A Bird on My Shoulder (20 page)

Ruth was one of the most special visitors I've ever had and I cleaned the house as if it were the Queen coming, which in
some ways it was. She was not well at the time – in fact she was to die a few months later – and the few steps up to our house were negotiated with care and caution.

We were left alone to sit in the quietest room in the house. Even sitting on our old sagging sofa, she managed to maintain such poise. The late afternoon light fell through the window where she was sitting, illuminating her sensible shoes in a pool of golden light.

I knew that the moment of Eric's final breath had been a profound and beautiful experience, as I had read some of her book. Like Ruth, this had also been such an unexpectedly joyful moment for me – I felt she was someone I could talk to and try to make sense of it all.

‘Could it really have been the way I thought it was? It feels so strange to say this but all I could feel was his absolute joy,' I told her.

Her sky blue eyes held me in a perfect, level gaze. ‘Ah, yes,' she said without hesitation. ‘That was his great reward.'

BEFORE SLEEP

Goodnight, goodnight, my darling.

Above me the stars are reaching down

Lighting that walk to infinity.

The children think you live in the sky.

Perhaps you do. Burning as bright

And as brave as you were with us.

Goodnight, goodnight, my darling.

I can hardly bear this desolate bed,

The bowl of dried-out jasmine

Still lies next to me, death's perfume.

The children think you are a flower.

Perhaps you are. Still unfolding,

Blessing our lives with silent mystery.

Goodnight, goodnight, my darling.

I've lit a candle tonight, to call you,

Beg you to stay just a little more,

Just one, one minute longer.

The children think you are a flame.

Perhaps you are. Its warmth is

Glowing and leaping out to touch me.

Goodnight, goodnight, my darling.

I breathe deeply while I'm weeping,

Tears tumbling, body longing.

The children say you're all around them.

Perhaps you are. I wrap your memory

Around me tightly where you lay,

Nest in your blue, dog-eared jumper.

Goodnight, goodnight, my darling.

Tonight the wind is nudging the doors,

Spinning and lifting drifting leaves.

The children think you are the breeze,

Caressing their faces in the morning sun.

Perhaps you are. I hear your voice

Murmuring in the hollow of my shoulder,

I adore you, I adore you.

22

This is my world, a kingdom complete; never

ending, always connecting, life pouring from

me where I and the universe meet in air.

Grief had a way of coming upon me unannounced, springing around the corners of a conversation, lying in wait on the radio, cunningly suspended in an aching sunset at the end of a long summer day.

Alone with the children, life was a simpler affair. I did not have to pretend; indeed, I often had no energy to do so. I felt I could endure the desolation better by myself, away from the demands of others – or at least hoped I could.

When I had to go out into the world and negotiate what had previously been the simplest of social encounters, it was as though I had an enormous gash in the middle of my chest that everyone could see, making me feel exposed and strangely humiliated.

‘You are every woman's worst nightmare,' an older friend suggested matter-of-factly.

‘People look at you and they see that this could also happen to them. They sense the devastation you feel. It's incredibly confronting.'

It felt impossible to negotiate the daily challenges of life when I felt so brittle, so broken; I viewed the world entirely through the prism of loss.

I had always been such a social person, but having to deal with others now filled me with dread. The loss of Julian began to change the way I felt about other people and the way I imagined they felt about me. I could not conceive of a world anymore that was unaffected by his absence.

I staggered through each day, weighed down by emptiness.

•••

One day I went to a lunch in Sydney with a group of women, hosted by a friend. ‘It will do you good to get out. Please come,' she had said. I was late, badly dressed and conscious, by the muted expressions that greeted me, that they had already been briefed about my ‘situation'.

The other women gathered in the garden. In normal circumstances I would have introduced myself and been friendly and warm, but now I hovered like a teenage wallflower at a dance, anxious and self-conscious. I stood on the edge of the group
and picked at a bowl of nuts, aware that I was overeating, but not hungry. Not hungry at all.

The day was overcast, the clouds were lying low; in the distance there was a faint suggestion of blue like a glad memory.

Over lunch I caught some of the women observing me with wide, doleful eyes. I wondered what I was doing there and how soon I could leave without causing offence.

It pained me to so keenly feel this schism, the loneliness of the outcast. I tried to join in, even managing a tinkly laugh as one woman recounted how her husband drove their children all the way to the city to see a show, only to discover he had the wrong day. ‘Husbands,' the woman said, as she beamed around the group. ‘Hopeless.'

A champagne cork popped in the kitchen.

The conversation weaved through the safe topics of the external world – renovations, school choices, the nights of broken sleep with small children. My mind drifted back to Burrawang, to the graveyard and the coffin, deep in the freshly wounded earth.

The talk turned to family pets and then, unexpectedly, there were tears. A cluster of faces turned, like fluttering flowers towards the sun, to focus on a weeping woman. An arm was placed protectively around her shoulders. Someone offered tissues.

I tried not to stare.

‘It's our cat,' the woman began. ‘He had to be put down last week, and I am so upset that I have not been able to tell the children. I just made a joke of it, and said he has probably found a girlfriend and when he's bored, he'll come home.'

There was a muted chorus of sympathetic sighs.

Someone began to clear the plates as the story was told in detail – the cancerous growth on its underbelly, the vomiting, the plaintive mewing in the night. The final decision.

I remained as still as I could manage. My heart was forming into a scream, the sound in my ears like thick, black globules spilling over the white tablecloth.

The crisis subsided seamlessly into dessert. Baked pears in a glutinous syrup.

‘It's been a lovely lunch,' I said as soon as I could, retrieving my coat. ‘I'm sorry I have to go, but I have to get back before the end of school.'

‘Thanks for coming,' my friend said with a warm hug. ‘It's good to see you out and about.'

Faces turned towards me, a huddle of smiles. ‘Goodbye, see you again.'

‘It's just awful,' I heard a woman say as I left the room, her voice dense with exasperation. ‘It really is, I'm at my wits' end. He's hardly ever home before six.'

•••

It was confronting to feel so inhibited by the company of other people, yet suffocated by loneliness when I left them. It was as though the world had no space for me anymore, that as a single parent and widow I had been relegated to the shadows. It frequently pained me when people talked about ‘we' in reference to their partner. I had no idea how to protect myself from being hurt by the ordinariness of other people's lives.

•••

I felt safer at home with George, Meg and Charlotte, where there were no unpleasant surprises. There were many days when I managed well and enjoyed the fun they were creating. But there were other days when I withdrew from them, feeling guilty that I was failing them, unable to laugh with them and be fully present. There were times when they appeared like mirages, three tiny souls looking to me for love and comfort. I wished so desperately for their sake that they could have a mother who was serene and happy, someone who could fill and smooth this vast chasm, who could say that Dad would be coming home.

How would I be able to raise our children alone? I wondered. How could I care for them and provide for them when I felt so adrift? Soothing their daily tears and reading them stories in bed at night was often my only comfort and the spur that kept me going. I drank in their innocent beauty and bathed in their
affection. Holding them close always brought some relief from the dull aching weight that had become my life.

In my darkest times, it no longer seemed to matter that I or the children had once been loved; the only reality I could comprehend was that I had not stopped loving Julian but that he, the source of so much care and support, the rock upon which our everyday life had been constructed, was no longer able to love us in return.

•••

It took me a while to organise a gravestone for Julian. I found a mason who could carve a beautiful old-fashioned slab of sandstone and work began. I had decided that underneath all our names should be written:
Nothing is as gentle as strength. Nothing is as strong as true gentleness
.

Many years later, a friend visiting the grave with me asked about the first line as it seemed slightly odd.

‘Nothing is as gentle as strength,' I read aloud, somewhat puzzled. At the time I thought I had known exactly what I wanted to say, but looking at it again something was definitely wrong.

‘You're right,' I said. ‘I have absolutely no idea what that means.'

She laughed. ‘Oh well, it's rather like Julian then. Slightly mysterious.'

•••

After several months I felt drawn to return to Douglas Park for two days, hoping that the hours of contemplation and a chance to talk to Terry Naughton would give me once again, even for a moment, a place of peace and comfort.

I told him how I felt, angry that Julian was no longer here.

‘I know it makes no sense but I feel abandoned by him,' I said. ‘We never talked about the future, about what my life might be without him, caring for the children by myself. Perhaps it was just too painful or too hard. But I really don't know how I'm going to do it.'

‘One thing you might consider is writing a letter to him in the evening to tell him about what has happened that day,' he suggested.

I raised an eyebrow – I had in mind a few choice phrases.

‘Let everything unfold gently,' he said. ‘All of your losses will be felt during this time. Try to be still and hold in each hand the joy and the pain.'

I found a book in the retreat library called
The Desert: An anthology for Lent
. Since my long walks from Birdsville to Alice Springs and then west of Alice to Broome, the desert had held a special place in my heart and imagination. It was in this apparently empty space that I found something essential within myself, a certainty about my own resilience that had eluded me for many years.

I made notes in my journal and stole a quote from the book to reflect on.
The way you must go is the way you already know. He has set it in your heart. The solitude will speak to you
.

Although I was drawn to the deeper truth of these words, I instinctively felt conflicted by their implication. I already felt banished from the ordinary world; to turn towards solitude even more meant the possibility of greater despair and disconnection. Yet if this was where I might find healing, what choice did I really have?

That afternoon, I set off along the same track I had walked on my first visit to the monastery. Australia was in the grip of a deep drought by this time and the ground was cracked and parched, the grass a morose brown.

The path wound around a series of hills while from the ravine below came the faint smell of water. Seeking some relief, I crashed my way through the bush to what had once clearly been a magnificent river, now a listless stream. Everything seemed to labour under the heavy heat of the day.

I sat down under a spindly tree and rested, silently asking for the grace to be peaceful. It finally felt safe to stop. For a moment at least there was no need to keep running, to keep turning a shining face towards the world. Alone, I could simply feel the way I felt; shattered and lonely, ashamed of the smallness of my fearful heart that still cried out:
Don't go, don't leave me.

I stretched out on the dirt, my head propped up on one hand, and allowed my mind to wander back ten years to a rather desultory night shift in the AAP Sydney newsroom, when a story from Wollongong University had popped up on my screen.

Up to this point, I had told very few people about another longstanding desire that I had – to one day venture into one of the world's great deserts. In my teens I had not only developed an inexplicable obsession with Papua New Guinea, I had also collected several books about expeditions into the deserts of Africa and the Middle East:
Venture to the Interior
,
The Empty Quarter
,
Arabian Sands
,
Beyond the Last Oasis
. And well before I left the UK I had read
Tracks
, Robyn Davidson's account of her incredible solo camel expedition across Australia.

None of these accounts painted a glamorous picture of desert life – far from it; the stories were riddled with disasters, physical suffering and near-death experiences. With their descriptions of
the nomadic life and the rare beauty of the silent land, however, they also awoke in me a longing to venture into an apparent nowhere, to lose myself in emptiness.