Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  With her eyes closed and her cheeks sucked in above her thin dry lips, she looks like her own mother as she was about to die. Perhaps it is an omen for the future that I look more like Mum every day. The day before Christmas, as Mum and I walked along one of the hostel’s corridors, a perky nurse had smiled at us and said how alike we looked. I had wanted to tell her that, though I’d always looked more like my father, I had grown prettier and more open since I’d cared for my mother, grown kinder, too, and more patient.

  We stay at the house for two days. On Boxing Day night, when Mum is on a high after her drugs kick in, she goes around cleaning the house with Cole Porter booming from the CD player. In a festive mood, I take out my violin and play some of her favourite tunes – ‘Night and Day’, ‘You’re the Top’, and ‘Begin the Beguine’ – while she and Byron take a turn around the lounge room floor. We have fun together for the first time in months. It is like a party. A real celebration. But Mum gets too worked up and begins to rave: Everyone thinks I’m mad, but I’m not mad at all, she yells as she dances around the room. You don’t know how miserable you get in those places. You ring for the nurses and they tell everyone that you just want attention and it’s so simple, so obvious that, yes, you do want attention! You’re old, sick and alone and you want attention. What’s so crazy about that? She drops to a chair, exhausted. I suggest we breathe together to calm down. She still remembers how to do this. I hold my hand against her stomach and encourage her to fill it with air.

  When she speaks again her voice is softer. Don’t you think it would be crazier if you thought that’s how it was supposed to be? she asks me. Someone paid to look after you, but not paid well enough for them to be kind to you, not quite well enough for them to not treat you like you’re shit!

  We’re both shocked by her language. In my whole life, I have never heard Mum swear. It reinforces just how miserable she is; how the possibility of a smile from Bert or a walk around the dark corridors with Marta has done nothing to ease her sadness.

  That night it is hard to get her settled. Outside the hostel she is like a child set free on holidays and her moods constantly fluctuate. I’m like your little baby, she calls out to me as I tuck her into bed, settle her down with a kiss and tell her that the dark shadow in the corner is not a dangerous stranger. She tells me then, as she has told me a hundred times, how I used to keep her and Dad up all night, bouncing up and down between them in their bed with all my wild energy, and that if and when I finally get myself a husband and have kids, I might understand how tired you get and how important it is to take control of the children or they will take control of you, how you have to become less like a mother and more like a general with a small army of kids to feed and organise, day in, day out.

  My father loved my mother, I imagine, from the time he first saw her on the banks of the Brisbane River to the last day of his life. It couldn’t have been easy when they first married, a middle-aged man recently out of religious life with a blue suit and little money. What could he offer her but his beautiful thoughts and words? According to a relative who met them on their honeymoon, she had never met two such lovely, innocent people as my mother and father holding hands and smiling like angels while they discussed their future together.

  ‘Can we have an affair of the heart?’ Dad would write to Mum. ‘Can we have an affair?’ Perhaps Mum was too busy for such things. Most people were. And so when Dad thought to call words of love to my mother, she was too preoccupied with children, study and her burgeoning teaching career to hear him. So he would have called, if he had tried – I don’t know if he did – into an empty space, or, rather, a space filled with utilitarian words, with everyday things and the business of surviving. And my mother, if she had heard the poet’s sigh brush her ears before he descended into his lonely world – is there a word or place in the underworld for a spurned poet? – might have yelled across at him as if he was just another annoying distraction to her business and said, as I heard her say a hundred times: Not now, Ben, I’m busy.

  Later, after their difficult years, a period which perhaps only ended with the first of my father’s three strokes, Dad became like a romantic boy towards Mum all over again so it was like first love for him, a man in his seventies bringing his girl a rose. He used her second name then – Elizabeth – to herald this rebirth in their relationship. He hardly called her Joan again during the last years of his life. Joan: it always sounded a practical, industrious name to me. In Hebrew it means ‘a gift from God’. Perhaps she was that to him when he came out of the monastery: an innocent, smiling gift from God. It took many years for her to become, in his eyes anyway, someone else, another name. After their difficult years she became Elizabeth, ‘the abundance of God’.

  Cathie remembers this vividly: I don’t think I ever heard him call her Joan in the last six months of his life. He would often say to her: ‘Elizabeth, can we have an affair?’ Mum simply responded to Elizabeth like it had always been her name.

  Dad used to impress Mum’s students then, the way he would wait outside her music room door with her morning tea on a silver tray, a single red rose in a pewter vase positioned beside the china plate on which he had carefully laid her toast and marmalade. And sometimes there would be a special note, a secret love note, just between the two of them, which made Mum blush like a schoolgirl and bluster at her students, in an attempt to salvage her professional dignity: Oh, typical Ben!

  The night after Christmas, with Mum in the next room, I open up to love for the first time in years. I’m too tired for raging passion though. Byron and I lie beside each other softly like survivors of a war, with an understanding about the ephemeral nature of things. I am afraid of being touched, ashamed of the fatigue which weighs down my body. I mistrust my senses; I don’t feel beautiful anymore. But when Byron reaches out to me, I do not turn away.

  Knowing Mum is in the next room doesn’t inhibit our intimacy; it only makes it sweeter, more private. I receive Byron’s touch with tiny sighs and sudden intakes of breath. I don’t dare laugh or moan, though, or make a sound that might disturb Mum. Our encounter is a mime, a silent movie. A humble exchange.

  Thank you, I whisper as daylight falls through our window. Byron thinks I am thanking him, but I am really thanking the passing of time and the fact that I seem to have finally grown wise enough to be grateful for love, to not take it for granted. That I have been humbled enough by my failures to appreciate love, in whatever form it takes, when it comes along, and to say thank you when gratitude breaks through me, and even when it doesn’t.

  INTERLUDE

  After months of offers and counter-offers we finally sign a contract to sell Mum’s house in January 2003, but I delay the settlement for another six months. The rest of the family regards my procrastination with a mixture of understanding and anger. One sibling advises me to ‘go easy’ and learn to communicate more clearly about what steps I am taking to facilitate the sale of the house and the subsequent access of Mum to the profits from the sale. Another tells me my stubbornness is ‘not helpful. Never has been’. It seems that what at first was considered care and protection is now considered to be less benign, even a little sinister perhaps. In some ways they are all right. I have also grown weak and tired over the four years I had been with her, and it is hard for me to leave the home I now consider, for the first time, to be one.

  The house is not officially handed over until June the sixteenth of that year after a frantic week of packing, cleaning, throwing out rubbish and organising furniture removalists. Cathie comes with colleagues to sort through Mum’s music and arranges the moving of the pianos. Some of Mum’s large collection of music and pedagogical material is donated to the university; some is distributed to interested family members and old students, while the pianos go to the care of friends. Paul offers to pay for the removalists and cleaners, but is too busy with work and family to do much more.

  Byron sees my need, though, and
like a hero arranges help for me. He is there for me too, although his presence sometimes makes me tense. I am used to managing on my own and our arguments concerning my not wanting – or needing – him around while I deal with the business of leaving home for the last time are fraught and unsettling.

  I don’t follow Paul’s advice to give everything to St Vincent de Paul. I’m not yet ready to consign everything left of my mother’s life to the dusty oblivion of a charity store. After a lifetime of disconnected indifference, I find myself unable to discard the past entirely, not because now it is ‘my past’ but because, in the sharing of my life with my mother’s, it has now become ‘our past’. I discover surprising evidence of Mum’s gifts – gifts she had always denied. She often told me that she didn’t have an artistic bone in her body, but as I pack her things in cardboard boxes – her china, her old crystal – I see the few beautiful things she loved and created herself: the jumpers she knitted for us as children, beautiful woollen one-piece, two-piece and three-piece ensembles, decorated with patterns of fir trees, roses and edelweiss. I discover other things as well, such as the tablecloths she had carefully embroidered with bluebirds and roses and neat crocheted edges. Yellowing with age they look like tribal artefacts from an old, lost female culture.

  The day after settlement, I crash into bed at a friend’s house and don’t get up for a week. The same day the family home is sold Mum is offered a freshly painted self-contained unit in the Garden of Eden Hostel on the north side, a beautifully maintained complex with both an independent living section as a well as a nursing home, mass every Sunday and a regular program of activities for the residents. Because of the large amount of money that has just been deposited into her account from the buyers of her old home, she is able to accept immediately. I will later wonder how easily she is able to leave Blue Hills, how she goes without even saying goodbye to Marta or to Bert, neither of whom is ever mentioned again.

  Joan: Self-pity can only last so long and then it must go out the window with a lot of other things. I also learnt in the dark years about my daughter. Actually that’s probably the most important thing of the whole experience. I learnt her character. Not that we weren’t friends before, but we became really close. It was a very valuable experience. And I got to listen to her violin again. I loved hearing her play all the old favourites. Sometimes I even played them with her, though my piano playing was nothing to write home about. But her violin was so strong and confident that I could rely on her to pull me through.

  When I was a young girl playing in eisteddfods I couldn’t always rely on Mum as my accompanist. I didn’t always feel confident that she would start at the right time or keep going when I faltered. Once during an eisteddfod when I was eleven, she got confused and our whole performance fell apart. I was playing ‘Czardas’, a piece of gypsy music considered an unsuitable choice by the more conservative entrants, who favoured Mozart and Beethoven. As the piece became faster towards the end, Mum’s rhythm slipped and stumbled. She began to miss notes and then entire phrases. In response to her obvious difficulty, I panicked and began to race. My bow slid across the strings and the crisp attack necessary to play the final bravura section became impossible; we ground to a halt before the final flourish, which, in an ideal world, would have been followed by thunderous applause and a first prize medal in front of all the much more highly fancied entrants.

  But, in the real world, I was humiliated. I staggered from the stage in tears, clutching my violin and music as if they were the only support I would ever really have. It’s ok to fail, Mum said later. Don’t be ashamed of failing.

  But at that moment I didn’t want her wisdom or her philosophy. I wanted only for her to say sorry and to assure me that next time she would not let me down, that I was the eleven-year-old and she was the mother and I had the right to her support.

  Mum felt there was no need to apologise. She expected me to roll with the punches. To pick myself up, dust myself off and have another go: to forget about what had happened and move on to the next challenge. I was too young to realise that while I was learning, she was learning too, that I was sharing her dreams in a way that eventually would help me realise mine. It’s character building, she told Dad. And life’s all about the character, she would repeat for my benefit as I huddled on my bed, alone and ashamed, mortified by the memory of my latest public humiliation in the cause and service of music.

  Friends all around me were giving up music but I wasn’t allowed to.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, Mum would admonish me. You just have to keep working and the rewards will eventually come.

  She was right, of course. But she was also wrong. The joy of music was always there inside me, but it was locked in a skeletal system made rigid and hard through fear and endless repetition. These were things Mum did not foresee for me perhaps. Much later I chose to see it benignly as a difference in tastes – what suited her did not necessarily suit me. And later too, just as my own body unfurled, the physical freedom of making my own music transformed this old pain into pleasure.

  But until then I was good in a crisis and I got through. Like all the women in the long line of my female ancestors I got through. Sometimes I imagined them behind me, all those women, aunts and cousins and grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers, heads bowed in prayer, shoulder to shoulder, never unfurling or breathing deeply, patiently hauling along with them all their simple pain and pleasure – these good and practical women – and their ability, above all, to get through.

  PANIS ANGELICUS

  Cathie: I was very lucky to spend the last six months of Dad’s life at home with him and Mum while I was studying at QUT [Queensland University of Technology]. What I really noticed in that time was that Dad was such a great patient. I think he loved the fact that Mum was looking after him. I often thought how awful it would be to be invalid and dependent on someone who didn’t love you, or who was cruel physically, mentally or emotionally. Mum was always patient with Dad and treated him with dignity.

  I remember a week before he died he was sitting on the veranda in the winter sun and he turned to me and said that we should use a certain funeral house for his funeral as it had a special deal on at the moment. It would have appealed to his frugal ways: the idea of a cut-price funeral. I do recall feeling like he was not really with us that Sunday. He seemed far away, as if he’d already left. But he seemed incredibly peaceful, which was very comforting.

  Barbara Clarkson was passing our house the day Dad died in 1993. Although she hadn’t seen Mum and Dad for years, that day she experienced a strong impulse to drop in for a visit. My father was falling over in the shower just as she knocked on the front door through which her two children had passed so many times for music lessons. He was dead before she got inside. She remembers:

  I held his head in my arms and tried to resuscitate him while Joan was ringing the family. And then, the strangest thing. Suddenly I was aware of this incredibly cheeky presence in the bathroom. It was like a little quirky leprechaun up by the ceiling. There was this bright feeling. It wasn’t light; it was just a very bright, sparkly feeling and his voice, which I hadn’t heard for quite a while, said: ‘It’s ok, Barb. I’ve gone.’ And then so strongly I heard him say: ‘I just want you to tell Joan that I’m happy. I’m really happy.’ And then it disappeared and I had this amazing feeling of relief and joy with this message to impart to a very distressed wife who was on the phone. So I just went up to her and said: ‘Joan, he really is dead. But I’ve just had the strangest experience. I heard his voice. I felt his presence and he was really very eager for me to tell you that although he was gone he was really very happy.’ And I could feel her lighten under my arm and she looked at me as if I had just told her something utterly normal and said: ‘Did he really? Did he really say that?’

  We flew in for my father’s funeral from all corners of the country. When Paul gave the eulogy, he spoke about how my father had taught us all
to swim in the ocean, how to tread water when the waves got rough, and find our balance as we bodysurfed back to shore. My sisters and I provided the music for the service. Cathie played the organ, I played the violin and Janice sang. We played duets, solos and trios through tears and sniffles. I played ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Air on the G String’ by Bach and my sisters sang ‘Panis Angelicus’. At times my sister Janice found it hard to sing, but took deep breaths and continued to fill the chapel with her pure soprano voice. At the end of the funeral, relatives we hadn’t seen for years congratulated us on the music, rather than commiserated with us over losing our father.

  I’ve always said that Ben would have loved his funeral, Mum tells me later. He would’ve loved that great talk Paul gave. And the music! Oh, the music! He would have been so proud. He would have sat back and thought to himself what a great show they put on just for me. At times during the service I thought I could hear him say it himself. ‘Thanks for putting on such a great show, Joan!’ Oh, he would have loved it!

  After Mum moves to the Garden of Eden at the end of 2003, we find ourselves speaking in hushed tones about ‘mysterious universal forces’ and ‘miracles’. It isn’t that inexplicable, though, as Cathie called on many of her contacts in the Catholic community to ask for help in finding Mum better accommodation. But despite these logical explanations, after the trauma of the last few months, I feel we are entitled to grasp onto this sudden turn of events as a serendipitous change in fortune. Any progress is good progress, although Mum’s brother expresses his dislike of her new residence for being ‘too clean, too ordered, and too isolated’.

  Mum’s bad dreams begin all over again soon after she moves to the Garden of Eden, just as I make the difficult decision to move – temporarily, I tell him and myself – into Byron’s house across the other side of town from St Lucia. I don’t know whether her dreams recur because of the change in environment or because of the change in medication. When I visit her now I find notes she has written to herself on scraps of paper secreted in hiding places all over her room: