Deborah Forster

The things we don’t know; like how you’ll be for the rest of your life or how you’ll die, if your kids will be all right, these things occupy us like a long rolling desert within.  These are our dry interiors, and we try not to think about them. There are ways to handle these scrubby plains.  Sometimes doctors can help, but the shock of that is its own weight. Needing medical help to live is of course what you’d do. But still.

Time works at us persistently, gnawing away at our bones, revealing years in dryness. Youth is so brief most of us barely notice it and its beauty is a forgotten picture, a surprise, that lives in a blink. Time is rationed.  Billions more people have died than are living now on our blue planet. The people we know who die each year is something to turn from. The pain of the loss of every single person lingers within us. It’s the essence of the edge we walk.

Once I thought the elderly didn’t worry about death. Reminds me of the Hemingway quote in the story ‘Indian Camp’ — ‘In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.’

There are moments when we seasoned people don’t consider the abyss but a fair amount of time, it’s the shadow. We want not to be a burden by falling and breaking a limb. The month of May has finally found its way here to the rich coldness of now. On this grey Friday afternoon, leaves fly from the tree to catch up with the others and rest like bits of amber glowing in the grass. A plane drones past like a paper dart. Plenty of beauty around when you look for it.

These days, a small nick on my hand can stay for weeks like a ruby blob, and blood tests leave dark circles, the thumb prints of giants. The number of doctor’s visits increases, but strength doesn’t. I used to push furniture around rooms for fun, for a change like it was nothing. Now I try to remember to ask for help or just leave it. And yet within the withdrawals, the strength of feeling for children and grandchildren magnifies. Their beauty is familiar and noble in the way of the young, their dark eyes, mirrors. They are part of the chain of us and how they’re loved is our stake in the future.

I found my grandmother Eileen’s, death certificate on a bright morning this month.  I was doing a bit of ferreting, and the certificate was in a box strangely (for me) of named documents. In the certificate, under cause of death, it said my 67-year-old grandmother ‘had died of a coronary occlusion (minutes) and Atherosclerosis (years)’ and that was it; taken in minutes and years. On the day she died, I came home from school, and she was on her bed with the yellow candlewick bedspread covering her. That physical shock doesn’t leave. And since Pa was already sick, life felt precarious.

Nan’s story went with her, and I look at her birth certificate and smile at her solid Scots name, a 35-year-old mounted policeman for a father, a sister a year older and a very tough mother. And then on duty one night, her father drowned in the Wimmera River near Dimboola. His wife Mary soon re-married.  Life became different for my grandmother.

Eileen was at least ten years older than she ever admitted. She’d married a younger man, the wonderful wood-worker Bert. He was twenty-seven when they had Eileen and Nan was nearly forty. Anyway, Pa went to war in Greece, Crete and North Africa and they never had another child.

Reading her death certificate made me think that our deaths are probably already at play within us genetically, for social reasons or just for that old favourite, bad luck, but that’s no reason to give up. Sometimes there’s no avoiding them. When Eileen started smoking, the tobacco companies had convinced everyone that smoking was beneficial.

And what words will most of us have trailing after us when we leave? That we had hearts of gold, that nothing was too much trouble, that we were excellent parents. Is any of this true? We’re so stuffed full of thoughts and plans, doubts, disappointments, memories, largesse, kindness, smallness, the idea of beauty, outrages, the ability to waste time, to love and hate and the bone-breaking feeling of tenderness for our young. And then there it is, another one we loved has died and taken himself/herself away and left us grieving and heeding the ticking of the clock.

I know an old woman approaching one hundred who can’t stop repeating herself as if she were a budgie in a cage. She’s still there, you can see the humanity in her eyes and yet the switch is stuck, and the repetition comes out with a kind of anxiety that claims her place among us. Its insistence reminding us of everything that’s at risk.