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This Life and This Death

Health

If you looked at your life, you’d see where the slow neglect began. As we age, it takes us with it like leaves on a river. We’ve lived to negotiate the fads of the day. Your mother was under general anaesthetic to extract you. There was little breastfeeding then, so condensed milk was the latest thing.  In the house you grew up in, food was a chore and smoking kept your mother thin. She never seemed to eat. And anyway, the best food came from the fish and chip shop wrapped in newspaper with a bit of vinegar for flavour. You loved running to see your mother coming home from work. Sometimes seeing her, mostly missing her. The radiance of her, the perfect way she held herself walking through the fading sky, it all lives in you. You take these things to the place inside your heart where your mother still is in a little house, something simple with a garden, a warm fire and a shady tree. You know she’s happy there.

The people you loved died far too easily and too young from the same calm neglect you have adopted as your chosen course. Yet others live on and connect. Even on this dire day of storm clouds scattered with the pink of ozone,  a gang of parrots swim through telling each other they are here.

~

You recall your grandmothers with such love, one small, one bigger, both shearers’ cooks. You met your father’s mother only once that you recall. She wore an apron and you’d never seen anyone do that before. She held out her arms and two weeks later she died. You remembered the day you met in the dry of the farm and then your father taking her to the hospital because she could no longer swallow, while we waited for him to come back from the hospital. It was shocking when he was kind because it proved his kindness was not accidental. All things are choices, you thought, and the choices still hum in you. That day at the farm your mother did the dishes and cleaned up all the food Nan had made but couldn’t eat. You watched the news on TV in the sinking light and then Dad’s tyres crushed through the gravel and swam up to the night farm.

Your other Nan, small and kind, died quickly one afternoon going down to the milk bar. Remembering this now you are a grandmother, you understand that love again, which works away, diving into the depth of you, diving into the weeds to bring you back. And the day you went into that shop, you wet yourself and ran away.

 

Moon

Tonight in the patchy sky, light seeped under the curved moon. Eclipses are often much anticipated but elusive. It was cold, clear and still and stars seemed to have broken through slivers in the clouded sky.  The cloud held it back like waiting for the red bus when you were a kid and sometimes it would just slip past you because you had become invisible. It’s so quiet you remember the lockdowns and the cars withdrawing, leaving us with a gap in their place.  The breath in that corridor of empty cars was like a breeze. No one thought the quiet would be so restoring. Sometimes, there were noises from outside and then calm would rise and the house again became an island in the quiet sea of the city. The quiet could never last.

Grey

Can you have too many trees? No. Can you have too many cardigans? Definitely not. Can you downsize without regret? Maybe not.

After all these deep questions, you feel unwell again. You go to your doctor in one of your grey cardigans. You think you must have gallstones. The doctor disagrees. It’s constipation, he decides. He gets a colleague to agree. You ask for an ultrasound anyway to reveal gallstones that must be there.

And there they are! but the doctor is still unimpressed. He says everyone has them. A month later, after several attacks of pulsing pain that last all night: vomiting, like nothing you’ve ever felt. You go to the hospital and there are two seats left in Emergency. Hunched over your shoes for five hours, you finally notice they are stained. Why do you cook in shoes that absorb oil, you wonder? And then, following quickly, the thought: why cook at all?  The pain rolls in and washes away all thoughts.  A child has a lump on his leg. He cannot sit still despite everything his parents do, videos on the phone, snacks, stories, and drinks. Then, he starts crying. A scared little boy with big eyes. That’s it. You tell your husband you are going home. No, he says, we’ve waited so long. His Sudoku is open on his phone awaiting his next guess. No, you say, that’s it. You sit in the vestibule by the temperature machine and the sliding doors, holding yourself together and sweating coldly in your damp mask. This was still the time of Covid. A nurse offers Endone if you will stay perched in the waiting room and says, ‘I can’t guarantee your safety if you leave’.  I  say ‘I won’t eat, and it will be all right. Endone makes me sick anyway’, you reply, trying for politeness but arriving at something less. I just need to get home. You leave still hunched.  Outside, the night air feels alive and gracious. Standing by the gutter, the father of the little boy speaks into a phone: ‘No, we don’t know; we’re still waiting because waiting is what we all do’. In the car, we drive with the windows down through an empty road lined with lights hanging like moons. We are back early the next morning, and the queue is nearly gone.