Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  I know I’ll probably never sing properly again, she says with finality.

  That’s ok, Mum, I reassure her. Singing properly isn’t everything.

  I cuddle into her. As long as there’s breath in our bodies we can make sounds, I reassure her. Any sound is ok – a bark, a meow, a bellow, a squawk. Who says we have to sing words?

  She’s not in the mood for laughing, not even at my best efforts. But singing makes things bearable, she tells me. It always has.

  She is right. Perhaps that’s why I gave up so much to find my song. To make things bearable – when they got unbearable.

  She is suddenly wistful. But there’s something else, she continues slowly. I can’t see meaning in what’s happened to me. I studied for years so I could teach the meaning of songs, but this is life, and I can’t see any meaning in this suffering at all.

  It’s ok, Mum, I tell her. Maybe there is no meaning in suffering.

  I remember when you were a little girl, Mum tells me. You were always laughing.

  I think as I hold her that sometimes a voice can just break your heart and that I have never been moved by my mother’s singing voice the way I am at that moment by her vulnerable speaking voice.

  You were so bright and cheerful, she continues. But I can see you’ve suffered. The world has weighed down on you too, hasn’t it?

  Sometimes … everyone suffers, Mum. It’s unavoidable. A fact of life.

  What can I say, I wonder, except a few tired clichés? There is no time, I think, for anything else. The night will be over soon.

  I never really suffered, though, she continues. Not till I got sick. Not like I think you have. I saw what your future would be. I saw the self-doubt, the lack of confidence. I didn’t understand why, you were always so bright, everybody said so. I didn’t know how to help you. I thought you’d just get over it, like people do. But I knew that would be your flaw.

  She’s right. And also, of course, she’s wrong. Right and wrong, just like she always was. I smooth back her hair, and cuddle her again. After she falls asleep, I lift her up and carry her into bed. Thank God I lifted weights, I think, and did all those push-ups, so now I can carry my mother. It takes a few minutes to settle her, then I stumble back up the corridor to run myself a bath. I listen out for the sound of her snoring as daylight drips through the window. Perhaps it is at this moment, as I lean down to turn off the hot tap, that I lose attention and fall. It’s not that I feel dizzy or weak. It is more like a letting go, this falling. A surrendering to the fatigue that is now overwhelming my body.

  I fall on my side and lie there unable to move or make a sound. Perhaps I fall so I can sleep. Because I am so tired I could sleep even like this, knowing finally that I am unable to change Mum’s situation, to steer her boat in another direction to the one in which it is relentlessly heading.

  I remember a picture, then, that I saw once when I was a little girl in one of the old Pictorial Knowledge Encyclopaedias that had stood in the bookshelves of our lounge room. The image in this picture emerges in my mind as I huddle on the bathroom floor clutching my shoulders and arranging my head so it can lie peacefully on the cold tiles, an old historical image of the world drawn by an artist who still believed the world was flat and that sailors in boats would fall over the edge of the horizon when they finally reached it. For a moment, I see Mum and myself in such a boat, heading towards the edge of the world over which we will eventually tip.

  I take in a deep breath. I can feel my chest expanding with air as I breathe right through the pain that is now throbbing in my left hip. From up the corridor I can hear Mum’s rasping breath echoing through the house, diminishing in volume until it is only a faint sigh.

  Book Three

  HOUSE OF LOVE

  INTERMEZZO

  Mum was a student of people as well as a teacher of singing. She understood the connection between the body’s fears and tensions, and the ability to release the song she believed was in everyone. She notes in an article she wrote for the Music Teachers’ Assocation of Queensland in September 1995 that ‘tense, energetic, ambitious people are more likely to have tense glottal problems, whereas phlegmatic types are more likely to have a breathy problem’. For problems of tension she encourages an ‘inner smile’, which helps ‘deconstruct vocal chords’. She also suggests laughing exercises down the scale, ‘not up’.

  She became philosophical during her illness. Although she had hardly ever lived anywhere but her mother’s house, she had observed life through the prism of music and seen many types of people pass though the door of our house and later her music room. They had stood before her and confronted with her guidance their fears, their inhibitions, and their tight larynxes. ‘Leave your ego at the door,’ she would admonish some students, mostly important men in their other lives, who became like quivering children when faced with the seemingly impossible task of singing in tune. ‘Remember you are a star!’ she would encourage the shy girl who practised and practised but who could never look up from the ground as she sang.

  Sometimes she directed me to a vocal exercise that improved my resonance or released my larynx. She encouraged my inner smile. She told me not to close my eyes when I sang, but to open them up so that the audience could see what was in my soul as well as hear it. ‘You have beautiful eyes,’ she told me. ‘And a beautiful smile. Don’t look so serious. Remember, smile and the world smiles with you.’

  So I try to smile, even when I feel like crying. And to leave my ego at the door.

  Not long after I fall in the bathroom, Paul decides Mum should leave the St Lucia house. He doesn’t decide this just for Mum’s sake but for mine as well. It isn’t something I’m proud of, the way I yell at her sometimes, the way my own physical helplessness erupts into frustration and anger at someone who is more vulnerable than I am. As usual, I am too stubborn and embarrassed to ask for help or admit I can’t cope anymore.

  My stubbornness is stupid and dangerous for Mum. I’m not helping things anymore by clinging to my role as her ‘carer’. I am not even sure I am capable of ‘caring’ for anyone – not even myself – at this time. I am probably just making things worse. I am ashamed I can’t initiate the move myself, and that my sunny-natured brother has to step in to change things.

  Mum never comes back to the house, not even to say goodbye. Paul finds an old institution called Blue Hills, which is close to the sea and to where he lives in Sandgate, where Mum will stay for the next nine months. Later, we will discover it has many deep-rooted systemic problems. But for the moment, Paul tells me, we should be happy just to get anything.

  When Mum moves into the Blue Hills hostel, I am too ashamed of how we parted to call her. It is foolish and neglectful of me, but I leave it up to her to contact me. Though I tell myself she’s better off away from me at the moment, I am anguished and bereft at our sudden parting. I try to communicate this by sending flowers to the hostel, but it is nearly two weeks before Mum and I speak to each other again. Because Paul is close to Blue Hills, he helps her move and visits her daily. He tells me to take a well-earned rest, but when I don’t hear from Mum, I wonder whether she is punishing me because I fell when she needed me. I call several times, but am only able to leave messages. She has no private phone yet and the public phone is a long walk from her room. I also discover later that the hostel’s policy is to discourage a lot of contact between new residents and their families until a suitable settling-in period has passed.

  When she eventually calls we speak as estranged lovers might, polite, considerate and tactful, as if we know that much work will have to be done to find a new intimacy now that the old connections have been broken. Mum tells me that she has begun a new routine of daily walks from the hostel to the beach and back again. When I finally dare to visit she shares with me the details of these journeys by foot to the water. She tells me she dresses in floral blouses, her favourite tweed skirts and sensible walk
ing shoes for these sorties beyond the gate. Close to the edge of the beach she stops to breathe in the sea air; then she sits on a bench near the children’s playground, swinging her legs as she often does, quite unselfconsciously, if her feet do not reach the ground. At the milk bar opposite she buys herself a lime spider – lemonade and ice-cream mixed together in a long frosted glass – or, on the way back to the hostel, a cappuccino with one sugar and plenty of froth from the little coffee shop on the corner.

  I’m happy to hear that Mum has new territories to explore, no matter how insignificant they might seem. In her rapidly diminishing world, even a slow walk five hundred metres down a street to a concrete path close to the water’s edge constitutes a grand adventure.

  There are other unexpected bonuses as well: she begins to make new friends. One of these new friends is Marta, whom I first meet walking arm-in-arm with Mum along the musty corridor of the hostel’s fourth floor. Marta is speaking, or wailing some might say, to Mum, while Mum nods in agreement with her. Mum tells me later she can’t understand a word of what Marta is saying. But I have seen the numbers on her arm, she explains, and I can hear in her voice that she is traumatised by something.

  The numbers on Marta’s arm are from the two concentration camps, Dachau and Auschwitz, where she spent much of the Second World War. I recall Mum’s psychosis in hospital when she envisioned herself in such a place, unable even to visualise the horror of the reality. Marta and Mum make a strange pair. Neither understands a word the other says, but each listens patiently as the other rambles on, knowing not to interrupt the flow of words. Mum is, as she puts it, ‘the new girl in town’; Marta, on the other hand, has been a resident of the hostel since the early 1960s and is still unable to speak much intelligible English even after half a century away from her birthplace. Despite being isolated by her trauma and her broken speech, she lives in her tiny room with its stained carpet and peeling walls as if it is paradise.

  Then there is Bert, the namesake of Mum’s father, who takes a shine to her after their paths cross several times during their respective morning walks. Though Bert’s progress is hindered by the large metal frame he pushes along in front to steady himself, his incapacity only makes Mum seem more like an ingenue when, with a bow and a smile, he greets her and calls her ‘the lovely girl’.

  He lost his own wife, she tells me. She was a lovely girl just like me. So of course when I see him I smile. Nothing wrong with that. It’s simple, really, after everything’s said and done. I know he slows down and waits for me sometimes. He settles himself on the seat until he sees me coming back up the road from my walk, then he stands up and pretends he has only just started walking towards me. I know he likes me and he likes to see me smile.

  I would have kissed Bert myself just for making Mum smile. We are even more thrilled to discover that Bert is actually the father-in-law of an old friend of mine. I imagine happy endings: Mum finding love again with an older man, skipping like a girl beside him, or dressed like a bride as they walk slowly around the driveway of the hostel. For one wild moment I even imagine a union blessed by their gods, their families, and by whatever angels that have brought the two of them together.

  But her infatuation goes the way of a lot of things in her life: she begins to distrust him and wonders if he is, after all, just after her money. Eventually she shuns his smiles and avoids the driveway on her morning walks. I don’t know whether this mistrust is a cruel side-effect of her disease, a symptom of dementia, a response to feeling neglected at the hostel, or just a lifelong habit. Whatever it is, after a few weeks I don’t hear much more about Bert. Or about Marta.

  When Mum begins to deteriorate again, I listen to her renewed fears, her bad dreams and her fluctuating moods. Although I meet and befriend helpful and efficient nurses and carers while Mum lives at Blue Hills, it is obvious that they can do little to alter the sometimes degrading circumstances of the residence. A few years later the hostel will figure prominently in exposés on the care of the elderly on several current affairs shows, and Mum’s stay culminates in a physical altercation with one of the nurses’ aides who, for a period of several days, brought the right medication at the wrong time, or the wrong medication at the right time to Mum’s room and ordered her to take it. I finally grab it out of his hands and demand to see his superior, after which he demands to see either my husband or my brother, refusing point blank to deal further with any more ‘uppity and irrational women’.

  LOVE LETTERS TO LORD BYRON

  Dad never cared much for the work of the poet Lord Byron. Perhaps Byron’s work was too excessive for an austere man like Dad, who preferred the verses of Wordsworth, whose sound was like the sea, and his visions for a more egalitarian world. Dad was especially fond of Yeats’ love poetry, though. I know he loved my mother’s girlish beauty and still yearned for her to turn her charms upon him long after the first stage of their love had ended, but I know he really meant it when he offered these words of Yeats to my mother: one man loved the pilgrim soul in you/and loved the sorrows of your changing face. I sometimes wish he was still around so he could call out to Mum as her body stiffens and her face begins to freeze. I don’t really know how Dad would have felt about my Byron. He would probably have warned me, as he had many times while he was alive, about my choice of friends and associates. Perhaps he also warned Mum to be careful or feared that she might have been distracted by someone like Lord Byron. Or even that she might have answered his call of love, if the call ever came. Whatever my father’s fears for her, by the time I met my Byron, not a poet or a Lord, at a party in October 2002, Mum’s soul had well and truly become acquainted with the dark night and so she might well have answered the poet’s call when she was living in the hostel at Sandgate, where she grew increasingly disorientated and anxious during the final months of 2002. She might even have called back to the poet Byron, in her growing dislocation:

  bid the strain be wild and deep,

  I tell thee, minstrel, I must weep,

  Or else this heavy heart will burst;

  And break at once – or yield to song.

  I am ready to yield to more than just song when I meet my Byron. Even though I have gone out with a few people during the past few years, I usually told prospective partners that I wasn’t available for any kind of serious relationship, that I was ‘committed elsewhere’. It probably helps that Byron is a practising Buddhist and has gone through his own painful reconstructions – from the wreckage of a broken marriage, a troubled son and, in the past, his own mother slowly dying in a nursing home. Despite being humbled by life, Byron is still a vital, optimistic man who is used to being in charge. I wonder at first if his vitality will be too much for us, but things change when his heart melts, as he tells me later, after hearing me sing my songs in Mum’s lounge room. A melting heart, rather than a broken one, is something both Mum and I can appreciate and so we both welcome Byron into our lives although we are at first as tentative as we might be as travellers journeying for the first time to a country whose language and ways are strange and unfamiliar.

  On Christmas Day 2002, an overcast, humid day, Byron and I drive down to Blue Hills laden with brightly wrapped presents, cards, balloons and streamers. I have booked us all dinner in the hostel dining hall, but Mum is too distressed to leave her room and is only interested in getting her Parkinson’s medication. Sometimes watching her wait for her medication is like watching a junkie wait for a hit: all the energy drains out of her body until the drug miraculously revives her, about twenty minutes after she swallows it, as if she is a dead person coming back to life.

  During this visit, I am not alone for the first time since I left Raphael in Bellingen. It feels strange to have company, but Mum likes Byron. She thinks his shaved head and Eurasian face make him look like Yul Brynner from The King and I. This Christmas, after finally taking her medication, she even tries to ‘Whistle a Happy Tune’ with him. She also likes his flattering,
cajoling way with her, but I wonder if he is too eager to please and suspect his sudden involvement in our lives. But I overcome my natural reticence by remembering my grandmother’s words: Never look a gift horse in the mouth. So I let myself be wooed by his attentiveness to my mother and imagine I see in him, just as I think my mother can, the same kind of man she imagined my father was: gallant, attractive, paternal.

  The day after Christmas we all drive down to Byron’s house outside Brisbane. When we arrive Mum lies down and tells us that she is ready to die. She holds out her hands to us and whispers God bless you all in the faintest voice, as if her body has already gone, lids flickering over slits of blue that journey glassily across the ceiling where all the seraphs and angels are apparently waiting for her. It’s hard to tell whether it’s the real thing or whether she’s just rehearsing like she used to rehearse for her other performances. I start to wonder, why is heaven always up there? Hasn’t anyone ever thought it might be down there, across there, or over there?

  I remember what your grandmother said about dying, she whispers as I hold her hand. It wasn’t the actual dying. It was how long it took.

  I lean in and whisper back: I don’t think you are dying yet, Mum. And if you are, we’re here with you.

  But she is dying in a way. Every day the old certainties, the old routines, the old ways of thinking are falling away. Her home will soon be sold. She doesn’t even have any familiar furniture left. Her room is hardly big enough to contain a single bed and a small television, let alone her photographs or music. She is a refugee now, one who would perhaps prefer to die than start all over again in a strange, lonely country.