Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  You don’t necessarily have to live through something to understand it. To sing opera – to enact an aria – you have to go further than just finding the splendour of the voice. You have to understand the story and, if necessary, let the voice crack and break. You have to be willing to surrender perfection, to find the light and the shade, to be brave enough to produce a sound that might be technically flawed for the sake of the real art of the song.

  In late 2001, a boat carrying asylum seekers is discovered in difficulties off the coast of Western Australia. Mum and I watch the footage of the boat and the refugees in the television room of Woodlands Hospital where Mum is staying for observation while she undergoes further adjustments to her antidepressant medication. There is a scandal about photographs that purportedly show some of the asylum seekers throwing their children overboard.

  As her inner world continues in chaos, Mum is increasingly vague about outside events. She manages a few comments, though, on the children who have supposedly been hurled into the sea: I don’t think any parent would do that, she says. And if they did it can only be because the parents thought they would be safer in the sea. She trails off, before continuing quizzically: You wouldn’t think they would be safer in the sea. But sometimes your perspective suddenly changes and everything you believed in is turned upside down.

  A week after this incident, Mum’s legs are so stiff she can’t get out of bed. She asks her nurse for a wheelchair to help her get to the toilet. After examining Mum’s legs, the nurse tells Mum she is fine and to get out of bed and walk to the toilet herself. Unable to stand on her own, Mum falls to the floor and is accused of malingering. The head nurse, who is called to sort things out, will have none of Mum’s ‘play-acting’ and says she will not ‘placate such attention-seeking behaviour’.

  As I arrive for my daily visit, I am able to hear the head nurse from down the corridor. Get up, Joan, she growls. I know you can walk by yourself. We’re not going to waste a wheelchair on you. I hurry towards Mum’s room where I see a large woman, whose name tag reads ‘Nola’, trying to pull Mum up onto the bed. Mum is yelping in pain as she struggles against Nola’s greater weight. My natural instinct is to physically confront Nola, but our frequent hospital visits have made me wary of those who hold the power. I feel like a traitor collaborating with an enemy, but for the moment I don’t dare confront Nola – this careless, ignorant woman is our passage out of here.

  I coax Nola’s hand from my mother’s arm and whisper: Can we just humour Mum, please?

  As I release her grip on Mum’s arm, I ask her meekly to call an ambulance to take us to Westminster Hospital so we can have Mum’s knee seen too. It might be a wasted trip, as Nola suggests, but right now it might be the only way to get Mum out of here.

  I can tell you now, love, Nola spits at me as she throws down her hands in disgust and walks out of the room, it’ll just be a waste of time and a wasted trip for the ambos.

  I understand what she’s telling me. I understand also that sometimes Mum’s feelings of helplessness reveal themselves in these passive-aggressive encounters with people like Nola. But such analysis is for another time and I’m in no position to argue the point. Mum is crying. Please, Linda. Please, she gasps at me. Why is this happening? Why is this happening to us? Do you know? Can someone tell me?

  These are existential questions, as far as I am concerned. Even though all through my childhood Mum called me the impractical one, I am at this moment way too practical to answer any of them, on either a philosophical or literal level. Right now the hospital seems to be a war zone and I am going to do what I have to do – collude, lie, make peace with the enemy – to get Mum the hell out of here.

  I look up and down the corridor for another nurse and eventually find one who is willing to be persuaded to ring an ambulance to take us to Westminster Hospital. That’s the plan anyway. Nothing is simple though: we have to wait for the ambulance for over an hour, during which time Nola theatrically stamps past our room several times snorting her disapproval. The ambulance ride from Woodlands to the Westminster is thankfully brief – the emergency room is only ten minutes away – because we have another two hours of waiting ahead of us.

  Mum’s knee begins to swell until it is twice its normal size.

  At around nine o’clock in the evening we are ushered in to ‘see doctor’, an attractive young man called Gabriel. With the arrival of Gabriel in our lives, it seems as if an armistice has suddenly been signed and our war is over. He glides around the room like a dancer, lifts Mum’s hand to say hello, turns his twinkling eyes in my direction, and tenderly prods Mum’s knee. Despite this beautiful truce, he drops another bomb on us.

  I’m afraid it looks like your mum’s kneecap is fractured, he says, as if he is whispering sweet nothings into our ears.

  Oh my God, I gulp. My first thought is panic. Mum might be bedridden. You mean she won’t be able to walk?

  Don’t worry, he says quickly, seeing my distress. No need to panic yet … at least not before we get a full X-ray to make a proper diagnosis. Meanwhile I’ll order a knee brace for your mum.

  That damn nurse, I growl.

  One of the nurses here? he asks, suddenly worried himself.

  I don’t feel like going into it right now. I let my distress deflect his attention. If she can’t walk, I whimper, it’ll be a disaster.

  Third world poverty is a disaster, he twinkles at me. Global warming is potentially a disaster as well. A boat sinking at sea is also a disaster. Your mum not walking will be a problem, for sure, but certainly not a disaster.

  He’s an angel, I think suddenly. An angel with a message for me. Keep things in perspective. Perspective’s the first thing to go when you get tired, when you’re overwhelmed. I shake my head, then nod quickly. I can’t remember whether Gabriel needs a yes or no answer. I probably look like a madwoman standing there in emergency shaking and nodding my head like I don’t know what’s going on anymore. It’s been a long day.

  The knee brace arrives. It is light blue and makes us all laugh.

  I took the liberty of ordering it in sky blue, Gabriel says to Mum. You look to me like a sky blue kind of lady.

  Mum is giddy with all the attention. She hobbles bravely up the corridor in her knee brace, which looks like a wicketkeeper’s leg pad and which also comes in a range of colours.

  Gabriel muffles his mirth long enough to tell Mum not to walk too much, but not to stay completely bedridden either.

  Got to get the balance right, he tells me as Mum limps around in a shaky semicircle then back towards us.

  There’s that word again, I think. Balance.

  These things actually heal better when there’s some movement to help the blood keep circulating, he tells me before turning to Mum, suddenly serious. Now perhaps you can tell me exactly what happened to you, Joan?

  His sincere interest opens a torrent of breath and tears.

  I’ve paid my taxes all my life. Or in this case my health insurance. Don’t I have a right to proper care? she asks him, tearfully. What do you think, Gabriel? I mean, sometimes I think they forget.

  Who do you mean by ‘they’, Joan? Gabriel asks.

  It’s a good question. We use the word a lot these days. They. We are ‘us’ and they are ‘them’.

  They should remember I’m somebody’s mother. Mum’s crying again. I deserve to be well cared for.

  Gabriel looks at me and winks. His light-heartedness in the face of her distress is beginning to feel flighty rather than charming. Or maybe I’m just too hardened now to take things at face value.

  I’ll give Woodlands a call, if that’s ok with you, he tells us. Even if this nurse didn’t actually cause your mum’s injury, she certainly … ah … he pauses diplomatically before continuing, should have arranged for Mum to get here a lot sooner than she did.

  Mum feels validated and reassured, not just about
her leg but about humanity in general. Me too. After Mum expresses fear at returning to her hospital, Gabriel arranges for her to stay in overnight.

  I wait while she changes into a hospital gown. Curtains are drawn, routine tests are carried out. Later we’re told that there is an irregularity in her heart, which Gabriel assumes has been caused by the trauma of the day’s events. I wonder then whether a heart can be slowly weakened through lack of care and love. Whether a heart can break down from fatigue and loneliness.

  I suddenly think of the asylum seekers at sea scanning the darkness for a sign of a distant shore. At least we had found our Gabriel. I wonder if there were any other angels out there calling them home through the night.

  I remember some of Dad’s favourite lines from The Tempest.

  While storms wreck havoc with our vessels

  And tempests whip up gales and frenzy

  Remember dear heart my love is stronger than

  Any man made craft and I will carry you

  I will carry you to the edge of the world

  Of course it isn’t Shakespeare. It isn’t really anything. It’s just something a little like something Dad read to me once. It doesn’t matter now, because I started making things up as I go along a long time ago.

  Gabriel phones Mum’s hospital with his report and a week later Nurse Nola is sacked.

  Unlike Mum, who asks me to pray with her – deliver us Lord from every evil – I don’t thank God. He or she doesn’t seem to have much power in hospitals and I do not think that Nurse Nola, by any stretch of the imagination, could be considered a handmaiden of the Lord. Instead, I pray in gratitude to Mum’s private health fund and thank the high-priced premiums she has so diligently paid during the last twenty-five years.

  ‘Going through traumas of various kinds is par for the course in life,’ my father wrote in a letter dated 1989. ‘Come out of them wiser, more cautious, more tolerant, even happier. No hurry. No worry. No hassles. No sweat. Just remember to make every post a winner.’

  The family come and go throughout Mum’s difficulties. Paul visits us at home when he can and makes time to see Mum in hospital. I can tell her crises are a burden for him. Often he has to come in from work if things are serious enough for her doctors or nurses to call him, although he is always cheery and supportive. He is busy with his young sons, Finn and Kel, whom we see grow up from babies to children, and regrets sometimes, I think, that Mum is not a healthier presence in their lives. She feels this loss too, for him and for herself, and although Finn and Kel always arouse in her wide smiles and, she tells me, deep emotions, she seems unable to change the situation.

  Stephen visits regularly, taking days off from his work to fly up from Melbourne, and when she can Janice flies in for short stays as well. Cathie is still a regular presence on the phone and in person.

  Each visit is like a rebirth for Mum; the new energy feeds and revives her. With Stephen, who spends time deeply listening to her, Mum finds her inner calm and peace; Paul’s breezy optimism gives Mum confidence in the future. When Cathie stays, Mum briefly regains her old determination and spark. Cathie also brings to the house the music and laughter that she and Mum shared so much of in earlier times, as well as visits from her wide circle of friends. Janice always arrives with a kind of buzzing light; Mum perks up whenever she comes to stay. Despite her obvious dismay at Mum’s deteriorating health, Janice can still make Mum giggle and in the increasingly fragile space of Mum’s home giggling is something I am not so good at anymore.

  Each visit is like a renewal for me too. I try to be a good hostess now that Mum cannot easily play the role, although sometimes it still feels awkward to share things with the brothers and sisters from whom my life has separated me. These visits also bring to me a private sense of wonder, as if I am putting together some kind of biological puzzle, when I witness this woman, my mother, who has no favourite among her children, being the single body through which five such disparate life forces can interconnect and I marvel at the subtle ways Mum is able to balance us out even though illness is slowly weakening her own balance. Despite these times of welcome revival, though, the geographical distance that separates us all means that for a lot of the time it is just Mum and me getting through the days – or, as she describes it, ‘the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the ins and outs’ – as best we can.

  I try to stay as open as possible with Mum when she returns from her regular stays in hospital. She comes home each time like a newborn. But now there is a different element to our experience at home. After settling back into these familiar spaces I begin to notice her looking past me, as if there is someone standing behind me.

  Hello. Are you here again? she sometimes calls out now, even if I’m standing right next to her.

  Mum, I’m right here, I say gently, careful not startle her.

  She points towards the blank wall across the corridor. No, not you, she tells me. Them.

  We both begin to refer to whatever she sees as ‘them’. I am more adept now at going along with all the changes in Mum’s perception. I know her drugs are making her hallucinate. At the same time, I secretly enjoy this evidence of her altered state and so I am not surprised – nor even, with a smile for my dead father, discombobulated – when she turns to me one day and whispers: Ever since I’ve come home from hospital it seems like there’s more than just the two of us here.

  Who do you think is here? I ask.

  She is matter-of-fact as she explains: In the hospital when I wanted to die, she tells me, every night I prayed to your father and your grandmother. I asked them to send me some help if they really wanted me to keep going. Do you think I’m crazy for thinking that sometimes it seems like they might be here with us?

  ‘What’s crazy?’ I could ask her. In these circumstances, exactly what is crazy and what isn’t? I like the idea of spirits walking the corridors. Of angels watching over us. Sometimes I even envy Mum for seeing what I cannot see – the vague outlines of things from other worlds, messages from the dead and the dearly departed.

  Sometimes she looks at me and I know she sees her mother. And behind me, perhaps, my father. Maybe we merge together in her visions, the three of us, a triumvirate of past and present making the future. The Buddhists would think it is all perfectly natural. They know we are just vessels for souls. Possibly I am sharing my vessel with my grandmother, sort of like an extended stay over, until Mum’s better. And though I once told Dad I wished never to see him again, he’s welcome too; in fact, anyone is who can make Mum feel more secure.

  Joan: I was convinced that they were there with me, and you know that I’ve never gone in for all that ghostly hocus-pocus. If I can’t see it or touch it, as far as I was concerned it doesn’t exist. One of your sisters reckons it was probably the drugs making me hallucinate; perhaps I just needed them to be there. But they were there. I could feel their presence. Sometimes I could see outlines of things: shapes in the corridor and on the end of the couch – they were moving … hovering around me. I felt better, whatever was happening, knowing we weren’t so alone.

  AIN’T WE GOT FUN

  Mum knew that for many people singing is a serious business. It brings out all sorts of insecurities and fears. Confident, articulate people can become bumbling messes in a music studio. Children also experience all kinds of terrors when they have to learn a classical song and not the pop songs they have practised in front of their bedroom mirror. There is no way to fake a voice in an empty room without resonance or microphone.

  Many of her students heard for the first time their own voices recorded on Mum’s old ghetto blaster; it was also often the first time they wanted to give up and never sing again. It was Mum’s job to help her students through all these different stages, to encourage them through their difficulties and try to make their development as enjoyable as possible. She understood also that many teachers felt frustrated by the process as well: studen
ts who did not practise regularly, who had severe technical difficulties, or simply a terrible sense of pitch, could make the work of the singing teacher extremely demanding.

  In an article for the Music Teachers’ Association Mum advised teachers to maximise the things that made them laugh. In 1990 she wrote that ‘a smile is the quickest way to combat the teaching blues and to connect with your students’. She even suggested getting up from the piano in the middle of a particularly challenging moment in the lesson and doing a tap dance with the students. ‘Add a bit of nonsense to break the tension,’ she wrote. ‘And learn to laugh at yourself so that others will laugh with you, not at you.’

  Dad would probably have found something to laugh at in everything that happened to us and he would have told this story a lot differently to me. He would have not just looked at the bright side, he would have found the dark comic textures underneath. He would certainly have told me not to be so personal, to be stoic as I did my duty and to keep my feelings to myself. Renowned for his word play and practical jokes, his sense of the absurd provided a strange counterpoint to his austerity. I sometimes wonder, too, whether his humour was his protest at the world of surfaces and respectability that might really have seemed laughable after the simplicity of his monastic life.

  Everyone has a story about Dad changing into different clothes – hats, ties, sunglasses, even swimming goggles – for each course at the dinner table. It was a way, one relative observed, of asserting his identity during all the talk about music, a topic that usually dominated the conversation at dinner.

  Cathie remembers simple things – like going round and round the roundabout nine or ten times in a row whenever new friends drove with us for the first time. Or screaming in the stairwells at his school as if someone had fallen into the quadrangle. Kym remembers how he used to love to sit back and watch us all. You were his entertainment. He’d love just watching you all interact around the dinner table, all this banter and music. I remember going away and just buzzing. I thought it was wonderful all these things happening.