stuffing everything into bags, and took it home to the top of the hill. I try not to run away but to sit next to Dad while he produces his vibrant spume of coughs, yielding blizzards of soaked tissues discarded in florets over the side of the bed. I am painfully squeamish with splinters and injuries and when he coughs, I cough too. It feels like my body is trying to vomit, I cover my ears and retch when I hear his chest rattling and carving. “Just think, darling,” my mother used to say, “only five Tertiary Entrance points saved us all from you becoming the world’s worst doctor.”

    I certainly am a terrible nurse and would have made a woeful surgeon. However we laypersons can love, and we can serve. This morning Dad began to cry and his whole face crumpled. The carer was away in the kitchen. I asked him, but he could not explain what it was that was so sad. “Is it because you feel so miserable and sick?”

    He nodded hopelessly.

    “Ah, Dad.” I had been stroking his face and his bony shoulder. I feel inhibited by the memory of the times he would grab hold of a handful as I walked past, graspingly unable to grasp how a routine which was mere sport to him could be so distressing to me. Dad would often pinch or fondle my bottom or comment on my budding breasts and he always acted so surprised when I howled with outrage and pain. “Dad! Stop it!”

    “Oh, but darling,” in an injured, high-pitched, goofy voice, “it’s only a bit of fun.”

    Now he is reduced to this skeletal frame who produces industrial quantities of mucus. His tongue, which laved the palm of my hand eight years ago after his stroke when he lay stricken as a baby bird naked in the lifting hoist and all of the nurses were out of the room, is thick and useless in his mouth. His eyes, which bored into mine that afternoon as I recoiled and cried out and he held onto my hand with surprising strength, still have that mischievous expression that is, in his character, life itself. I remembered him gazing at me over our linked hands, letting me know he was being naughty. I remember the repulsion and chagrin that gripped me and how I felt the need to blame myself because, overcome by remorse and compassion at his collapsed post-stroke state, I had pressed his head against my shoulder to embrace him, though carefully keeping it well clear of the breasts. Now on a sudden instinct I curl forward and lie my head on the side of his chest. It is the closest we have been since they beat me in my bed, after I escaped the year of rapes, when I was eighteen. One held me down and the other yanked an arm right back to whale into me. Their mouths were filled with filthy words, slut, tart, the boys at Uni will be round you like flies round a honey pot once they find out you’re on the Pill. Next day the girl who lived next door crept round as soon as my mother had driven down to the shops. “Are you ok? I wanted to call the police. I thought they were going to kill you.” He could not hit me now. He could barely even kiss. I closed my eyes and let the feeling of his liquid loud breathing fill me. And a kind of rickety peace that has hovered round me nearby and more distant, never staying, never settling, came and perched in my heart like a dirty bird, for a few long minutes.

  • Dad and Ian

    Dad’s number is 0412 195 957. Mum’s number, obtained in a different year and from a different phone company, is separated from his by only two digits. For years their numbers were almost the same and then Mum put Dad’s mobile through the wash and now Dad has cancer in his blood. The doctor’s stopped the chemotherapy because it wasn’t working, but not before it turned their home life medieval. He had radiation, hormone treatment, then the magic pill. He will be dead before I ever get home.

    Dad has a close friend from childhood called Ian, not the Ian in this picture. They were lifesavers together on the Gold Coast. Tonight I heard that Ian has inoperable cancer in his lungs. My brother sent me a photo of Ian coming out of the water at Little Burleigh looking hale and strong: he sent a photo of the four dozen young men lined up in their wrestle suits. This is how men were built in those days, I thought: before McDonalds. As I lay down and closed my eyes a strange calming image flooded me. I was thinking about the two friends who now have known each other longer than they’ve either of them known anybody else, just about; so many people have died. Their generation is at the wall. Their bodies are crumbling. I knew Ian was in town for a while to spend time with his children, our playmates on the long summer holidays at the beach, and I thought: what if someone could bring the two of them together, if they both wanted; and then discreetly disappear; so they could have a beer or a cup of tea with no one fussing around them and being social; and face the horizon as it approaches. Dad told me once years ago how when they were lifesavers they were both out on their boards beyond the breakers, where the water is green and tilts; a huge shark went cruising past his feet. He said he wasn’t scared. It was just a part of being in the water.

    I always thought once you step into the ocean, you are in their territory. They know the places we cannot map and can eat the things we are. They have no mercy, so far as we can understand it. They maybe don’t even have fear. But once you leave the sloping beach and paddle out past the breakers you are out of the reach of land and you have stepped into the wild.

    .

    My father was born during World War Two. It’s hard to imagine he minds being deprived of his mobile phone, the constant connectivity that keeps us bobbing on the surface of our minds like so much trash.

    For the first time now the living outnumber the dead, things will only get worse; it is a strange and insecure world we have made, top heavy and crumbling fast, like a breaker. We are a web on the surface of a world we have ruined and let ebb, and filled its clear salt waters with our junk and emptied them of all life using nets the size of dead cities. We are a glinting and reflecting shifting roof of plastic bottles for the endless ocean which needs no roof.

    When I went to buy a futon in 1996, my father had the only mobile phone I’d ever seen. He lent it to me, so that he could call me later to come and pick up his car. I shoved the phone in my bag and forgot it was there.

    The futon I chose was so comfortable after I lay down on it I fell into a sound sleep. A strange blaring noise woke me, repeated and insistent like a tiny tugboat. People around the shop were stirring and saying to one another, I think your mobile phone is ringing. That’s what we called them in those days, two words. I said when asked, loftily, Oh no – I don’t have a mobile phone. Then, mortified, recollected that I had, and this was my father, ringing me on it. His phone and his car were in my custody.

    I bought this week a German sim card, after a year and three months here without one. I am wary of giving anyone the number. I think of the life I had, once I had slipped its leash, as like telling the household I’m just going out for a walk. Unless you take your phone along – no one can know where you are. No one can call to say Stop for milk or You are late, and so you can browse and forage and glean and sift through your thoughts like hot sand that sparkles neverendingly and forever through your fingers which are dry and brown. It makes me sad that my father doesn’t have a phone now and that it seems hardly worth replacing it. It makes me proud for him, and happy, to think of him slipping the leash, gazing at the sky, listening to the birds.

    On his verandah with his afternoons all to himself he can see the horizon from his long cane chair which curves like a Malibu board. But the chair is so low and Dad struggles to get out of it. He cannot make it to the landline in time if I call him from my strange time zone in another season; efforts to reach him seem futile. From his supine position the verandah rail is his horizon. It has snuck closer in his sleep.

    On the far side of the world where the water is cold I stare and stare towards the south but it’s slipped round the curve. I hear nothing, and I see nothing, and I get these occasional emails. My father who then was the love of my life with his fearless innovations and his steady carpenter’s hand has stepped off the coastal shelf now, he is out for a walk and he may be some time, he is going where we none of us can follow and I don’t believe he will ever meet us there; he’ll be gone; he has stepped into the wild.