Dying (6 page)

‘You get more and more like her,' she said.

It felt for a moment as if my mother had joined us, that us all being together had
conjured up her presence at the table. It was only a fleeting thing. But then I can't
imagine an afterlife that consists of anything more than these brief and occasional
visits with the living, these memories that come unbidden and out of nowhere, then
vanish again into oblivion.

No, my priorities remain the same. Work and family. Nothing else has ever really
mattered to me. It might sound odd for a writer with my small output to claim that
work has been a lifelong preoccupation, but it's true. When I wasn't actually writing
I was preparing to write, rehearsing ideas, reading, observing life and character,
learning from other writers. As Nora Ephron always said, everything is copy. If
I was slower than some at finding success, it isn't because I wasn't trying. I was
trying and failing all the time. That's what I'm doing now and I hope failing better.
I've put off using my death as material for a long time, mainly because I couldn't
find the right tone. I'm not even sure I've found it now.

To say that family has been my other chief priority in life is to understate the
case. Marriage, children, the whole catastrophe as Zorba called it. To become a mother
is to die to oneself in some essential way. After I had children I was no longer
an individual separate from other individuals. I leaked into everyone else. I remember
going to a movie soon after Nat was born and walking out at the first hint of violence.
It was unbearable to think of the damage done. I had never been squeamish in my life
before, but now a great deal more was at stake. I had delivered a baby into the world.
From now on my only job was to protect and nurture him into adulthood, no matter
what it cost me. This wasn't a choice. It was a law.

That makes it sound like a selfless task, but it wasn't. I got as much as I gave,
and much more. The ordinary pleasures of raising children are not often talked about,
because they are unspectacular and leave no lasting trace, but they sustained me
for years as our boys grew and flourished, and they continue to sustain me now.
I can't help but take pleasure in the fact that my children are thriving as I decline.
It seems only fitting, a sure sign that my job in the world is done. It's like the
day Dan, then in the fourth grade, turned to me twenty yards from the school gate
and said, ‘You can go now, Mum.' I knew then that the days of our companionable walks
were over, and that as time went by there would be further signs of my
superfluity,
just as poignant and necessary as this one.

No, I am not unhappy or depressed, but I am occasionally angry.

Why me? Why now? Dumb questions but that doesn't stop me from asking them. I was
supposed to defy the statistics and beat this disease through sheer willpower. I
was supposed to have an extra decade in which to write my best work. I was robbed!

Crazy stuff. As if any of us are in control of anything. Far better for me to accept
that I am powerless over my fate, and that for once in my life I am free of the tyranny
of choice. That way I waste a lot less time feeling singled out or cheated.

As I told the young psychologist, I rely on friends to divert me from dark thoughts.
I don't have a lot of friends, but the ones I do have are so good to me, so tender
and solicitous, it would seem ungrateful to subside into unhappiness or depression.
And then there's Shin, without whom I'd be lost. He's been so good-humoured and loving;
I owe him no less than my sanity. If I'm ever depressed or unhappy, I hide the fact
from him as best I can. It's the least I can do.

No, I'm not likely to take more risks in life, now that I know I'm dying. I'm not
about to tackle skydiving or
paragliding. I've always been physically cautious, preternaturally
aware of all the things that can go wrong when one is undertaking a dangerous activity.
Paradoxically, it was Dad who taught me to be careful. I don't think he was temperamentally
suited to flying; the risks played unhealthily on his mind and made him fearful,
tetchy, depressed. At the same time he was addicted to the thrill of flying and couldn't
give it up.

His ambivalence about danger confused me while I was growing up. He never discouraged
me from taking up risky activities; instead he filled me with fear about the possible
consequences, with the result that I was never any good at them. When he taught me
to drive, he made sure to emphasise the fallibility of the machine, something he
would have learned during the war at flying school, where mistakes could be fatal.
He liked to open the bonnet of the car before we set off, and run through a sort
of flight check with me to make sure everything was hooked up to everything else.
These were good lessons and they've served me well, but I wonder if a certain enthusiasm
for risk drained out of me as a result of his teaching methods, and whether that
wasn't his intent. It strikes me that I might have turned out differently if he'd
taken me for a spin one day in one of the Tiger Moths he loved so much, shown me
what had turned him on to flying in the first place, emphasised the mad joy rather
than the danger.

The irony is that, despite my never having tempted death the way daredevils do, I'm
dying anyway. Perhaps it is a mistake to be so cautious. I sometimes think this is
the true reason for my reluctance to take my own life. It is because suicide is so
dangerous.

I shall miss you so much when I'm dead
: Harold Pinter, dying of cancer, speaking
of his wife. I know exactly what he means.

The short answer to the question of what I'll miss the most is Shin, my husband of
thirty-one years, and the faces of my children.

The long answer is the world and everything in it: wind, sun, rain, snow and all
the rest.

And I will miss being around to see what happens next, how things turn out, whether
my children's lives will prove as lucky as my own.

But I will not miss dying. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I
will be glad when it's over.

I'd like to be remembered by what I've written. As somebody once warned, if you
don't tell your own story, someone else will.

But I know I have no real say in how I will be remembered. It is in the nature of
memory that different people will remember different things, and that none of what
they remember will be verifiable or true. This is the case even in my own recollections
about my life, which are porous and mutable and open to contradictory interpretations.
If I use them in my work, which I often do, it is to fit them into a particular narrative,
to shape them to a purpose, because that is how fiction is made. In the process,
I become convinced that the fictional version of my memory is the real version, or
at least preferable to it. It is a thoroughly self-serving exercise, I know, but
that is part of its attraction.

In the end it is a blessing to be remembered at all, and we should not worry too
much about how or why. My grandmother on my mother's side died before I got to know
her. But I remember her as a talented woman with literary aspirations, who died too
young to fulfil her potential—because that's what I heard so often from my mother.
The point of the story was not lost on me. It was a cautionary tale, and it haunted
me, as it haunted Mum. But to my mind it was also a romantic story, especially in
the detail. My grandmother was a country girl from Longreach, in outback Queensland.
When she was scarcely out of school, she married a grazier twelve years her senior.
She wrote bush poetry that was published in the
Bulletin
, but her real wish was to
escape to the city, to meet with other writers and be part of a literary scene. Her
chance didn't come until she was sixty. Newly
widowed, she bought herself an apartment
at the Macleay Regis in Kings Cross, in the heart of bohemian Sydney. A week or so
after moving in she died in her sleep. A sad end, of course, but what impressed me
was the strength of her ambition—she had nursed it for so long and against such odds.
And I admired the fact that she took writing seriously, which gave me permission
to do the same, to protect my own little flame of ambition as soon as it flared up
in high school.

Without my grandmother's example, who knows what might have become of me? I might
have dismissed poetry as a waste of time and concentrated on my science classes.
As it was, a part of me always believed that I was honouring my grandmother's memory
by choosing writing as a profession, that I was finishing something she had started,
or at least taking up the baton. I know she is not aware of it, but I'm still persuaded
she would be pleased to think that this is how she is remembered. In that way, too,
she is a pioneer, gone ahead of me into the great bohemia in the ether.

I am the youngest of three children. My sister Sarah is six years older than I am,
and my brother Eliot four years older. I have the impression that I was a surprise,
if not a mistake. According to my mother, when she announced that she was pregnant
for the third time, my grandmother shook her head in disbelief. ‘You stupid girl,'
she said, rightly worried about the state of my parents' marriage. For some reason,
this story always made my mother laugh. I couldn't see the joke; maybe you had to
have been there.

From time to time as we were growing up my mother would take Sarah and Eliot and
me out to the place where she was born. We went in the winter school holidays, from
Sydney, and later from Canberra. It was two or three days by car, up through New
South Wales, and across the border into Queensland, the towns growing sparser and
dustier the further we drove, the horizon flattening, the sky overhead broadening
until there was so much of it your eyes ached from staring.

The pattern of our visits was always the same. We stayed with my mother's youngest
sister Jenny and her husband Ranald. They lived on North Delta, a sheep and cattle
property near Barcaldine that had belonged to my grandfather Norman Murray. The country
there was ochre, scrubby, and we approached it along a rutted road that my mother
navigated gingerly because of the bull dust. I could tell she was scared as soon
as she turned off the bitumen. She gripped the wheel and narrowed her gaze to a few
feet ahead, expecting us to strike disaster at any moment. The bush wasn't her natural
element. She might have been born there, but after years of exile she had become
suburban and cautious.

At the end of such a long journey the homestead was always a joyous sight, set in
a clearing surrounded by rough-hewn fences. We drove in from the back, passing the
machinery shed and the chicken coops and the pigsty and the tethered dogs along the
way. The verandahs were pitched wide and low, so from a distance the house appeared
to be all red roof. Once you had come in through the kitchen door, you immediately
saw the point of this arrangement. It meant the sun was barred entry, and inside
was kept dark and shadowy as a cave.

There was no real logic to the design of Delta. Beyond the kitchen was a breakfast
room, really just a screened section of the verandah, and beyond that a warren of
rooms that had been added or partitioned over time to accommodate Jenny and Ranald
and their four sons. Jenny would lead us through the rooms, allocating beds as she
went, then serve us tea at the front of the house, where the verandah was at its
widest and overlooked a lawn and a swimming pool.

It was here that the talk took place and all the stories were told. It was here that
I learned where my mother had come from and why she carried such a burden of sadness.
Not that this was much in evidence, for generally she was a person who liked to laugh
and enjoy life, but underneath her vibrancy there was another strain, a sort of indelible
grief that no amount of good cheer could dislodge. And this grief, it soon became
clear, had originated in her Queensland childhood, to which she felt compelled to
return periodically, with us in tow as her excuse.

It is notable that our father rarely came with us on these trips. Often, in the early
days, he was away flying somewhere, but later he didn't come because my mother preferred
to travel without him. There was a lot of talk on the verandah about Mum's hasty
marriage to the handsome pilot she had met in a bar, and about how, in the intervening
years, things had gone so disastrously
wrong. I listened to these tales with extra
attention. My father had told me so little about himself, and it was rare to hear
from people like Jenny and Ranald who had known him since the start, so I took note,
my writer's instincts already awakened, piecing together, guessing, inventing, trying
to figure out what it all meant. My brother and sister preferred to be out on the
horses with my cousins, but I was a reluctant rider and happier to sit astride a
squatter's chair scoffing teacakes and soaking up the family legends.