by Paula Keogh
Michael’s relationship with death is, I realise, different from mine and far more complicated. He investigates dying in order to discover what it is, what it’s meant for. But this implies that there’s a choice in his fixation, and I don’t think there is.
When I was at school, I had a picture of Saint Michael the Archangel on a small holy card. It represented him as a powerful, winged figure with a sword, threatening the fallen angel Lucifer, who lay defeated at his feet. When I see Michael struggling with the powers of survival and death, I think of this image, and trust that, in the end, it will be the Michael I love holding his sword high in triumph over the cowering angel of death.
In Michael’s inner world, the sword he holds is Excalibur. In his poem ‘Still Life’, dedicated to me, this sword with its Arthurian resonances is turned on himself:
i cannot pull the sword out
of the stone to rip
my veins apart.
I see the effort involved for Michael in defying the death urge. He’s in the grip of something beyond my understanding; all his heart’s complex yearnings and all his conscious thoughts are united in his attempt to negotiate his way through it.
Sitting in the day room listening to Dylan’s album New Morning, Michael and I imagine after-death experiences. I remind him of the reference he made to bardo country at our first meeting, and we talk about The Tibetan Book of the Dead. We decide that he was right when he saw that M Ward is a place where we wait to be reincarnated. We imagine ourselves as souls travelling together through bardo country, watching visions arise from thoughts we had in this life. We imagine the visions that might be associated with different kinds of thinking – music thoughts, love thoughts, thoughts about dogs. Soon this turns into a game of seeing who can come up with the most absurd vision.
Then Andy joins us, and Michael starts talking about drugs again. He speaks as if being high is like riding a wave to the edge of existence. I remain silent.
In the months when he was using heroin and living in Darlinghurst, Michael got to know other junkies. He tells us of people he knew who died of overdoses. Dreamers and rebels. The heartbroken, the unlucky, the experimenters. Or those who simply didn’t care for much beyond the rush of the high. He seems to identify with people on the edge and with their deaths. What strikes me most clearly, though, is the weariness that settles on his face when he comes to the end of this rave. As if he’s heard it all before.
That night, Michael writes a poem on the back of a photocopy – it’s the image of a miniature statue, the Infant of Prague. He gives it to me.
statue and prayer
of the merciful
infant jesus
we pray together
i cannot stay
is it night
is it day
so stoned it
doesn’t matter or what does.
7
The Labyrinth
The week after his overdose, Michael walks out of a meeting with his psychiatrist and tells me he’ll be leaving M Ward today.
I’m shocked. I always thought we’d leave together. I suspect he has to go because of his overdose, but he doesn’t offer this as an explanation. He’s distracted and depressed, and it’s obvious that he doesn’t want to talk about what’s behind this decision.
He says he’ll go back to Caloola Farm, about twenty-five miles away near the village of Tharwa. He was staying there before he came to M Ward, and he tells me that the vibe is friendly and the people are cool. The Anglican priest who runs Caloola is an old friend of Michael’s who set the place up as a sanctuary for refugees from the city: junkies trying to kick a habit and people who just need to get their heads clear. Michael will help with the farm work and live in one of the huts dotted around the property.
As one, Michael and I walk out the door and take the path to the green bell. We sit with our arms around each other, and I wonder if this is the last time we’ll be here together. I feel the gravity of Michael’s life, the burden of who he is to himself. He says he can’t cope with life, that there’s no place for him. I hear a bitterness in his voice, and I wonder how he’ll manage outside the ward and how I’ll manage without him here.
We’ve known each other for just over a month, thirty-two days; we’ve spent thirty of those days together and talked into the nights. The thought of him going grips my heart.
Back in the day room, everything is the same. The fluorescent lights give the space an ashen sheen, the painting of Ned Kelly still hangs on the wall, and patients sit around waiting for something, anything. It’s all familiar except Michael’s face, which is sculptural and sunken as if I’m already seeing it from a distance. Rough brushstrokes suggest a moustache and beard, and dabs of blue catch the light of his eyes.
‘You’re preoccupied,’ he says, sizing me up.
‘I don’t like farewells.’
In the hospital foyer, Michael makes some phone calls. It’s all arranged. He’s leaving straight after lunch, catching the bus to Tharwa.
Sitting at our favourite corner table in the cafeteria, we talk about visits he’ll make, letters we’ll write, and how we’ll soon be living in a place of our own. I am holding myself together, just.
The mood has shifted, as it so often does with Michael. He’s now enthusiastic about going back to Caloola to work the land and tend sheep. He talks about becoming strong and fit, and he asks me to call him ‘Jack’.
I like the name. It reminds me of my father’s generation: down-to-earth, capable, sensitive men who don’t take themselves too seriously and have an irreverent sense of humour. With this new name, Michael plans to reinvent himself as a grazier poet, a man of the land. He says he’s tired of the old Michael, sick to death of all his worries and problems. I look at him and see a desperation in his desire to walk away from himself. I tell him that I don’t want someone completely different – I want to keep some of the old Michael. We decide that I’ll call him ‘Michael Jack’.
After lunch, he appears in the day room looking like a hippie farmer. He’s wearing his favourite outfit of beanie, jeans and air force boots, and his hessian bag is slung over his shoulder. We walk to the foyer, and after kisses and goodbyes, I’m standing outside the hospital under a blue sky, watching him walk along the footpath away from me. He takes a few paces, then turns and walks backwards, waving. As he passes a fence, he does a little jig in his heavy boots, nearly tripping over a low pole.
He calls out as he recovers his balance, ‘I’m gonna get strong, get some muscle. You wait and see.’
‘I’ll write.’
‘I’m counting on it.’
He strides off towards the bus stop.
For some moments I can’t think what I should be doing. I can’t face the people on the ward, so I make my way to the cafeteria. I float along the corridor in a daze, feeling invisible as people bump into me on their way past. In the cafeteria, I buy a coffee but ‘our’ table is occupied, so I find another one, feeling displaced. When I raise the cup to my lips, my hands are trembling. I think of Michael’s hands, shaking as he held his cigarette, shaking when he gripped an album cover. When you hold on too tightly for too long, something gives and the trembling starts.
I imagine sitting next to him on the bus, taking off through the countryside together into our future, but at this moment there’s only my shaking cup and the spilled coffee on the saucer. I begin to have difficulty breathing. The emotion I’ve been holding down since Michael told me he was leaving bursts through. I’m a moth in fright, fluttering my wings but unable to fly. Michael is gone. I must get back to my room.
I tumble along the corridor and plunge into M Ward, past staring eyes and into my room. A mute scream clutches my throat. I open drawers, throw clothes onto the bed, bend to pick up records from the floor. The room is impersonal; it doesn’t want me here anymore. It’s time. I must leave.
The panic recedes with this conviction, but before I can organise my belongings, two nurses appear, standing like pris
on guards at the door. The bunch of keys on the belt of the short one looks like a closed fist. ‘Paula, what’s this? You’re not going anywhere,’ she says, coming into the room.
This is the first time my freedom to leave the hospital has been questioned. ‘I’m leaving,’ I say. The effort of asserting my will takes so much energy. I turn back to the bed and begin to fold my clothes.
‘You’re not scheduled for release, you know that.’
I take a deep breath. ‘This is an unlocked ward, and I’m a voluntary patient. I can leave whenever I want.’ My body sags like a rag doll. The noise in my head is scornful of my weak voice.
The nurse with the keys gives a meaningful look at her colleague and leaves the room. I turn back to the task at hand. When I find my sarong, I bundle all my clothes into it. Now my possessions are ready to go.
Go where?
A man steps past the nurse into my room. He introduces himself as the doctor on duty and says, ‘Okay, you need to think this through.’ I face him. Although he isn’t a large man, he seems to take up all the space and oxygen in the small room. ‘You can be held in the hospital if we consider you’re a threat to yourself or others.’ He sounds formal and tired, and his eyes roam my face for signs of comprehension, as if he’s already explained this a number of times. But this is the first time I’ve heard it.
‘I’m not a threat to myself – or others.’ Breath catches in my chest. Each word is an effort.
‘Look, you could be considered a threat to yourself. You’re scheduled to see Doctor Hawke tomorrow morning. You can discuss plans for leaving the ward then.’
He turns to go, and I stand in the empty room, staring at the bundle of clothes and the records and books. Somewhere deep inside me, beneath the pressure of my chemical straitjacket, I want to scream and not stop screaming. Break windows, kick doors.
*
What am I still doing here in M Ward? When I was brought here, I was totally unable to make decisions. All I knew was that I wanted the madness to stop, but I had no idea how to make that happen. The medical staff seemed to know what to do. I signed forms, had ECT and mostly took the medication. M Ward offered me a place to be when I was in crisis. There was no alternative method of treatment.
Now that the crisis is over, I don’t think that the ECT is helping, and I’m not sure about the medication either. My brain feels singed, I’m heavily sedated, and I’m confused by memory loss. I can’t remember the subjects I’ve been studying or the names of my friends. I forget news my mother brings me about the family and, when she asks, I can’t account for the way I spend my time. I still don’t have the will and confidence that enables people to appear as themselves and speak of normal things. I’m disconnected from what’s known as reality – even from my parents who come regularly to see me, and my brother, Phil, who rides his bike all the way from school to visit.
But Michael has entered my inner world, become part of its system of meaning. He alone understands what’s real to me; he acknowledges my reality. He’s the bridge between my madness and the world outside. I can speak truly to him.
After talking with him about Julianne and accepting the fact of her death, I’ve discovered a hard knot of anger at the core of my grief. Although the coroner found that she died from ‘poisoning by an overdose of a combination of sedative drugs’, no explanation was given. The drugs had been prescribed by her psychiatrists, but no one took responsibility; no one was found negligent. Julianne had said to her mother, ‘They’re killing me with these drugs, please take me home,’ but Mrs Gilroy felt she had to accept the authority of the psychiatrists. Questioning their power seemed, and still seems, impossible. Complaints get no response. No one cares when people die in psychiatric hospitals; there’s no concern within society to ensure that thorough enquiries are held into deaths associated with madness, as if these deaths don’t matter.
Julianne was diagnosed on the basis of a ten-minute interview. ‘Paranoid schizophrenia,’ the doctor said. With that judgment, she was claimed by psychiatry. Her passionate spirit was reframed in terms of symptoms that had to be eradicated. Her experiences were recast as signs of illness, and no psychiatrist asked her to tell her story or listened to her opinions about treatment. Her family heard her and loved her; her friends knew who she was. But in the narrow corridors of psychiatry, she was known only by the label she had been assigned. In the end, they took her life from her, they took her from her family, and they haven’t been held accountable for what they did.
I want to leave M Ward. I don’t want to take any more medication. But I’m afraid of becoming mad again.
Since Michael’s departure, I feel as if I’m in a labyrinth, going around in circles, losing my way as I try to avoid the minotaur at its centre. When I panic, the walls become narrow, the paths baffling and intricate, and I imagine that I’ll never find my way out, that I’ll spend the rest of my days circling around in the darkness.
If I reach the exit, what then? My parents have offered me my old room, but all my instincts tell me that this is a bad idea. My state of mind is likely to disrupt the whole family – but it isn’t only that. My parents are stoic, serious. Family is everything to them, and while they insist I’ll always have a home under their roof, I know they’re anxious about the impact of my lifestyle on my younger siblings. I haven’t gone to Mass since my first year at university, and I’m vocal about my views on religion and politics. In their eyes, I’ve rejected everything they brought me up to believe. It’s also clear that they still disapprove of my plan to marry Michael.
They’re in an impossible situation: they worry about me, but I can’t be the daughter they want; I love them, but I need to find my own place in the world. I’m twenty-three, Michael is twenty-four. It’s time to move on and create a life of my own with him at Jumping Creek. The three months until our wedding seem an eternity.
I still want to avoid conflict with my parents, though. I want to hold on to the bond between us.
*
In the afternoon sunlight I lie on my bed, my mind spinning with memories I haven’t thought of for a long time.
Like the time my father and I stayed at Tathra on the south coast of New South Wales. I was nineteen, and I’d recently been released from hospital after my first breakdown. Dad arranged for the two of us to stay at a friend’s beach house. This was very unusual: I’d rarely spent time alone with him, as we normally did things together as a family. I felt tentative and awkward as the familiarity of our usual roles gave way to the bare reality of two people sharing a small space for a week.
The holiday house was like the ones we’d stayed in during the summers of my childhood, basic but comfortable. There was lino on the floor and old couches around the walls, a green laminex kitchen table and a radio on the shelf above the bread bin. Our talk was mostly of ordinary things: how the fishing had gone, the weather and the daily routines. Each evening we listened to the news on the radio as Dad prepared the fish we’d caught and I cut up vegetables. After dinner we played card games, mostly rummy and poker. Dad tried to teach me his favourite, five hundred, but I couldn’t grasp the rules.
I was heavily medicated on the antipsychotic drugs Largactil and Mellaril. I couldn’t read because of their effect on my eyes. My mind was often blank; at other times, it pursued problems that I couldn’t possibly solve, like the origin of the universe or the end of human suffering. I became anxious and talkative. Dad negotiated these episodes with a gentle tolerance, not saying much but being attentive. His acceptance of anything I said, however delusional, was like an embrace from a benign beyond. The stranglehold on my mind was loosened, leaving it free for a while from the need to obsess and argue.
For Dad, whatever the season, if you were down the coast you went fishing. During our week at Tathra, we fell into a morning routine of negotiating the rocks until we found a spot where his fisherman’s instinct told him we’d catch something. We spent hours attuned to our lines as waves crashed onto the rock shelf and gu
lls eyed the bait.
On one of those blue-and-white days when sunlight sparkles on the water and wind whips the waves into peaks, Dad was standing close to the edge of the rocks, his line between his fingers. I stood off to his side trying to bait my hook. My hands trembled from the medication and the prospect of putting sharp metal into the flesh of a dead fish. I began to cry as I held the hook in one hand, the bait in the other.
Without comment, Dad gently took the hook from me, baited my line and, with a smooth and arching movement, threw it far out into the water. I stood there next to him on the rocks, feeling the pull and ease of the ocean through the line in my fingers, the wind and the sea spray on my face, and the closeness of Dad beside me. I had the thought that somehow, one day, things would work out.
I think of him now, standing on the rocks along the shoreline, his fingers tending to the line while his mind travels to regions known only to himself.
In my other favourite image of Dad, he’s dancing the soft-shoe shuffle in the lounge room singing ‘Underneath the Arches’, the iconic song of the Great Depression. It tells of homeless men sleeping beneath a railway bridge, dreaming of the future and remaining optimistic as they make the best of homelessness. The song captures Dad’s attitude to life: he relishes being alive. No matter what project he’s working on, there are a thousand others he can’t wait to get stuck into. And no matter where he travels, there are a hundred other places he’d like to go. Boredom is alien to him.
I remember him sitting down to dinner with us all and saying, with a wry smile, ‘I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.’
But there’s a darker side to Dad, one I don’t think of that often. Late at night he sometimes sits in his green chair in the corner of the lounge room, a whiskey in his hand, melancholy and inaccessible.
When Dad was quite young, his father was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, the trauma of the war having caught up with him. Dad keeps his feelings about his father’s madness and absence from the family to himself. What I know of this time comes from Mum’s stories about how Dad shouldered much of the responsibility for the family after his father’s breakdown. It was the Depression, and Dad was the second eldest of five children. As a young boy, he grew and sold vegetables to help with the family finances, and he spent cold winter afternoons walking along train tracks, picking up the coal that railway workers threw off the trains for people to collect.
