‘We are already born. We are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.’ Toni Morrison
The operative term here is that you respect. Morrison goes on, ‘Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part, but the grandeur of that life is in that attempt, it’s not about the solution.’
Likewise, people tend to talk about ageing and death as problems to be solved rather than parts of our lives we must live out. The ageing part that is, if we’re lucky enough to live that long.
As usual I’m finding it hard to slip into the part of life that is mine, to hold, to keep and in time to give away.
It seems like yesterday and I was young. Not so much hopeful as fearful though I’ve long held the optimistic bent of my mother, not her belief in miracles so much as a belief that over time good will prevail. Good in the form of loving feelings that override all the narky ones.
I’m reading Kathryn Heyman’s Circle of Wonders which deals with death, of two mothers, one who is of an age when death is inevitable and her daughter who is dying prematurely of breast cancer after a long period of remission.
The daughter’s life to her own mind has not been exemplary. In a different way from her own mother, she has been a negligent mother moving around the world in search of her dream as a musician or a hippy type of person looking for a chance to fly.
Her own mother less dramatic, more a creature of her generation when children were typically born but intentionally kept down so they did not grow too conceited or confident or whatever else it was that people of my mother’s generation found so worrying.
I can remember coming home from school in my secondary years with good reports and looking forward to her response, which was always lacklustre though I believe it mattered to her that all her children succeed.
She boasted of this often enough as we were into young adulthood, not so much our achievements and relationships as that none of us took to taking drugs. Drugs taking was her biggest fear. Alcohol and smoking never troubled her, but the idea of drugs sent her into such prohibitive language, you could hear the hell fire and brimstone come out of her mouth, like a dragon.
As I suspect it does mine.
I have never used mind altering substances except once when I was a student visiting a friend who lived in a share house on Grattan Street in Carlton. Hers was part of an upper storey in a Victorian terrace perched over a bakery near Lygon street. In the early morning when I stayed overnight on warmer days the yeasty smell wafted through my open window and left me feeling even more nauseous after a night of heavy drinking.
This night one of my friend’s friends was handing round a joint. I drank alcohol only if it was sweet: vodka and orange juice, ouzo and coke, port and lemonade. Sick making concoctions but sweet enough to appeal to my long standing sweet tooth.
I did not smoke at this time and had a revulsion at the thought of cigarette smoke reaching what I believed in those days were my pink lungs. Pink in contrast to my father who went through something like three packs a day of Craven A filter tipped. The proverbial chain smoker..
The stubby bit of a rolled-up joint moved from one set of fingers to another and when it came my turn I puffed on the end as if clutching the thing in my teeth and holding it there for show.
I did not let anything get past the top of my throat as I had learned to do while swimming to block off my throat and nose so that no water could enter my lungs.
It worked and I stayed the same only the effect of the alcohol was closing in. And this day I had ventured into new territory. I wanted to join the cool folks in my time who instead of the sweet lolly stuff we females typically drank, or the boys their beer, I wanted to try wine. The only wine available, a heavy Cabernet from the Clare Valley.
I took a few sips and was repulsed by its lack of sweetness but made myself persevere to the extent of half a glass. Then I hoed into the cheese plater. Something about the sharp tasty cheese my friend had bought from Victoria Market that morning and the red wine had a strange effect on me that first time.
My lips swelled as though I was living in the time of Botox and had endured a major injection of the stuff. Red swollen and pulsing I feared they might get so big I could not breathe again. I washed them down with cold water and stopped taking anything in, until they settled. Which they did as the saying goes, in the fullness of time.
Time is indeed coming for us, and memories like these within the treasure chest of my past stand out in all their resplendent or dull glory.
And to borrow from a quote a friend offered me yesterday from Jericho Brown –
I must look him up – ‘Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.’
Make of this as you will but hope to me is the most essential ingredient of our lives however often we falter.