Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  The night before Cathie is due to fly back north to resume teaching we share a meal at a nearby café. The conversation begins tentatively.

  Maybe it’s time you moved on, she tells me over tea and buns. It’s no life for you to just be living here with Mum. You should get back to what you were doing.

  What had I been doing? My old life seems a long way away now.

  I’m just trying to help, not only Mum but the whole family. It’s my way of contributing after years of being away. I feel ashamed of having to explain myself.

  There are professionals for this sort of thing, she continues. People who know what they’re doing.

  I feel grateful, actually, that I can do this, I confide in her, that I can be with Mum right now.

  Her eyes begin to fill with tears and I dislike myself for upsetting her, for not finding the right language to articulate what I mean.

  Not all of us have that luxury you know, she tells me, looking down at her empty plate. Some of us have to work for a living. Some of us have mortgages and responsibilities.

  I feel stung by her words, but I don’t snap back as I once might have. I know how hard she works and how easy my gypsy life might seem in comparison. Perhaps she feels guilty that she can’t be here instead of me. Neither of us says anything more. I think of the little girl with the triangle crying at the back of the school band. And I see what she must see, what perhaps I am meant to see as the sister of that child, as she stands at the back without being able to make a sound because someone has forgotten to hand her the stick: the need to be loyal to her family, to tolerate the different viewpoints of the group and to stand there patiently while someone else is out the front taking a bow.

  I try to catch Cathie’s eye across the table but she is looking somewhere else. I look away too. Here we are, two sisters, looking in opposite directions, both committed to playing in the same band, but unsure of our new positions within the group. Who should stand at the back now? Who should move to the front? Or do we get through this ‘crisis’ as we once got through the violin and piano duets we played together as children, when each part balanced out the other? I feel our world reordering itself as we sit there together breathing in the twilight, the dark yellowing glow, the soft scents of dusk. I don’t mind our silence; I don’t think Cathie does either. We both understand that all good music needs space and time.

  At the airport the next day, as Cathie frets and fusses over details to do with her ticket, her luggage, her seat allocation and her meal, I notice how tired she looks. I wonder if she had a sleepless night worrying about Mum and ache for the extra pain I might have caused her. At the departure gate she turns and suddenly hugs me.

  We do appreciate everything you are doing, she says, crying close to my ear. I start to cry too, though I wish I could sing instead of weep, there in the airport; we are still our mother’s daughters and music is what we understand, perhaps better than words.

  You know I’m only a phone call away, she shouts back to me as she leaves for the tarmac. As I watch her slim, solid body striding purposefully – ‘so much like your grandmother’, Mum used to say, ‘your beautiful, vibrant sister’ – to the plane, I am overwhelmed by concern for her, for Mum, for the threads of history that weave us all together. I stand there looking at her disappear, suddenly wondering how far away a phone call actually is, or whether, if I did try to call, there would be a proper device to measure such things.

  Later, Cathie shares with me her recollection of her last grand singing adventure with Mum and how she feels it might have impacted on the onset of Mum’s illness.

  Cathie: My first encounter with Mum’s Parkinson’s was probably when we were travelling together overseas in mid-1998. She met up with me in Singapore where I had a vocal jazz group performing at the Singapore Arts Festival. I wasn’t aware at the time that there was anything wrong with Mum and as I did not want her to miss anything, I don’t think I gave her enough time to rest after the long trips. We did many long journeys during the following five weeks which took us to various parts of Canada, America and back to Australia. We had enrolled in three summer schools in the US and in hindsight I realise it was just too much for Mum. I have to admit that, at times, I was not very understanding. She did not sleep well at all and this would probably have aggravated everything. But I just didn’t know what was happening to her then. We’d travelled together a lot in the past and always had a wonderful time.

  After Cathie leaves, Mum stays at Westminster Hospital on and off for several weeks while her doctors adjust her medication again. The degree of Mum’s anxiety appears to puzzle everybody and we are told that her terrors and depression are not normally associated with Parkinson’s. But I am beginning to understand that nobody really knows what’s happening to Mum. Or what to do about it. And also that the drugs Mum is now taking would have an impact on any woman who has lived without any kind of medication for most of her life. I dream sometimes of arriving at the hospital in the middle of the night, bundling her into the car and driving off somewhere together where we could face her difficulties in a more natural way, through tears and laughter, shared cups of tea around the kitchen table – where she often tackled the problems of children, friends, relatives and students – and also, perhaps, through music and song.

  Her psychiatrist, though, a man who perhaps has no time in his busy schedule to sing or cry or share cups of tea around a table, looks for explanations that he is trained to understand and name. It might be something separate altogether, he muses to me. We’re just trying to get to the bottom of it. Did she suffer some kind of anxiety or trauma in her childhood?

  What can I say here? I wonder. What should I say here? Should I inform him about the funny story Mum used to tell about running down the street as a child after her best friend Joanie Wilson, the ‘other Joan’, wielding an axe? Could this story be open to misinterpretation? Would he read something sinister into an event that Mum used to think, as we all did, was hilarious? Or should I tell him about the road trip we once made down to Sydney in the family Kingswood to see Dad’s brother, Bill, when there were seven of us in the car, five of us under fourteen? How Mum packed for days to get us ready; how Dad drove so sedately, stopping for solitary walks away from the car and its inhabitants only when the noise and the fighting got too much for him? How somewhere along the Pacific Highway our luggage flew off the roof rack and scattered for miles across the bitumen; how our Uncle Bill was so irritated about having us ‘ragamuffin kids’ to stay at his house at Hunters Hill that he followed us from room to room turning off light switches as he went and every day stood grumbling outside the bathroom timing our showers – and Mum’s too? Should I tell him that Mum referred to the aftermath of that family trip as a ‘kind of trauma’? Or that she had briefly agreed when, after struggling with fatigue and stress upon her return to her duties as mother, wife, singer and teacher, her doctor gave her ‘a little something’ to help soothe her nerves? Should I then add that, in a matter of weeks, whatever was bothering her passed and she ‘got on with things’ as she always had?

  I decide against such disclosure. It hardly seems relevant now. I am growing wary of how stories – full of emotion, primal secrets and the effort of loving and living – can sometimes be reinterpreted as symptoms of madness or disease. So I wrap my silence around my mother and hold her history inside me until it can be spoken and heard in context.

  The psych ward is becoming Mum’s second home. I visit daily, clinging to habits now as the familiar path disappears beneath my feet. The habit of duty. The habit of service. I dig deep to find these things in myself. They don’t spring yet from my heart or from love, only from some profound genetic memory.

  I arrive at Ward 6B with flowers. The nurses at reception smile uneasily when they see me. They both enjoy and dread me now – they enjoy the variety and colours of the flowers I bring, but dread the questions I need answers to.

  H
ow’s Mum today? I ask a nurse, whose badge identifies her as Hilary, and whom I have not met before.

  Much the same, she answers politely.

  Did she sleep ok? Last night, I mean, I press her.

  I wasn’t here last night. You’ll have to ask the nurse who was on night shift.

  I sense the ground shifting between us, sense myself walking over from the no-(wo)man’s land that the hospital prefers relatives of patients to occupy to the territory where my mother now lives. I don’t really want this to happen. I have not been on the side of my mother ever before in my life. I do not really even believe in sides, but this seems to be no time for staying neutral. Lines have been drawn and I am about to cross over to somewhere dark and primal.

  What about her chart? I fix my eyes on the paperwork neatly lined up on her side of the desk. What does it say on her chart?

  You’ll have to wait and ask the doctor, she says firmly.

  I see I am bothering her, but I continue: I thought the new medication was supposed to make her less anxious, I continue. She was getting so scared in the night that sometimes we had to get into bed with her to help her sleep.

  Another nurse, whose badge tells me her name is Sister Robinson, joins in: Oh, that’s highly inappropriate, she tells me politely. For you to be sleeping in the same bed as your mother.

  Hilary and Sister Robinson stand shoulder to shoulder as they face me behind the safety of the nurses’ desk. I stand shoulder to shoulder with nothing but weary indignity. I protest now almost automatically. I hardly trust any of my old responses anymore.

  She wakes up in the middle of the night. Crying. Unable to sleep, I tell her. So one of us gets in with her, just to calm her down.

  A word of advice, Sister Robinson scolds me. Stay out of your mother’s bed. It probably hurts more than it helps. Both of you.

  Suddenly I want to tell this reasonable, stressed, professional woman with her clinical charts and neat rows of medicine bottles arranged on the ledge behind her that Mum and I seem to have left the land of right and wrong. We have left the land of orderly behaviour. We have pushed off together on our little boat and are now lost at sea trying to find a safe shore on which to land. Polite, civilised, landlocked society has no power where we exist now; the wilder, tumultuous laws of the ocean claim us, not human laws.

  It’s quite normal, really, Hilary says soothingly as Sister Robinson leaves to see to another patient.

  What’s normal? I ask, almost in tears.

  Everything you’re going through, she says gently. The attachment. The worry.

  No, I say wearily. I mean, what is normal? What is the definition of normal?

  She rests her hand on my shoulder as she speaks, glancing over her shoulder to see if there are any witnesses to our conversation: That’s not really for me to say. Look, it’s hard to be detached in your situation. Sometimes it’s good to just talk things over with someone who might offer a more objective point of view. Do you have anyone to talk to?

  I want to cry. I don’t want to yell or scream or make things difficult. I just want to cry.

  I don’t know what to do anymore, I whisper, unable to move for the shame I feel at not knowing when my mother, my father and all my friends and lovers have told me my whole life how clever I am, when they have loved me always for how much I did know.

  Is there anyone? she asks again warmly.

  I think of what my mother said to the man who found her in her nightdress in the middle of the street: I am all alone. I have no family. I think of all the people whose lives I have passed through, the friends, the lovers, the relatives, the strangers, the ancestors, known and unknown. Is there anyone among them, I wonder, whom we could turn to now? Or, if not a person, then some clue buried in our history?

  I still can’t answer Hilary’s question as I stare at her. She doesn’t mirror my confusion; there is nothing but kindness in her eyes as she propels me out of the ward down towards the nearby café.

  Why don’t you go and have a cup of tea at the cafeteria, she says maternally, guiding me as if I was her child. Your mum’s sleeping at the moment. We’ll wake her up for morning tea and have a chat with her about her rights as a patient, if you like.

  I don’t know what I like or don’t like anymore. I feel upended. I bite my tongue and remind myself in future to choose my words as carefully as I wish the nurses would choose theirs. In hospital, I am discovering, language can normalise, demonise, trivialise and brand you as insane. But I say nothing of this to Hilary. If there’s one thing I’m learning it’s that it’s best not to argue with kindness. I am discovering how precious it is, as we arrive at the café where Hilary buys me a cup of lukewarm tea and an Arnott’s biscuit to cheer me up.

  ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

  But still the fates will leave me my voice

  And by my voice I shall be known.

  Ovid, Metamorphoses

  We used to give up Arnott’s biscuits for Lent. Lollies too. Grandma used to tell me that I would have to give up something in order to have something else so she especially approved of the sacrifices I made every Lent when I struck my own private bargain with God the Father for the sake of my miserable soul. If I gave up eating chocolate frogs and musk sticks for four weeks before Easter, for instance, I would be able to eat all the chocolate eggs I wanted on Resurrection Sunday, the day that our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Son, rose from the dead and walked out of his dark tomb into the light. It would also help save me from eternal damnation, not to mention the fires of Hell. The Catholic Church was full of fire and souls, the dark and the light. The fear of the dark, the absence of light.

  Light could choke you though. Once I was carried out of the church after fainting from inhaling too much candlelight. Or so I believed. Just hold your breath until help gets here, I heard Grandma whisper. Looking upwards as I lay on the church floor I imagined she was already in heaven and that I had been unable or – worse – not permitted to make the ascent. Her face was framed by angel wings and the robes of the saints who lined the walls of the church as she told me over and over not to breathe too deeply or I might pass out again. Words like ‘toxic fumes’ were unheard of then. Either way I learned early that not breathing could protect you. Not breathing made your body into a kind of armour. If you made your body tight and strong you would not breathe in too much light. Or too much pain.

  I once asked Grandma if she felt sad when my grandfather died – long before I was born – and left her a relatively young widow at the age of fifty-two. She didn’t even hesitate as she leaned in towards me and said with great deliberation: I didn’t feel sad. I felt released. Except for a man called Fred, whom she met at a place called Land’s End sometime during the overseas trip she took when she was seventy-three, I never saw Grandma arm-in-arm with any man. Watch out for men, she would tell me, they’ll just take all your money.

  Perhaps Grandma gave up men so she would never have to give up on the violin. From the very first violin she bought it was a love that endured long after she had decided that men ‘just weigh on you and hold you back’. She believed in the saints of the Catholic Church and the gods of music and it was to them she gave her love and devotion even before her future husband Albert Cottrell and his sisters Minnie, Florrie and Dot came into her life. Using her business skills, her ability to work hard at menial jobs, and her delight in the small triumphs of her family, she did her duty to her church and her family. She endured. But when she boarded the Fairstar to travel the world at the age of seventy-three, liberated finally from her life of service and devotion, she carried only a violin and a small suitcase with her up the ramp. Her instrument, a perfect copy of an old Stradivarius, would never travel cargo. Like a small, perfectly formed lover, it would always share her cabin.

  Grandma had breathed just deep enough to put down roots, to be independent. Breathing deep enough to catch the breath inside and stret
ch it out in her belly like a trampoline on which the voice could spring and ascend higher and higher never occurred to her and she must have heard her daughter, Joan, sing in her high soprano voice for the first time with a kind of wonder. Joan would be a typist, of course, a secretary with job security until she married – that was the plan. After that, God – and my mother’s womb – would determine the rest.

  But you could not plan for magic. Or love. That is what she learned from her daughter. And from Yehudi Menuhin, whose gifts had come upon him, she had read, like a mystery; beautiful Yehudi, little Mister Menuhin, who slept with his violin at the height of his prodigious flowering, unlike my grandmother, who always placed it carefully in its case after playing it late into the evening. She couldn’t imagine sharing a bed with either a violin or, after her husband died, a man. It was not that she was afraid of being broken – she knew how to hold the breath to stomach things – but that she might stop breathing altogether from fear that her violin, her love, might itself be broken, and that she, not it, might do the breaking.

  Good country folk didn’t play music – or sing – for a living. They worked the land, took in sewing and boarders, they mended things, and endured like the trees that sometimes turned to ash during the bushfire season. After they became grandmothers, the women visited family all across the country to make sure their children – and their children’s children – went to church. They did their duty and wrote letters to relatives. They enquired after their grandchildren’s school grades and music lessons and invited leftover relatives to stay for the holidays. They might suck in their bellies deep enough to sing a lullaby to a sleeping baby, a hymn at a funeral, or an Irish folk tune around an old pianola, but after their childbearing years, their soft round bellies held no other mysteries. They left the matter of mysteries up to their priests, prayed for salvation, and waited for heaven.