‘We resurrect the dead in our dreams.’ Siri Hustvedt
The only time I see my parents now is in my dreams, in photographs and my memories.
My dreams, the clearest depiction when they come alive, and in them we have conversations. Reading Siri Hustvedt’s book Ghost Stories, a story of grief on the death of her husband Paul Auster in 2024, I’m struck by her passion for this man, within the context of a long and fulfilling marriage, despite the tragedy of drug addicted Daniel, Auster’s son who killed himself soon after the death of his eight-month-old daughter Ruby, for which he was held responsible.
Hustvedt details this tragedy, the year before Auster was diagnosed with lung cancer as a possible determinant in the onset of the disease. The doctors, she writes, are interested to know his genomic history and the fact that he smoked, but they did not once reflect on the extent to which this tragedy, losing his granddaughter and son in such a short space of time, could derail a mind and body such Auster is unlikely to have been the same ever again.
Stress, Hustvedt reminds us, can lead to bodily changes, which the medical establishment with its heavy emphasis on the mechanics of bodily health and disease the quantitation of blood and hormone levels fails to factor in.
This book, like all diaries, as Hustvedt describes, is a ‘geography of telling and not telling.’ Isn’t this true of all lives?
Yesterday, I met with an old friend. We extend across four decades with long periods in between where we have scarcely seen one another. Linked in large part by mutual friends, one of whom has since died. His wife, now in her mid to late nineties is losing her memory. My friend and I tried to piece together the time in between, when she spent a good deal of time with this friend and placed that memory against earlier times when this woman was like a substitute grandmother to my children.
When this older friend and I travelled every Tuesday to an event held at the Athenaeum Library in the city, for The Tuesday writers. A group of people stemming from my days at the Council of Adult Education with whom I completed a diploma of Professional Writing and Editing.
Some from my class did not want our novel writing class to end so we formed the Tuesday writers. I left this group ahead of my friend to care for my grandchildren which I’ve done these past 18 years. The Tuesday Writers might still exist but given my Tuesdays are never free now, and I no longer know anyone in the group I cannot say. But something is stirring inside. How can I chase them up? How can I reconnect?
They, too, are like ghosts in my memory. So many people and their names fading much like the ghosts of a lifetime.
And the conversation with my contemporary friend was studded with gaps but I gave her a copy of my memoir The Museum of Failure assuring her there were people she might recognise despite the pseudonyms.
I did not tell her that the person who was most instrumental in my failure was a woman who was most significant in my friend’s life as her analyst.
There is something about keeping the identity of other people’s therapists safe and sacred for the sake of the person’s therapy or analysis that is deeply ingrained in me.
We don’t want to badmouth other people’s heroes.
It would be like telling you things about your parents you do not want to hear. Things about your parents that might re-shape their view of those parents after death. The ghosts will morph into something horrendous relative to the idealised views they hold in their hearts. But I want to tell my friend about her analyst now dead. About her strange ways that were hard on me. And other secrets I know, but secrets are like this. You hold them close for fear of the damage they might do. Her secrets, my secrets.
A geography of telling and not telling.
Paul Auster began writing letters to his grandson Myles, born four months before the writer died. Such compelling letters as Hustvedt details in her story. She also includes some letters she wrote to her friends during her husband’s illness. She wanted them to know. He wanted them to know what was going on following Auster’s cancer diagnosis. To keep them in the loop.
It reminds me of the messages I sent to my siblings during our mother’s last days when she was in the Dandenong Hospital dying.
We did not realise this until she was described as palliative. For much of these last three weeks of my mother’s life, my sister and I operated as though we would need to find her higher-level care given the retirement village where she lived for the past decade did not offer this.
My mother died in the Bethlehem hospice, which seems apt given this hospice which is no longer trading under that name was in earlier incarnations a maternity hospital where my husband was born.
He likes to joke, like Jesus, he was born in Bethlehem. Born in Bethlehem and baptised in St Patrick’s Cathedral. You can’t get more high ranking than this within the Catholic hierarchy of Melbourne, but he does not submit to these hierarchies anymore.
My mother did. She believed in miracles with all her heart, which brings me to another of Hustvedt’s observations when talking about the roller coaster of the story of her husband’s life, his final months after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
‘There is an important distinction between optimism and hope. The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that at least for those who love the patient are unsustainable. Hope on the other hand is necessary for living on. In my case a stringent reality principle with hope allows me to be a better companion as this story moves ahead.
The number of times my mother told her children a miracle had occurred, and our father had agreed to stop drinking is remarkable in its frequency. This alone put me off the idea of miracles. And the day my analyst told me there is a fine line between optimism and denial stays with me. Such a fine line. Better to stick with the idea of hope. That things as Emily Dickinson writes like hope with feathers. It can fly. Despair cannot.
But miracles belong with the ghosts of our pasts and presents, ghosts that help us maintain our connections to those long gone, but they cannot be rematerialised except in our Imaginations.
And like Hustvedt pining for her beloved Paul we must learn to grieve our losses rather than image they will one day be resurrected that way of Jesus. We all must die. But while we live we hold onto the hope of finding meaning in our lives and connections such we might never need resort to miracles if religion or otherwise.
They can lead us into false hope, and denial which ill prepares us for those final days. Auter said he hoped to die telling a joke. Philip Adams talks about wanting to be awake when he dies. From my limited understanding of death when it comes, it’s unlikely to go the way of movies with a person uttering their final word. My mother reported that our father’s final words were along the lines of ‘St Francis was a wonderful saint.’
Somehow I find this hard to believe. Perhaps she thought it. Perhaps she wanted it. My father reformed from alcoholism into the church of heaven. Another miracle, or so my mother believed. I suspect he died in silence. His last breath no more.