Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  Thirty

  Even though it seemed like he’d wanted to just days before, my father couldn’t give up on life. He couldn’t stop fighting and we said goodbye to him three or four times before his body finally succumbed after the ravages of forty-seven years of living with polio. When he was first discharged from the infectious diseases hospital all those decades before, weighing eighty-five pounds, the doctors told my grandparents their son wouldn’t see out the year. He called every year he survived beyond that gloomy prognosis ‘cream’.

  Watching him as he was really dying was like waiting for a huge pendulum to stop. Death had stalked him ever since he was twenty, but he hid that fact from me and everyone else. Now there was no hiding it. In the end, it wasn’t polio that got him. It was cancer. He was leaving us.

  He had been discharged from the hospital and come back home. Every day, while he slept, I sat for long stretches, looking at the sea outside the big sliding windows. When things got really tough, I went down to the beach and threw rocks into the water and skimmed pebbles across the flat glass surface. On the other side of the world, the American writer I’d kept in touch with through daily emails threw pebbles back to me from his beachside home. I imagined the rocks colliding on the water’s surface and settling gently on the seabed, where they’d roll together, buffeted by the tide.

  My father’s impending death unsettled everything. I’d felt abandoned by him before, but then he returned. Now I would have to let him go him once and for all, when we had so much to make up for, so much still to talk about. And here was this whole new me, liberating myself from a stifling marriage and slowly becoming the person I wanted to be. I wanted him to see who I would become.

  We were lucky. Our father was not instantly and unexpectedly snatched from life as Uncle George had been. Uncle George was fit and healthy. He had a skipping rope, which hung on a hook on the back porch, and he skipped religiously for thirty minutes every morning before he went to work.

  He took his family skiing to places like Vail, played tennis and squash regularly. He ate healthily. Uncle George was the strong, able-bodied father I never had, yet he died aged fifty-four, coming down the black run of an Italian ski field. Aunty Babs had to arrange to have his body flown back to Australia in the midst of her blinding grief.

  The guilt I felt when he died was enormous, because I knew it should have been the other way around. It should have been Uncle George’s family that had time to make proper arrangements and tell him the things that needed to be said. He was too young. It was too sudden. They should have had more time. Surely they wondered why it had been their father instead of mine. I would have.

  In the weeks before my father’s death he took to watching a lot of television and it was that, more than anything, that scared me. In the past he only watched the news and foreign language films and those, I always thought, mainly for the sex scenes.

  Now it didn’t seem to matter what he was staring at. From the moment he woke until he fell asleep at night the television, turned up too loud, beamed and blared nonsense at him. I knew this meaningless distraction meant that he couldn’t quite bear the thought of death.

  One night, towards the end, to give Becky a break I slept beside their bed on a fold-out mattress on the floor, while Becky stayed in the spare room. My father woke all through the night in a fevered delirium. Every two hours I drew morphine into a syringe and shot it into his gasping mouth. It stilled him.

  The following evening at dusk, haggard from the night before, I walked along the water’s edge. The enormity of the simple fact that I had never been on the beach with my father hit me. Of course I had thought about it in passing, but as he lay dying, it struck me like the devastating blow it actually was. I suddenly saw that to live at the lip of the ocean yet never once build a sandcastle with your father was a cruelty that had hurt me more than I had ever admitted.

  As the sun melted down into the curve of the horizon, it looked like the sea should bubble from the heat. I left my clothes in a pile on the sand and waded in until the water reached my belly.

  The sea was so flat it mirrored the pink and orange sky. I faced the horizon and propelled myself off the seabed. I felt as though I was diving into glass. I swam out far and when I came back to shore I was covered in goosebumps. I sat on the warm sand and patted myself dry with my T-shirt. The sky had softened while I was swimming. It looked like someone had come along with a giant brush, painting it and the water in a wash of colour. I went back to my father’s sickbed, where he lay hooked up to air pumps and other contraptions, and placed my cool palm under his nose so he could smell the sea.

  My father made all the funeral arrangements himself and enjoyed doing it. ‘I’m dying, so let me see the box, let me think about my body being lit in flames. Let me now face this off.’

  He made us promise there would be no roses or baby’s breath. He wanted wattle, because it was South Australia’s state flower and because ‘Wattle’ was the name of the street where he had lived with his aunt Molly and his parents after being released from hospital. Wattle meant home.

  He also wanted his funeral to be an inexpensive affair and wattle, considered a weed by many, is as cheap as they come. He had chosen the cheapest casket, one with removable handles, and told the undertaker to make sure they took them off before they threw him in the furnace so they could be used to carry another dead person to their resting place.

  ‘Put the dead in the ground, if you must, or throw them in a furnace,’ he said. ‘But don’t, don’t – I beg you – waste all that nonsense on me.’

  In an ideal world, he would have been buried in a cardboard box – he even made inquiries, but there were health regulations against it. He decided someone should make a DIY coffin. The entrepreneur in him wished he’d had that particular business idea a few years before he was due to be in one.

  He knew he’d found the right funeral home when he discovered one close to the two-dollar shop warehouse. The two-dollar shop was his favourite place to shop. He still liked nothing better than a bargain, so the warehouse seemed like a good omen, or a fitting symbol. I joked about it. ‘Dad’s getting buried at the two-dollar shop.’

  The coffin could be cheap, I thought, but the flowers, my mother had taught me, should always be spectacular. Not too surprisingly, though, my father chose a mean little florist with spindly blooms and gauche oil paintings of sunsets by local artists in ugly frames.

  It didn’t matter that we were arranging his wreath, he flirted with the young woman behind the counter. I realised that as well as the price point of her flowers, her enormous breasts had also caught his attention.

  The florist agreed to the wattle but my father knew she’d try to sneak some baby’s breath in and he warned us when we left the shop. ‘Watch her. She’ll get carried away. I don’t want any of that,’ he said. ‘Promise me.’ I gave my word and kissed his forehead.

  By now I was a few years into my tenure as director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. All this was going on during the final stages of preparation for this juggernaut of an event, but I was flying back and forth to see my father as often as possible, bringing Jack with me when I could.

  Whenever I was there, I cooked. Food is love and cooking was the best thing I could do that made any difference to Dad and to Becky. Cooking was also a welcome distraction from the sadness. When Jack came with me, he spent most of the time sitting up in bed beside his Chair. He chatted away as though nothing were unusual, that this wasn’t breaking his heart. But when I tucked him into his bed each night, the stress showed. Sometimes he cried, but I knew mostly he saved his tears until after I’d left the room. He was being stoic for my benefit too.

  During the day, watching the two of them reminded me of all the times I’d sat up in my father’s bed as a child. It was like watching a version of myself. Jack knew of jigs, too, and I watched as he got those whenever my father had the strength.

  Chair was Jack’s champion and a father figure in his life.
Years earlier, he boastfully declared he would teach Jack how to defend himself in a knife fight. When we laughed at the absurdity of the idea of him giving that advice, he told us how he’d had to get out of numerous knife attacks when he was on the docks. He also managed to suggest that pretty girls were often at the root of the dispute.

  We were standing around the kitchen while dinner was being prepared when my father said, ‘Jack, get the carving knife.’ Jack, thinking he was just passing the knife for its usual purpose, put it in my father’s hand with the blade stood upright.

  But once the knife was in his hand, my father told Jack to take his elbow and lunge the knife towards himself, as though my father was attacking him. Jack obliged, jabbing the knife towards his stomach with one hand and defending himself with the other. When my father told him he’d done everything wrong and would have been cut in a real fight, Jack didn’t protest at the absurdity of the whole thing. He played along and took every instruction to memory. Jack still likes to recount the story of how he learned from his 95 per cent paralysed grandfather how to defend himself in a knife fight.

  A few days later, I was back in Sydney scrambling to ready what was to be my second-last festival.

  I remember calling my father near the end of the festival, while I was in the back of a cab, taking three overseas writers to the festival reception at the governor’s house. ‘I promise I won’t die in the middle of it all,’ he said. His voice was frail but cheerful; he said nothing of how close he knew he was. Becky told me they had been out for a coffee that morning with his breathing mask strapped to his face and the canister of air hooked up to the back of his chair. She laughed that he looked frightening, but he’d gone beyond caring. I was glad that all that mattered to him was that he was still punching.

  The festival finished on the following night. He died very early the next morning, at home, with Becky and Anna sitting beside him.

  ‘He waited for the festival to be over for you, darling,’ Becky said. My father died with all the wilful determination he had possessed in life.

  And sure enough, when I rang with the news that the time had come to prepare the wreath, the florist said she couldn’t get wattle.

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t get it?’ I asked. ‘You said it was easy when he paid you.’

  ‘Well, I can’t,’ she said. ‘I just can’t. No one has it. And anyway, it’s ugly.’

  ‘You may think it’s ugly,’ I said, my knuckles turning white around the receiver, ‘but it’s what he wanted and it’s what we’re going to have.’ I hung up the phone.

  In the end, determined to deliver on her husband’s wish, Becky got in the car and drove through the suburban streets and filled their decked-out van – with all its now redundant hydraulics, straps and belts – with the bright yellow blooms. She stole them from parks and people’s front yards.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, as we carried armfuls of yellow foliage into the florist’s depressing little shop, ‘Can you do something with this?’

  ‘I guess I can. But don’t you want anything decorative in it? It’s so plain. Some baby’s breath. A rose or two …’ She trailed off as she saw my expression.

  ‘My father only wanted natives.’

  That was her cue. The colour came back to her face. ‘Well, how about a little decoration with something red to offset it? It’ll be lovely, I promise. But you can’t just make me make do with this,’ she said, pointing at the yellow branches on her countertop as if they were noxious weeds. That was part of my father’s joke, I suddenly realised. ‘Bury me in the weeds, where I belong.’

  ‘It’s hardly a job for a florist, is it?’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But only natives and do not, not, not use roses or baby’s breath.’

  I went home and sat in my father’s wheelchair, which I’d always loved to do. I decided to be brave and say my final farewell before they turned him to dust.

  I drove Becky and my father’s van to the funeral parlour and laughed as I passed the two-dollar warehouse nearby. I parked in the disabled spot even though my father always reprimanded me for doing that if he wasn’t with me. I sat for ten minutes with the engine off, steeling my courage.

  I had never seen a dead person before and the first thing I noticed as I stood above his pale body was that he didn’t smell like salad dressing anymore. I never imagined that death would take away your scent.

  It is true what they say about dead people. He looked peaceful.

  The undertaker had wrapped a cloth around my father’s neck that looked like a starched doily. The rest of his body was covered in white satin and reminded me of his John the Baptist fancy-dress outfit.

  I cried black mascara all over his shroud and then he looked a little less angelic. The funeral attendant tut-tutted before he shut the lid of the coffin, but I thought it was appropriate for my father to appear a little smudged.

  Thirty-one

  For close to fifty years, driven by the vow he took against the matron who’d ‘cared for him’ when he was first admitted to hospital, my father fought for the rights of disabled people. He was determined that others like him would not face the impediments to success and independence that he had faced. He believed everyone could and should contribute and he prised open closed doors so people with disabilities could play a role in society and have their voices heard.

  So on the day of his funeral, the crematorium courtyard looked like a wheelchair convention or an accessibility protest without the placards. The fountain set in the middle of the rose garden was surrounded by every kind of wheelchair I had ever seen – electric, manual, fancy racing chairs cut down low. The people on wheels almost outnumbered the able-bodied mourners.

  Our family stood behind the hearse as he was pulled out. The shiny black box swathed in yellow branches of wattle slid out onto a waist-high chrome trolley. It looked like a bright yellow firecracker had burst across the lid of his cheap coffin.

  As the service was about to begin, all the chairs wheeled into the hall, running into each other like dodgem cars. They vied for room down the front and took up all the aisle space, so to make their way into the pews the able-bodied had to climb over their footplates or push them this way and that.

  When I sat down in the front row next to Anna and properly set eyes on the floral arrangement on top of my father’s coffin, I began to laugh. The florist had set a large, stiff red Banksia right in the middle of my father’s coffin.

  ‘Dad’s got a hard-on,’ I whispered to Anna, who smiled for the first time that day. Becky overheard what I said and winked, while my brothers shook their heads disapprovingly.

  My opinion of the florist changed forever. This was a wonderful parting gift from the big-breasted florist in the mean little store. It was either an incredible piece of unplanned, hilarious luck or that girl was very funny.

  It was a wonderful irony to see my father – the man whose body confounded people when they saw his children – memorialised by a big red phallic salute, exactly the joke he would have initiated himself had he thought of it. From then on I held on to my sister’s shoulders, and we cried and laughed through the service.

  My mother attended, although I am not sure where she sat – not with us in the front.

  After the speeches, Jack stood next to the coffin with a large wicker basket filled with Italian Baci chocolates. Hugh’s daughters, my nieces Sophia and Claudia, each held matching baskets of fresh coastal rosemary picked that morning from the path outside the house.

  As people paid their last respects, they took either a sprig of rosemary from the girls or a chocolate kiss from Jack, then laid it on the coffin. Becky wanted to send him up in flames covered in sweet kisses, so he knew he was adored, and rosemary, so he would never be forgotten.

  The night of my father’s funeral, more than a dozen dolphins danced out of the water at sunset. We’d often seen small numbers of them together – three or four in a group, making their way along the coastline – but never so many. M
y father always had his eyes cast out to the sea when we sat on the deck or in the sunroom, so he was usually the first to spot their fins ducking and diving.

  Once, in my thirties, he pointed to three fins swimming as close to the shore as I had ever seen. ‘Go on, run,’ he said, sensing my thoughts. I tore out the door, scrambled down the rocks and ran as fast as I could across the sand. I waded into the water with the dolphins swimming around my legs. Their strength and power shot through the small breaking waves as they hunted down a school of tiny silver fish.

  My father was delighted when I came back up to the house charged with the thrill. It was exactly what he would have done, and watching me do it, and hearing me describe it, seemed to give him as much pleasure as if he’d done it himself.

  I sat beside him one afternoon with my feet up on the spokes of his wheel, watching Morgan and Anna playing a game of cricket on the beach, and he said, ‘I wish I could be down there with you kids.’ That was as close to a complaint or regret that I ever heard.

  I understand now that my father’s time in the iron lung was like a monk’s meditation. He lay there and for a long, dull, isolated and largely silent year, he thought. He thought his way out of his rage so the people around him would never feel it.

  After the wake, the sadness I felt when I was finally alone seemed selfish, because he was finally free and I knew that’s what he’d wanted. But I would miss his fighting spirit, his whistle, the smell of vinegar, his jigs and the sound of rubber tyres squeaking on wooden floorboards as he motored himself around.

  I pictured him flying and swimming and doing all the things he hadn’t done since he was twenty. He was released from his confinement. There was something about my father’s death that felt freeing, not just for him, which it certainly was, but for me too.

  As I lay in bed that night listening to the waves crashing outside, I remembered my childhood hunt for matches to set my father on fire. On the day his body was turned to ashes, I realised he didn’t need flames to get him out of his chair. His mind got him out of it every single day.