by Amal Awad
Her apartment is spacious and uncluttered. Ruth is an avid reader: ‘I’ve always got books everywhere because all I do is read, because I still think there’s so much I haven’t learned, that I want to know everything.’
Ruth is English; her family migrated to Australia after World War Two. Ruth remembers the voyage over. ‘It was wonderful. It was such an adventure because we went through the Suez Canal before they closed it, so we saw the Pyramids; we saw so much. We went to Aden, we went to places we never would have gone to. And then, coming to Australia, because I really love animals, it was like coming to heaven for me because there were animals everywhere. And fruit trees – we didn’t get much fruit in England because the Germans were bombing all the ships that were bringing supplies through.’
Her family relationship is important in our discussion. Ruth says she struggled to forgive her father for his lack of support. She had a tense relationship with him. ‘I was always angry at him.’ But she believes his own conditioning locked him in to his way of thinking and acting. It softened her towards him a bit, she says, tearing up. She grabs a tissue. We talk about how common it is to have parents encourage pathways that aren’t necessarily the ones their children desire.
‘I’ve got another friend who always wanted to be a doctor, and still does, and couldn’t be because she was a girl,’ Ruth says.
Ruth’s father was a teenager in England in the early 1930s, when they had the hunger marches due to a lack of food. ‘The government turned the army and the fire department and the police on to them, and they arrested everybody. My father was seventeen, and they gave him the choice: he could either go to jail or join the British army and go to India. So he went to India because he didn’t want to have a police record.’
Ruth believes this influenced his character. ‘But the thing is, he loved India. He learned to speak the language. He loved it, he loved the colour, because we come from Manchester, which is such a dreary, grey place. And they had this beautiful tasty food …’
Ruth says she had a better relationship with her mother than her father. ‘My mother was a bit emotionally not well. I think she was clinically depressed most of her life … She had a really hard life because her mother died when she was nine, and I think there were ten kids in those days. And then her sister, who she was next to and really close to, got burned to death in front of her.’
While Ruth is attuned to hardship, particularly the struggles of women, she is buoyed by progress. She is excited by the freedoms women enjoy today. ‘I think it’s fabulous. I was really in the feminist movement, and I wanted women to have the opportunities that we couldn’t have.’
She tells me she was inspired to speak to me after her neighbour put out the call, attracted to the idea of ‘the young ones writing a book’.
‘I think whatever we do outside of what we’re expected to do is wonderful.’
Her feminist years were during the Vietnam War. ‘And we succeeded there, and we were the ones that got “Ms”, you know? We were the ones that got that through, instead of Mrs or Miss. I use that a lot, actually.’
‘So do I,’ I tell her, I suppose as a compliment.
Ruth speaks in a low voice, her tone matter-of-fact, thick with certainty. She tells me she’s a lot more peaceful now than she has ever been. ‘I don’t mind getting older. I don’t have all the turmoil I had when I was younger.’
‘What’s that like?’
‘It’s gorgeous.’
‘What do you think was the turning point for you in getting to that?’
‘Accepting.’
Ruth lives alone. She is the last of her siblings; her sisters have all passed away. But she is enjoying her life. For her, the most difficult period happened twenty years ago, when she had a brain haemorrhage and lay in a coma for ten days.
‘I’ve been there, and survived it. They didn’t think I would and they thought if I came out of it I might be brain damaged, or deaf, or blind. I decided myself that I was going to get well. And I realised that it was between me and my brain to get well, nobody could do it for us. They could assist us, but they couldn’t do it.’
Being in a coma ‘was pretty interesting’, says Ruth. ‘If you’re ever around anybody who’s in a coma, be careful what you say, because I could hear everything.’
She remembers it all clearly. ‘I could hear everything, but I just couldn’t talk back, because my sister was saying, “Say something,” and I was lying there and I was thinking, “Well, I would if I could.”’
Ruth emphasises that she remembers the whole experience. She couldn’t move or speak, but at her sister’s request to squeeze her hand if she could hear her, she obliged. ‘She said, “Oh, she’s squeezing my hand.” I thought, you silly bugger. Even people in comas can hear.’
It was an incredible experience, says Ruth. ‘I was in a valley and I thought, it’s so cold, so at least I’m not in hell.’ She was walking through the valley with other souls, she recalls. It was an afterlife kind of place. ‘Everybody was wailing and I thought, oh hell, what’s everybody wailing about? Then I realised I was wailing too, and I wondered what are we wailing about? And I thought, well, this is what we do on earth, we whinge all the time, we just wail and moan and complain, and this is what was happening there, but we took it with us.’
There were other visions, which Ruth believes were reflective of the evolution of life.
Ruth is a spiritual person, and she says the experience didn’t change this. ‘I don’t believe in religion, and I think most of it’s made up by mankind to make you feel good … but I believe there’s something that’s way beyond anything that we can comprehend.’
Given her turbulent experiences, it’s heartening to see that Ruth has taken their lessons to carve a more peaceful pathway for herself. She’s determined in how she lives her life; even the way she speaks is that of a person who does not brook fools. She has always craved freedom and independence. To cement her point, she tells me about her short-lived marriage to a nice man, declaring it was a mistake. She had never wanted to be a wife.
Ruth and her husband had two kids, whom she ultimately raised herself. Then she got sterilised. She wanted more joy, more sex, but no more children. ‘I felt trapped. I felt like my wings were sort of cramped, so I had to go.
‘It was a bit like selling yourself to prison. So I decided that I didn’t want to be married any longer, so I divorced him. And I did say to him, “Seriously, this is not you, you’re a lovely man. You could be the king of England and I’d divorce you because I want to be free.”’
‘Did you feel better after that?’ I ask.
‘Absolutely.’
‘Did you have that free life that you wanted?’
‘I did, yeah.’
‘Did you ever come close to being with someone who you really thought, well, no, this is not temporary, I want to be with this person?’
‘Yeah, he was really lovely, too, but he got killed in a car accident, so that sorted that out.’
They were together for twelve years.
Her resolve filters into how she deals with her body. She believes everything comes from the mind. ‘I decided that I was going to keep as healthy as I could. You can fall into being an ailing old woman, but I decided that’s not what’s going to happen.’
It’s a continuous commitment to herself. When she had to have an X-ray and ultrasound a couple of weeks earlier, she instructed her doctor that she wasn’t interested in a diagnosis. ‘If there’s something there, I’m not interested in it,’ she told him. ‘Because I’ve seen people have cancer implanted into their brain, and once they’ve got it in there, they obligingly die.’
She saw it when she was a nurse, but also with friends, one of whom was given six months to live, told to get his affairs in order. ‘When he told me that, I said, “Don’t listen, [the doctor’s] only another man, he just happens to be a doctor, he’s not bloody God Almighty. You don’t have to die in six months.” But he did,’ Ruth recalls. ‘If
somebody says to you and your mind’s a bit weak, you accept it like that.’
As for getting older and needing assistance, Ruth doesn’t think about it. ‘It’s not to let it in, because sometimes if you let it in, it’s like a worm and it burrows in there, you know?’
She ensures she remains active. She goes out every day. She takes walks. She is critical of those who put every ailment down to getting older. She continues a love affair with life, a devotion to animals. When talking about the prospect of death, she demonstrates no fear. ‘It’s going to happen. If I’m afraid of it, it’s not going to change it,’ she says, adding that if there is an afterlife, she hopes there are animals there, too.
‘I had a laugh with my son because I really like everything –all things, I think. All things love their life, nobody wants to be killed. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to hunt an ant down – it runs like hell because it doesn’t want to be squashed.
‘So I feel like that about everything. When I was visiting my son, he’s got ants in the kitchen, and so I told him his family weren’t allowed to kill them. They had to clean the kitchen sink before they went to bed at night, and that way there was no food or anything on it so the ants won’t come looking, and I’ll put food out the back for them.’
Ruth made a deal with the trespassing ants. ‘I said, “Look, if you’ll go outside, I will feed you regularly while I’m here, and when I leave, I will get one of the children to do it.” So I had a little saucer that I would just put food on and put it out the back. It worked.
‘And then my son … because I used to [knock] on the wall when they started coming, to give them a warning that there’s danger around, he said, “God, you’ve even got me standing here knocking on the kitchen wall if I see an ant.”’
Later, Ruth shows me a laminated photo of a drop of water, magnified, and beside it an ant suckling from it. She’s fascinated by the image – the small made large, a fresh perspective, a reminder of how we’re all connected.
‘There’s an essence of who you really are’
Charlotte*, seventy-two, says she’s never ‘totally retired’. She runs through her work history like we’re in a job interview. She taught business, took on a bunch of training and management roles at a local college, holds accounting qualifications. It took her a while to get there, though. ‘When I first left school I started to study accounting, but didn’t finish it. And typical of that time when I got married … I stayed at home with the children but I always had part-time bookkeeping jobs.’
She has three children. Somewhere along the way she got divorced, in the 1980s, escaping a marriage she describes as traumatic. Trauma, she tells me, is the ‘hot topic’ in psychology, an area of interest she eventually pursued in her later years. A diploma in the history of psychotherapy in the 1990s, then enrolment in university to complete a masters of mental health in art therapy. When she couldn’t find work, she got into real estate.
Charlotte herself went into therapy a couple of decades ago with a Jungian analyst (someone who subscribes to a school of psychotherapy that had its origins in Carl Jung’s ideology). She found herself going to the art gallery a lot. ‘Art became very much a part of my process, just going there and learning about art. I do go to the exhibitions and get the headphones, and I started to really just allow myself to stand in front of artworks and absorb them. I’m not an artist. Although I dabble.’
Art therapy combines her love of art and fascination with Jungian psychotherapy. ‘Originally I wanted to be a doctor, but I was at a ladies’ boarding school and they didn’t teach physics and chemistry … and my father didn’t want to pay the extra money for me to learn that because I was a girl.
‘So I always meant to be more in the helping professions, I think, rather than business. Business horrifies me with the game-playing, it’s just unbelievable. And teaching – I quite enjoyed really getting to know the students and everything, but government departments frustrate me.’
Charlotte keeps busy. She lives alone, in a similar situation to Ruth – low rent, run by a charity, everyone in the building is over sixty-five. She’s happy to be in a good location, close to public transport.
Ask Charlotte about her average day, and she’ll tell you methodically: early riser. Diabetic medication. Breakfast, followed by two loads of washing, which she hangs on the line. Visits her daughter. And she’s active – she exercises, swims. She likes watching the ABC. On her mind is setting up an art therapy business (she’s previously practised on the Gold Coast), an endeavour that’s encountered delays due to personal circumstances in her family.
Like many people her age, Charlotte has various ailments and conditions to manage on a daily basis. Once again, she rattles off a list. ‘Diabetes, you don’t forget about it almost ever … it’s constantly in your life. And I have asthma. I only have one kidney. I have a lot of arthritis degeneration. I have hearing aids. I have glasses. I have false teeth – only two. I’ve just gone through a bad winter with about six urinary tract infections … A heavy cold and a month or two after that a flu. So I ended up taking eight lots of antibiotics, but it’s only in the last week or two that I got myself back on track,’ she finishes, without flinching.
‘So there’s this conscious, constant need to exercise, eat healthily, get your social connections happening, relaxation.’
Charlotte has ended up with nothing financially, she says, the result of a lifetime of being a helper. She’s in debt, a loan that is about to run out. But she has the pension, and the debt is only to the bank. She’s expecting it to be written off as a bad debt. ‘I’m quite happy, though. I’ve got the lovely trees to look at and enough space.’ Although she has no money, she says, ‘I feel very secure. I’m incredibly grateful that I live in Australia.’ She offers me an itemised gratitude list – her luck in finding a good place to live and the like. She just doesn’t want to be dependent on anyone, she says with a laugh.
Charlotte certainly makes the effort to be social. She has friends in Sydney, women she’s known for years. And when she goes to the pool, she is friendly with the regulars. She doesn’t have a ‘bestie’ in Sydney, but she has a lot of family. ‘I’m one of seven children, so I’m on the phone to my sisters and brothers. I’m connected on Facebook to all my nieces and nephews, so I have massive amounts of connections with people.’
It helps to stave off loneliness and isolation. ‘And it just gives you an interest. What are they up to in their life, so to speak.’
Importantly for Charlotte, she tries not to allow her health to be a burden. Attitude is everything. ‘And my kids just say, “Oh, you’re not old yet, Mum!” They’re not going to take up this role that you’re taking up, I think, ever,’ she tells me.
Her family in general doesn’t allow anyone to sink into an attitude of dependency. There are parties and get-togethers. ‘I spent last weekend with my sister on the Central Coast. Three and a half weeks on the Gold Coast a month ago. I’ve got a lot of friends and family up there.
‘But … like the fellow next door, he’s in hospital, he’s got diabetes, had his toe cut off last week and we’re waiting to hear the results today. If it’s gone to the bone he’ll have to have his foot cut off. But I jolly him along. I say, “Stop all this learned helplessness!” And his son loves it.
‘And I think he sort of listened to me … He said he got a new tablet and that’s really helped him, and I can see a big change.
‘Don’t make it worse than it is. That’s the big problem. I’m not unfeeling. I don’t go along with this “snap out of it” when they haven’t heard what the problem is,’ she adds. ‘I don’t like the idea of real pain and cancer and Alzheimer’s, and I gave up sugar last week because eighty-five per cent of diabetics get Alzheimer’s, and the big thing to help is to stop eating sugar.’
Charlotte has her own issues to unpack, though. Her studies on trauma have led to past issues rising to the surface. She’s scheduled to meet with a psychiatrist the day after we speak. Sh
e says such therapy has been helpful in the past. And, now, the imprint of an unhappy marriage has led her to recognise it as a traumatic experience. ‘[My ex-husband]was sexually abused by a school teacher … I used to say things like, “It’s like he’s not connected to his own inner person.” And I can’t get him to discuss anything. He just says, “We’ll do it your way.” But then he goes out and does it his way.
‘And it’s very unsatisfactory when he gives me a hug. It’s just like nothing. And everything seems to be all about him. There’s just no matter what happens, even when I gave birth to twin babies, ten weeks prematurely, and one was stillborn, and the other one lived for twenty-one hours, and I came out of hospital and I turned to him and he just looked at me and said, “Well, they were mine too, you know.”’
Charlotte goes deeper on trauma and how it affects people. ‘They lose the ability to trust anyone … They find it extremely difficult to be intimate. They’re anxious all the time.
‘And it’s overwhelmingly sad, because it’s not their fault. But the effect on me and the children was horrific, and I can still see how the effects on the children are still playing out in all our relationships. What can we do about it? How can we deal with it? That’s the question I’ll take tomorrow [to the psychiatrist], and we’ll see where that takes us.’
Charlotte has been on a winding journey for some time. In 1964 she was struck by chronic fatigue syndrome. She got on with her life. She kept working. She says that for years she didn’t feel well. But suddenly in 2014 the chronic fatigue dissipated. ‘Nobody knows what it is and I don’t know if they ever will. I definitely believe that psychology and physical illnesses are all mixed up together.
‘And so at sixty-nine I started to feel like I felt at forty-nine. Now I’m much more able to plan ahead. And I just sort of have a passing thought: I hope I live long enough to get through all that.’
Charlotte’s apartment is small and full. Not exactly cluttered, but there’s evidence of a variety of interests and experiences. Most striking is her hunger for knowledge and greater understanding. She invokes well-known philosophers and spiritualists such as Rudolph Steiner. She’s open-minded. When we meet, she is full of praise for an online course she’s completing on the human’s evolutionary relationship to life.
