Olivia (30 page)

 

We had a wonderful home in Malibu, but it was easy to leave it. Our home, and all the things we had acquired over the past ten years, had grown to be a barrier between family life. Our private life had been sacrificed by things. When you walk into a place like ours, you see expense - there’s a tennis court, a swimming pool and a horse-riding ring, and then you go inside and there’s the theatre and the stereo and the cars and the trucks and the things we’ve acquired. Things have distracted us.

When I came to Australia this time, I had nothing, just a Land Rover to get me around. We reduced our lifestyle and we live in a very small house the size of our living-dining area in the States. I always know where Chloe is, we can talk to each other and I can go to a little corner of the house to study my lines.

Here we have a chance to go out on picnics, we collect rainwater and experience real life and sit on the lawn. And although I am working five days a week and at weekends I have to study, the time we do have together is so precious and valuable and I’m like a different person. I’ve changed over the last six months. I’ve lost a lot of my attachments. The Tibetans call it
samsara
, and it’s our ability as the human race to invent all of these things that distract us from what we are used to being - hunters and gatherers. Man was always inventing ways to distract oneself from oneself - computers and telephones and the like.

How many fathers spend much time with their children? It’s not that much. I’ve changed that, and now spend a goodly amount of time with my daughter and my wife. You only get this realisation when you leave your comfort zone.

Livvy and I were both living in our comfort zone and going about our daily routines. It was time to spend the time with family and get away from the things, or involve family in things that we do. We can’t take all of our things with us, so we’ve been letting go of everything.

Olivia’s illness, moving house, leaving the US - all three things happening to us was stressful.

Olivia and I have been meditating. We’ve been studying a lot of different philosophies. We take from the best of every one - Tibetan, Christianity, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, American Indians, Aborigines. We’ve been reading extracts from books of masters throughout the world.

Meditation is prayer, and we do it before we eat, before we sleep. I have a couple of prayers and we do the Lord’s prayer, too. Chloe is very interested in the Bible and she reads it and we read to her. I was raised as a Catholic but my truth doesn’t lie there. I’ve found the greatest truth within the whole spectrum of Middle Eastern religions and beliefs, all of them. I find great fulfilment in educating myself.

 

She’s unbelievable. She could run a marathon. She’s out in the garden digging the earth, carrying in the wood for the fireplace. It took her three months to find her sea legs again and now she’s blossomed. We have 200 acres and we go hiking and climbing across rolling grassy hills, dense thick wood, waterfalls and creeks, and she keeps right up with me. I told her: ‘My God, Livvy, where do you get such energy from?’ She was getting it from the land. We both know she’s fine. But she’ll probably never tour again, maybe smaller venues.

 

The 1980s were wonderful. We were in a kind of Shangri-La. Then around 1989 we had to face the music. Chloe’s best friend, Colette Chuda, died of cancer at the age of five. They had grown up together and her death tore us apart.

Then everything crumbled. Everything that I held dear, everything that I considered my reason for being, started falling apart. Financial difficulties arose and there was a need to rearrange and reorganise. There were lawsuits, Koala Blue failing, incredible overheads, this huge machine and no income coming in, Livvy’s father dying, Livvy getting cancer - it was just boom, boom, boom from all directions.

 

Can you imagine the feelings Livvy and I went through when she got ill? I said to myself: ‘I must have no feelings. I have to be strong and take care of Olivia while she’s going through her chemotherapy, while she’s going through this illness.’ I was blocking my feelings down throughout her whole therapy.

While Olivia blossomed on the farm, I, on the other hand, had no familiar surroundings, no comfort zone and I started working seven days a week. It was an emotional wilderness for me because I didn’t have my family, my friends, my support group with me or the familiarity of my house or my dogs, I was alone a lot of the time and I was under immense pressure to do well - and I had a breakdown.

 

Then I started wondering what was happening to me. I was getting dizzy, depressed, having anxiety attacks. I would never wish it on anyone as it was so traumatic and Livvy had to watch me go through it helpless, completely helpless.

Olivia understood what I was going through and was in pain for me. But I told her: ‘Don’t take this on yourself.’ I had to believe I was going to get through it even though sometimes I believed I wasn’t going to.

I told Livvy: ‘Don’t worry, you have come through, but I’m going to have to blubber away on the bed and go to work and do my job then come home and fall apart.’

Livvy was fine and I was miserable. It was frightening and I wondered whether I was going to make it out the other side. ‘Is this happening to me?’ I asked myself. Chloe, who’s sharp as a tack, would come up to me and say: ‘Daddy, you just don’t seem to be quite yourself. I hope you make it through this. Don’t worry about it, Dad. We all feel bad sometimes.’

My grovelling, lowest point came at a time when I realised I was on my own. Livvy wasn’t there, she was out of town, and I was at home alone trying to study my lines and I was literally shaking, like I was convulsive, and there were tears, confusion, and I was screaming into a pillow. But I realised I could survive it. I had a couple of those moments, but there was one where I went below sea level. I felt like I was as low as I could get.

If you come up against a traumatic experience, something’s going to happen. But I wasn’t prepared for it. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew the meaning of anxiety, depression, uncontrollable crying and wanting to run away but not being able to. But I didn’t understand it.

I thought I was dying. I went to the doctor and had every single test but there was nothing. I asked: ‘How could I be feeling like this?’ The answer is your brain is a very powerful thing. It had been eating away at me for months and there was the fact that I’d been away from my home comforts. If you have a mental problem it affects you physically - you have dizzy spells, you feel weak, fatigued. The mind is so powerful.

It was a big lesson and it lasted for a solid three months. I was working and trying to pull myself together, and I came out the other end of it a more compassionate human being for people who have gone through this type of thing. I’d lived too much of an insulated life, insulated from all these things, and I learned a lot from this. It’s the best thing that could have happened to me.

We are conditioned to ignore feelings or hide from them or preoccupy ourselves with things. But if you’re lucky enough to grasp hold of what feelings are, then let them come up, bad, good or indifferent, and experience them, not shove them away or try to hide it.