Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  She describes her mental state as somewhere between a buzz and a flame. Her eyes grow glassy from her medication and her coordination deteriorates to the point where she bumps into walls and doorways and begins to fall regularly around the house. She falls near the kitchen sink, on the cement driveway; she falls on the concrete path near the clothes line and tears the skin on both knees. Her thighs seem to be permanently bruised. Her skin grows thin, fragile, and is alabaster white; her scalp flakes constantly. For a woman who had been vital and working throughout her sixties, her sudden deterioration near the end of that decade is a shock. I’m getting old, she comments sadly. And I don’t know what is happening to my mind.

  THE RUSTLE OF SPRING

  As a vocal teacher Mum’s emphasis was always on the words and good diction. She thought subtlety was impossible without knowing the limits of your strength and power. ‘Don’t let the voice die away when singing softly,’ she wrote in September 1988. ‘Keep people on the edge of their seats with the intensity of your articulation. Keep the propulsion going. Work even harder with your waist muscles for soft singing.’ She understood how important it was to recognise that each element contained its opposite element: softness needed strength, subtlety needed definition, force needed delicacy, and power, a light touch.

  She concluded her article, as she often did, with a quotation from one of the dozens of resource books she consulted at our old dining room table as she wrote her commentaries for the singing teachers scattered all across the state. The one she chose in 1988 is particularly poignant in light of the coming years: ‘This is the luxury of music. It touches every key of memory. It stirs all the hidden springs of sorrow and of joy. I love it for what it makes me forget and for what it makes me remember.’

  Mum’s mother, my grandmother Christina Augusta Cottrell, was left a widow at the age of fifty-two. After marrying relatively late to my grandfather Albert Cottrell, who was twenty years her senior, and having kids in her thirties, widowhood seemed to have energised rather than depressed her, though. After moving with her two children into the small house she bought near the university at St Lucia when the area was full of ‘nothing but swamp, cows and professors’, she cooked, cleaned, sewed and took in boarders to support her family. It wasn’t easy for anyone in those days, especially for a woman who had left school when she was twelve. Mum was luckier though. She got to stay on at school till she was fifteen, when she had to turn down the senior school scholarship that a few lucky, bright girls were offered at the end of their junior year, a class Mum actually topped. Mum never resented this lost opportunity; in those days you did things that were ‘good for the family’ rather than ‘good for yourself’. It wasn’t in her nature to look back with regrets. She was like her mother and just ‘got on with things’. She also never had a bad word to say about her father, whose deteriorating health had meant she had to start working as a stenographer to contribute to the family finances soon after leaving school. The bustle and activity of working life suited her. By the time she was fatherless three years later she was the head of the typing pool at Queensland Railways and a beautiful, blonde and budding part-time singer.

  In the fifties and sixties, young women in Brisbane with singing in their blood had few opportunities to develop their potential. But Mum found teachers with names like Dulcie, Elsie and Ethel who taught singing in musty rented rooms high up in buildings in Queen, Edward and Wickham streets. Mum never called them by their first names and neither did we when we referred to them later. They were always Miss Dulcie Bolland and Miss Ethel Martin, L.Mus.A., A.Mus.A., as if their unmarried state was a matter for both public and private declaration, a badge of honour as important to them as the letters after their last names. It never occurred to me that Miss Martin may have been lonely or unfulfilled in her life. In photographs she looked beautiful. Mum spoke about her with love, respect and warmth, and when Miss Martin retired, Mum helped organise a special citation for her in honour of her teaching legacy.

  Even we kids loved Miss Martin and never thought of using her first name. I used to think her title ‘Miss’ was honorary, like being called duchess or queen. I used to imagine that Miss Martin – and other women like her – were gatekeepers of a musical kingdom of order, tradition and theory that blossomed with flowers of song and melody. They looked like favourite aunts, but they were really mavericks and outsiders and subsequently were never part of that other kingdom – or queendom – of women who gave up their ambitions to sing after they married and who may have either pitied or envied the accomplishments of these pioneering women. Like the other religious women who had earlier schooled my mother, these nuns of music were also symbols of the few alternatives to marriage that were available to women of my mother’s generation who had intelligence, talent, courage and a yearning for independence. And who, of course, could sing.

  By January 2000, Mum is physically and mentally declining at an alarming rate. I sometimes wonder whether I am too complacent about what is happening to her, too lulled by my sense of ‘coming home’ to question Mum’s doctors about the medication which seems to be making her increasingly vague. Perhaps I like how soothing this vagueness sometimes feels, even though I know it is out of character for Mum. Her doctors are still unable to specifically name her problem, but she now begins to refer to her ‘mild nervous breakdown’.

  The doctor says I may have had a breakdown, she whispers to me, not so much ashamed as relieved that there might be a logical explanation for her problems. A breakdown also implies the possibility of a recovery, if enough time and care are taken to repair her broken nerves. So we live in hope that such healing is possible – I still preface sentences with the phrase ‘when you’re better’ – and that, like her mother and my father, she will continue to live a long and active life.

  There are compensations for her problems, though, that neither of us could have foreseen. Because she isn’t well enough to continue her old routines, Mum now has time for conversations and shared activities for which I have always been too absent: simple things like walking with me arm-in-arm around the streets of St Lucia, noticing the sounds and colours of the miner birds perched in their dozens along the telephone wires, the lorikeets that suck the juice out of the honey blossom trees, the sooty crows that wake us both every morning. We do things together that were unimaginable before. We observe changes in cloud formations, and the progress of the moon from evening to evening. We drive together to the University Lake and speak intently about the ducks that make their homes there. When our talking and observing is done, I bring out the songs I have written in my little flat at the rear of the house and perform them for the first time on the back veranda while Mum sips her evening tea. Oh, that’s a nice one, she might say. Or: I can’t quite make out the words of that one. Or: Play that one again, will you? I love those high notes.

  I begin to write songs for her. With her. I collaborate with the energy of her sudden sadness, gratefully accepting her advice about enunciation and resonance. I gravitate towards minor keys. I experiment with the lower vocal registers. I practise the singing exercises I used to reject because they came from my mother. I begin to play the piano, her piano, her fruity, mahogany brown baby grand that is getting dusty because of my inadequate housecleaning. I tend to it now in another way, coaxing from its smooth white and black keys rhythms and melodies I had only ever played on a guitar or a violin.

  I never expected to be writing songs in Mum’s lounge room. It seems as if full circles really do exist. Instead of playing my songs to ferals, punks, artists and ordinary punters, I am now playing them to my mother.

  Apart from singing, Mum could also make ‘spring rustle’ on the piano. ‘The Rustle of Spring’ was one of the piano pieces she practised over and over for her L.Mus.A., a diploma in piano from the Trinity College of Music in London. The sheet music for ‘The Rustle of Spring’ looked like something really was rustling across the page, which was covered in thick black arp
eggios that expanded and contracted like accordion soundwaves turned into print. Apart from its musical manifestation, though, I don’t know if Mum felt a special affinity with nature – after all, it was always Grandma who watered the garden at home – although I know she loved ‘Winter’ and ‘Autumn’ from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Mum always preferred the cooler seasons; her fair hair and pale skin made the extremes of Queensland’s summer months hard to bear. But I doubt she ever thought of moving, unlike her children, who all travelled as soon as they had the opportunity, scattering themselves across countries and time zones in search of adventure and experience, bringing back stories, photographs, music and songs so that she was able to vicariously enjoy years’ worth of world travel without ever having to leave the comfort and safety of her own home.

  I was the first to travel, courtesy of a youth orchestra that took me to different parts of the country and the world even before I left school. A few years later Cathie, who was teaching up in North Queensland when I returned home, travelled overseas and from exotic locales sent back photographs of herself smiling gloriously in a way I had never seen before, as if travelling had set her free. Janice, who moved to London in 1999, is also a traveller. Mum and Dad were thrilled for her when she became a professional singer and followed her radiant musical journeys through the programs and reviews she sent back from all her successes. Later I took off for India on my own and ended up working in Mother Theresa’s hospital in Calcutta, work that had less to do with any charitable impulses to help the poor and hungry than with my own hunger for understanding what was going on in the world. Later, I travelled the country from north to south and back again in third-class carriages, lugging a backpack, a bumbag and a case full of notebooks in which I inscribed my travel diaries to go along with the copious letters I wrote back to Mum, Dad and Grandma so they could follow my travels too.

  My brothers both moved to England at various times. Paul worked as a teacher in the East End of London, as well as, for a brief period, a photographer. He sent audiotapes back from his journeys through Africa and India for my parents’ amusement. Stephen, who now lives and works in Melbourne, also mailed home hilarious accounts of his squatter’s life in London.

  Mum enjoyed our confidence and freedom in being able to satisfy our curiosity about the world. And no matter where we were, how we were living, or what calamity or wonder had fallen upon us, she wrote regularly to all of us, sometimes once a week if she sensed something amiss, but always at least once a month and often more. The arrival of her letters was as predictable as the weather she liked to remark upon; she sent snippets of news from home, comments on the changing seasons, stories about her students’ achievements, as well as anecdotes about the minutiae of her daily life. Dad would add a few lines at the end of Mum’s letters or write letters of his own in spare, elegant handwriting.

  While we saw the world, Mum stayed home with Dad, studied, taught, played the piano and sang. As her teaching practice grew, perhaps she felt that the world was passing through her door, a population of would-be singers and pianists from multiple landscapes and territories, who shared the same simple dream that would connect them during all the travels they undertook, with Mum at their side, through the various geographies of music.

  The buzzing in her head that Mum begins to describe during the first year of my return could be that musical soundtrack imploding in her brain. I listen and listen in the silence that grows around her, but all I can hear are her sighs, the soundtrack, now, of her loss.

  THE POLITICS OF SADNESS

  Cathie: I remember vividly getting a call from Mum in my office at school in early 2000. I only found out later that she was in the psychiatric ward. Mum was hysterical and was weeping down the phone for me to come and save her and take her home. I had never heard my mother like this before – ever – and did not know what to do. This was the beginning of the sensation of total helplessness that I felt and I am sure we all felt to varying degrees at various times.

  At this time, no one knew what was wrong with Mum. She had never been a woman who let depression get to her. She has always had her walking and her music to get her through the low times. So this state of mind was foreign to us, as was the ease with which the medical profession seemed to prescribe drugs for women who said they felt sad.

  It seems the only available places for people to go while doctors sort out their antidepressant medication are the psychiatric wards of mainstream hospitals or private hospitals for the mentally ill. Stepping through the doorways of these institutions often feels like crossing portals into other worlds. We go first as travellers, hoping to just pass through on our way back home, but find ourselves staying longer than we first expect.

  During the next few years, I spend a lot of time in these places with Mum, who is still confident that her problems can be solved with the right treatment and medication, and by following what I humorously refer to as ‘doctor’s orders’. Though Mum’s insurance ensures she stays in well-equipped wards with state-of-the-art facilities, our sojourns in the psych wards are not always what I would call comfortable. It isn’t easy to watch women being wheeled down corridors for electroconvulsive treatment. Or to argue with doctors who advise Mum to undergo the treatment herself. I find myself once again in the position of Mum’s advocate – even, sometimes, with her. I shudder at the violence of the treatment as well as, often, at how bloody-minded I am accused of being. Family and friends tell me stories of relatives and acquaintances, of ailing aunts and depressed uncles, grief-stricken grandparents, as well as, I suspect, recalcitrant teenagers, who all benefited from shock therapy. I’m surprised by how many people feel undisturbed by this approach to emotional problems, one that destroys short-term memories while, I suppose, making longer-term memories bearable. I plead with Mum to stand her ground. Memories tell the story of life, I argue. I am greedy too: I want to hear her memories, to know what her life has been. In the end, Mum probably refuses the treatment just to please me. Or perhaps just to shut me up.

  Mum is first admitted to Woodlands private psychiatric facility when her doctor advises another hospital stay. Apparently, Mum’s antidepressant medication, which doesn’t always appear to be working, needs be monitored more closely and the best place to do this is in hospital. There are no beds available in the Westminster psychiatric ward so Mum is assigned a bed at Woodlands, a private hospital in a neighbouring suburb. I still marvel at the ease with which Mum is now considered a psychiatric patient, even though she has, to my mind anyway, only ever exhibited normal emotional responses – that is, worry and sadness – to the changing state of her health as well as the incremental losses in her life.

  Still, we heed the doctor’s suggestions, often because there seems to be no choice. I have also been warned that it isn’t fair of me to present alternatives to Mum. It only confuses her more, I am told, if you question the efficacy of her treatment. She needs to feel confident in her doctors and the medication plan they have prescribed. I don’t understand how having access to as much information as possible can be harmful, especially as no one really seems to know what is happening to Mum. But often now she is too overwhelmed herself to consider other options.

  While Mum is still strong she greets me during my daily visits to Woodlands like the queen of a new kingdom, introducing me graciously to her fellow residents, the majority of whom are women. Some I meet just seem tired; some of them are scattered and anxious. Others have entered these institutions unwillingly, at the urging of family and friends. Others rage against the authority and use their voices to resist the easy labelling of themselves and their fellow patients as ‘mad’.

  One of Mum’s new friends is called Grace. Her name seems appropriate; she is overweight – from too much lithium, she tells me conspiratorially – but she moves with the finesse of the ballet dancer she once was. Grace describes her encounters with her doctor, who regularly recommends her for ECT treatment, in absurdist terms, detailing t
he side-effects of her medication with off-hand humour. I told my doctor he was driving me bonkers, she says over morning tea. He stared straight at me and said, ‘I wouldn’t worry about that, love. You already are bonkers.’

  Grace’s stories confront the voice of authority that prevails in hospitals. Her humour is both contagious and unsettling: I looked at my CD player for an hour the other day, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was, she tells us, gleefully gobbling up home-made scones. Last time I went home I tried to insert a CD into my toaster. My daughter was more worried than I was. I said to her: ‘You know what they say, love, the less you remember the less there is to forget.’ And who wouldn’t want to start forgetting with some of the things you see inside here?

  I discover that Grace had never ‘presented’ any symptoms of the dementia she is now being treated for until after her first stay in hospital.

  During Mum’s intermittent stays at Woodlands as well as Ward 6B at Westminster, she and women like Grace become good friends. I admire Mum’s gift for these brief yet supportive friendships that seem to flower between women in places like psych wards and mental hospitals. I imagine new mothers share a similar bond: a recognition that another rite of a woman’s passage is upon them, through which they will discover their strength, alone and with each other, to handle the changes in their bodies and minds brought about through biology, chemistry or medical technology. Mum will rarely keep in touch after she and her temporary friends leave hospital – to go home or pass on to new facilities – but she is easy in the company of others like her, sent to these places to ‘rest and recuperate’, or to be observed while their medication regime is ‘finetuned’ only to find themselves categorised as ‘unstable’, or ‘subject to mood swings’. Or worse.