Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  ‘Gives him something to do, poor thing,’ Mum commented about Harry when he first arrived at her music studio hunched over from grief. He had been broken, hardly able to breathe. Mum coaxed him slowly, assuming he needed to talk more than to sing. She would allow him to come for lessons just for company, if that was what he needed, she told us. The absence of his wife, though, brought forth a miraculous gift. At the age of seventy-five, with an already forgetful mind and arthritis in both hands, Harry discovered, with Mum’s help, a tenor voice so sweet and sonorous that it could have come from a young man in the prime of his life. ‘And he had never even sung in the shower,’ Mum remarked, amazed that after a lifetime of not singing, a fully alive voice could still unfurl, like a child from a womb. She never stopped being amazed at things. Music was her way, as it was for all her family, to this amazement.

  Grief is unfamiliar when you first feel it. It can hurt you physically, like a fist pressing into your stomach. In my parents’ house, it felt unseemly, as if I had brought a wild animal home with me. I was numb as I sat outside Mum’s music room that day. I couldn’t even cry. I only felt alive from the neck up.

  Inside Mum’s music room, Harry was singing one of Mum’s favourite songs, ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’.

  Ah, sweet mystery of life at last I’ve found you

  Ah, at last I know the secret of it all.

  I couldn’t see Harry; I was facing away from the music room. But I could hear him. I had to stop myself from screaming at him to shut up. I couldn’t stand to hear his sweet voice, couldn’t bear the sentimental lyrics, the rising and falling of the melody, the swooning and the swooshing of the voice. They do it deliberately, I thought, these songwriters. They know how to wring the tears out of you. I won’t cry, I promised myself, pulling tight on my breath. I’ll decide when – and if – I ever cry again.

  I heard Dad, who was down the back of the house somewhere, singing as well. ‘All the longing seeking striving waiting yearning,’ he warbled from behind the bushes in the back yard.

  Then Mum began to sing as well: ‘My heart has heard the answer to its calling …’

  Harry joined in as they all finished the song together: ‘For it is love that rules for evermore.’

  I stood up to go. I’ll sneak out without anyone seeing me, I thought. Without having to face anyone. Or listen to this music for one second longer. But I couldn’t move. I clenched and unclenched my feet to get some energy into my body, but I was still completely rigid. My chest felt like rock under my skin. Something was dead inside me.

  Mum came out then. Her face was bright pink from the effort of singing as she called back to Harry: ‘Oh, look who’s here, Harry. Have you met my daughter?’

  ‘Don’t,’ I gasped at her. ‘Don’t … don’t …’ I couldn’t get any other words out.

  She looked at me more closely. ‘You’re as white as a ghost.’

  I shook my head, aghast at her seeing me like this.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ she asked, her bright voice pealing in the gloom of the shadows around me. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Don’t,’ I kept repeating. ‘Don’t.’

  I heard Harry call out discreetly from the music room: ‘Anything wrong, Mrs Neil?’

  His speaking voice was another anomaly after hearing him sing – it was an old man’s voice, cracked and broken.

  ‘Everything’s fine, Harry,’ she called back to him. ‘She just needs some air.’

  I needed more than air. I needed something I couldn’t identify. Something it would take me years to find.

  ‘You’re not breathing,’ Mum told me. ‘It hurts more when you stop breathing.’

  ‘I can’t.’ I shook my head as I buckled over on my side on the couch. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can. And you will.’

  She didn’t approach me. She didn’t lean down and touch me. She just let me lie there.

  ‘You’re not like me, Linda,’ she said as she hovered over me. ‘I can see that your emotions go up and they go down.’

  She swept her hand up high before dropping it down low.

  ‘Mine are more like this.’ She moved her hand in a straight line above my face. ‘I always wanted a placid life. It gives me time and space to sing.’

  I resented her so much at that moment, for her placid life, the certainty of her stability. The stability I thought, then, that I would never find.

  ‘But if you are going to live your … um … passionate life … then you’ll need to know how to keep breathing. Especially when life hurts you so much that you think your heart will stop.’

  Dad called out from the back yard then, as Harry started to sing again. Mum didn’t react. She just kept looking at me while I lay there. She was silent for a long time. It was unusual for her to be silent for such a long time, but I guessed she had nothing to say to me. I felt her there though, in her silence, felt her presence more than I ever had through her words or her song.

  ‘We’re not as different as you think we are,’ she finally said, before turning back into her music room where Harry was waiting for her to teach him how to breathe.

  I was twenty-two when I travelled to India for the first time on my own, old enough to risk the adventure alone, but still young and inexperienced enough for Mum to lose sleepless nights over the thought of me going. Still, she tolerated my ‘mad vision’ to travel to India and follow the path of Mahatma Gandhi. She was even sanguine when I became obsessed with the principles of nonviolence and turned vegetarian when, to prepare myself for my trip, I embarked on a serious study of Gandhi and, in particular, his theory of nonviolent resistance called satyagraha.

  Grandma and Mum travelled down with me from Brisbane to Sydney to see me off on this, my first big solo adventure around the world. It was a glorious Sydney day at Circular Quay when the three of us ate what would be our last lunch together for at least six months. Grandma was as excited as a girl at the thought of my grand adventure. The previous evening when we bunked together in a room at Mum’s cousin’s place in Eastwood, Grandma tried on my backpack and said giddily: ‘Oh, I wish I was going with you. I wish I was going too.’

  Mum was less excited. She was never as restless as her mother, never yearned for travel the way Grandma and I did. I think she thought, more than either of us, that everything she needed was just exactly where she was.

  It was magnificent on the harbour that day as the three of us looked together at the Sydney Opera House. I wasn’t that interested in the building though. I was thinking about my own death for the first time in my life and wondering if I might disappear somewhere in the wilds of India and never see Mum again. Or I might fall off a mountain somewhere into a snow-filled valley as I had read climbers of high mountains sometimes do. I thought also about how the Tibetans practise the art of living as if they are about to die: that is, they live each day as if it might be their last and therefore leave nothing they need to do undone and nothing that they need to say unsaid. I thought then of all the hundred things I would leave unsaid if I did die, all the whispered words, all the sounds and sighs that I had kept locked inside.

  I was sure that I wouldn’t miss Mum. That she wouldn’t miss me. I wish I can say now that I turned to Mum and told her I loved her. But of course I didn’t. I was ‘too wild at heart’, too intent on my own needs and my own drive out into the world to realise her significance in my life. There was still a long way to go, many years to travel to find what I needed out in the world, where I would be mothered and fathered by many different people, so that I could return home to meet my mother as if for the first time.

  But in case I did die, I turned to her and said: ‘You know I always wanted you to say “I love you”. I needed you to say it to me so I knew that you did. Not in an off-hand dutiful kind of way. Sometimes it seemed like you were always so busy singing and teaching and doing things. You never had the tim
e.’

  She seemed exasperated as she often was with me these days. But she was polite enough to wait until Grandma was out of earshot before looking me straight in the eye and saying: ‘Grandma and I have both come down with you to see you off on a journey from which you might never return. We have bought the tickets, packed our bags. We’re here with you. Right now. That means something too, you know. That’s also love. That is the action love takes.’

  I felt sad standing there next to her as the sails of the Opera House shimmered in the afternoon light. Despite being made of solid stone and steel, they looked as if they could just lift off there and then and sail off down the harbour into the sea, light and easy in the breeze. I felt sad because I understood that I had hurt her by saying what I said. I wondered if my journey abroad might give me some perspective to help ease the ache in my heart to feel such a stranger standing next to the woman who gave birth to me. Or if something one day might be revealed to solve the puzzle of our differences.

  ‘It is not always found in words, no matter how beautiful they might sound,’ she continued as her eyes were also drawn to the beauty around us. And I wondered if she felt it too, that ache in her heart, the same way she felt it when she sang a song, or listened to my father read a poem to her during a quiet evening. But she was a practical woman, above all, and I knew what she was saying was right and that one day I would understand perfectly what she was trying to tell me. I just couldn’t at that moment. It was, as my mother was always fond of saying, just not our time.

  It would take an illness and a homecoming for me to know my mother; and even further on, it would take the writing of a book, and the gathering of a hundred stories and memories, for me to know my father. But it would take years of music and it would take a hundred songs to find the language and the vibration that would make me less fierce and more peaceful – with her, with myself and with the world around me.

  ‘It is also in the actions we take to be with you when you might need us,’ my mother continued. ‘It is all very well hearing a beautiful poem, or a piece of music, or even to sing a glorious song, but it’s what we do for each other that counts.’

  EPILOGUE: JOY TO THE WORLD

  Cathie: I think that living with someone with Parkinson’s or dementia makes you more tolerant of illness, particularly mental illness. Now I always include hospitals and retirement and nursing homes in the concert schedules of my school and community music ensembles. I always tell my students that the very young, the ill and infirm, and the old deserve the very best music we can give them.

  When I see Mum these days I always sing to her the songs that she knew years back. I take her hands and conduct the music with her as I sing and this sometimes makes her start to sing too, and then for a brief moment I can see a tiny sparkle in her blue eyes, which these days are mostly vacant.

  Like any good Shakespearian tragedy, there is also comedy at its heart. I couldn’t help smiling one day recently as Steve and I were talking on Skype, when from the quasi-coma she appears to be in most of the time, Mum suddenly called out, ‘Do you two ever stop talking?’

  As for the family, in many ways the difficulties we all experienced, even the disagreements which we inevitably had, seem to have passed away with time. Time is all we have, really … and when you lose someone you look back on all the times you didn’t understand that simple thing: time is all we really have. And we don’t ever get it back.

  There is a picture of Mum as a young girl at the beach. She is wearing a one-piece bathing suit and her curly blonde hair is woven into plaits. She is kneeling on the sand, a bucket and spade beside her and a sandcastle newly built in front of her. The photograph is slightly blurred, as if either the hand holding the camera was shaking as the shot was taken or else Mum could not stay still for the few seconds the photographer needed to focus the camera and capture her on film. There is a feeling of movement in the photograph, as if Mum cannot be pinned down or captured by anyone; her mouth is open in a luminous smile and her eyes are fixed on someone or something to the left of the camera. Just visible in the corner of the shot is my grandmother looking across and smiling at the person taking the photograph of her daughter, who is apparently unaware of either her loveliness or the fact that her loveliness is being appreciated. She seems at one with her surroundings, completely comfortable in her graceful physicality. I have looked at this photo many times wondering what it is that my mother is looking at while everyone is looking at her. Who is she with beside her mother? What is she thinking as she moves about like a sunray on the sand? Who is she smiling at?

  Once when I was perusing the picture I suddenly thought how little you can ever know about anyone else or what is inside of them and that sometimes you have to live with that not knowing as you would a mystery. And then I noticed that what I had thought for years was Mum’s radiant smile was actually something else. At this moment, all the different elements of the photograph – the cameraperson, the sun, the sand, the castle, the shaking hand, the mother and the daughter – finally coalesced into a whole. I stopped seeing only the separate details and instead saw what my grandmother would have called ‘the big picture’. I could almost feel my perspective physically shift as I realised that what I had always thought was a picture of Mum smiling on a beach was actually a photograph of people – my grandmother, the photographer and who knows how many more around them – listening to a young girl, my mother, looking brightly into the distance as she sang to herself in the sunlight.

  Christmas Day, 2007: Cathie is home from Hong Kong for Christmas and I am sitting in the lounge room holding my violin on my lap next to Mum, who is in her wheelchair. Steve’s in the kitchen preparing her lunch and Cathie is sitting on Mum’s other side, a book of Christmas carols open on her lap.

  It’s been a good day so far. Mum was alert in the morning, although she doesn’t really know it is Christmas. The weather is not as hot as usual, it’s quite balmy in fact, and the trip down to Brighton from Brisbane has been surprisingly pleasant for this time of year. We have been singing Christmas carols today and during our collective song Mum opened her mouth and began to sing along.

  This year Paul is driving around Australia in a motor home with Kym and the boys. Janice is still in Tasmania, but will pass through Brisbane early next year on her way back to England. Family members come and go from each other, I think, orbiting like planets. Colliding sometimes, damaging each other from the impact of our accidental intersections, before being hurled back again to continue our voyages in the darkness of space. I wonder then whether some of us will always need to return over and over, as I have, drawn back to the centre by something inexplicable and magnetic in our drive to love those whom we know and to know those whom we love.

  After lunch Mum is wheeled back into her room and settled into bed. I hang around for a bit and watch television with Cathie and Steve before nodding off, as I usually do on Christmas Day, for a five-minute nap. When I wake up I go into Mum’s room with my violin to say goodbye. Even though her eyes are shut and her head is lying stiffly to one side, I play again some of her favourite Christmas carols, the ones we’d sung before in the lounge room: ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, ‘Silent Night’, ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ and, to finish things off, ‘Joy to the World’.

  Just as she did when I played them in the lounge room with Cathie and Stephen singing along, Mum starts to make some noises underneath the melody of the violin. It is not exactly singing, and it is not exactly a song, but in the circumstances it is something just as wonderful.

  When we finish, I put my violin down gently on the end of her bed and lean in close to her face so if she opens her eyes I will be right there where she can see me. It is miracle enough that she has sung with us, but to be recognised on the same day would really make it seem like Christmas.

  Did you like the music, Mum? I whisper into her ear.

  Of course. She speaks, as she often does now, a
s if she is hearing voices and passing on their messages to us. But I really have to practise some more … before I sing in public.

  But you were so good, Mum, I tell her softly. We have all had to learn to speak more quietly as Mum has grown so fragile, to become gentler, with her and with each other, just as our father so often urged us to do.

  Her inarticulate murmuring now reminds me of someone returning from far away, with many strange tales to tell, settling in for a long stay.

  I lean in close, my voice wavering. Do you know who this is, Mum? I ask her.

  Her eyes are closed. Her face has lost all of its fat and the flesh that remains stretches out across her bones like the skin of a drum. But Stephen has rubbed Olay moisturiser into her skin morning and night so that, despite the blood clots and bruises that mark her face, her skin is smooth and glowing.

  I smile as I stroke the loose folds of skin on her upper arm. What’s my name, Mum? I ask, remembering how she would tell me how annoying I was as a child, always asking questions.

  Don’t be silly, she rasps at me. I remember her as a mother to that child, always trying to quieten me down, to stop playing around, and to take things more seriously. And then later when I grew up how she would tell me to stop taking things so seriously. You can never win, I joke to myself, and then I can’t help myself from laughing out loud, from enjoying this moment with her, from trying to spin it out for as long as I can.

  Who am I then? I ask her. Tell me who I am and I’ll stop bothering you.

  I can hear the neighbour’s festivities of song and laughter and from the house on the corner a sudden brutal exchange of anger; from another the radio blares out a religious service; and from another there comes the faint echo of tears.