Elisabeth – Page 56 – Sixth in Line

On loss

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Elizabeth Bishop.

We get enough practice every day. Every time our bodies fail us as we grow older, every rejection, personal or professional. Every time something you aspire to falls flat on its face. Every fall, every time you fall on your face or hip or wrist or shoulder and your bones, once flexible and lithe, lose their hydraulic power and begin to crumble.

I’ve been reading Hanif Kureishi’s Sub Stack entries of late. The Indian/British writer living in Britain. He fell during a holiday in Rome and hit his head or some such misfortune. Now he is paralysed from head to foot. His despatches from his hospital bed are sobering. He tells you what it’s like to lose your body overnight, to be left with a mind in fine fettle, apart from the depression that accompanies his inability to get up from his bed and walk. He still can’t believe he cannot do this, even as the body attached to his head refuses to do anything he asks of it. He cannot bear the alone. So he insists on rostering family and friends to be sure there are never long moments alone except at night.

When he is alone he is overwrought and imagines he cannot go on. Kureishi writes that ‘children are always a cocktail of their parents’ desires’. I’d add an extra sentence here: children might consist of parental desires, but they also include resistance to the pressures put upon them to be all such desires. And they have minds and bodies of their own, however much a parent might reckon they’re in charge.

A week after enduring Covid, we are about to welcome visitor into our house, Anais who comes to attend a conference with me where she and I will talk about our work together over the past two years. All the way from Montreal, Canada she comes, and I sense a burden of responsibility greater than ever before. To make her trip worthwhile and meaningful. But more than that to reduce the clutter in this house such she will not be appalled when she arrives.

This is the hard task for the rest of this day and already my bones ache. A week after Covid which did not hit me hard but a congested nose still despite testing negative.

The congestion in my nose matches that in my brain but it’s nothing so massive as Kureishi’s lot. The loss of his bodily function. He thought he was going to die as he lay there on the concrete, pooled in blood, and well he might but for the administrations of his wife Isabella, and the medicos who kept him going on limited bodily resources.

Isabella is younger and she according to Kureishi is his shining hope. Her attention and love keep him going.

And what is life like for her with such a disabled partner? I cannot say. She does not speak except through Kureishi, who probably could not bear to contemplate any resentment from her having to nurse him. But he has a cohort of helpers, children, friends, admirers, so it’s not entirely up to her.

He refers from time to time to his friend the writer, Salman Rushdie under the weight of a dreaded fatwah for his thoughts on Islam and more recently after someone shot this writer on stage. A man haunted by the prospect that there are others who want him gone because he has offended their religious beliefs and sensibilities.

For all that Elizabeth Bishop reckons it’s easy to master loss, there are some losses that take a lifetime of grieving to overcome. And still they never go away. The water babies in Japan the missugo as Lidia Yuknavitch refers to them. Those still born who did not even make it into having to negotiate their parents’ desires, those little ones who reached full term but could not go further.

Such losses to me are not easy to master because they are beyond us, outside of us. They do not happen to us, but they happen for us, with us, around us. Loss of hope and desire is the greatest loss of all.

When I was young I wore my optimism like a cloak. I still do. Whenever something bad happens, and it happens often enough, I tell myself something good will happen soon.

I look out for the positive moments, the moments of joy that make it all worthwhile and refuse to be crushed by the disillusion of life’s disappointments but as I get older it gets harder.

I watch my grandchildren squabble over toys, over their desires to eat more of something they must limit or to be eternally with their parents who come and go like the weather and I see Elizabeth Bishop’s notion of mastering loss from the get go. But sometimes we need help to master our gains. To recognise our successes even as we stay alive. For Kureishi it’s writing which he dictates to his son.

Writing is his great joy and the knowledge there are others who care for him even in his infantilised state. But it’s hard when you spend your life growing into a state of semi-independence to find you can no longer walk, brush your teeth, defecate or eat without assistance. That’s a grim life beyond infancy. Impossible to master.

Language and Memory

‘Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the chaotic images we call memory. But we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.’ Lidia Yuknavitch

When I was ten, I stayed home from school one day with a fever. In my bed with a book about a dog who travelled with its family and got into scrapes and adventures, I fell into the trance of other worlds. No longer in my bed at home alone with my father nearby.

Why ever I fell ill with some unknown ailment at the time my father was home, I cannot say. But the two are linked in my memory. My father’s ailment had a name. Pleurisy. At times he could scarcely breathe. Even his beloved cigarettes became impossible.

Alone in bed with my book I tuned him out. In this room which I shared with two other sisters, there was a stand-alone wardrobe, a skyscraper to me. When I was well, we sisters climbed to the top of the wardrobe and looked down at the puny world below.

The dog in my book lived in the bush, surrounded by gum trees and the call of birds, magpies, whip birds and currawongs. From my bed to the top of the wardrobe I transformed my life into a series of magical kingdoms where people were under my control, in so far as I wanted to control anyone. At least they left me alone to explore the bush, to dip my toes into the ice-cold water of a stream, which my story dog leapt over in one stride. All thought of my father in the room next door disappeared.

When I tried to throw my legs over the edge of my bed and tiptoed to the outside toilet for a pee, my head spun as though it had lost its anchor. I held onto the side of cupboards and walls to make my way outside.

The air had an ethereal haze as if I had gone through one of Alice’s mirrors into another place where the smells were different, and animals could talk. The ants crawling up the weatherboards of the outside toilet shone in their blackness as if they wore suits and shiny shoes and the birds squawking overhead spoke their own language. Foreign to me, but as familiar to them as the morning sunshine.

In childhood, before the rot of understanding sets in, our lives are ruled by sensations, the smells, the touch, and taste. A visit to the toilet, for all that it stank of stale cigarettes and urine, held magical possibilities there among the cobwebs that fantailed across the ceiling and in the dank corners where toadstools spouted, a home for goblins. They scared me under my bed, but here outside they took a different form as if the very fact of living out of doors gave them an authority and sensibility lost to them indoors.

Here on the concrete floor of the toilet which I could barely make out once I closed the door and could only make out shapes from the light cast under the cut off slats I conjured a dream.

Another toilet at my school. One in a row, each identical, black plastic seats over white porcelain bowls that dug into the ground as if they grew there. I sat on the toilet and listened to the sound of my pee as it crashed like a waterfall into the pool below. I worried someone might be outside my door, another kid, a teacher perhaps, and they would hear my insides running out. My face reddened as if these matters were shameful and the fact that toilets held such solid doors to block light and noise suggested no one needed to hear your bodily explosions even when you could not help it.

Then at the door I saw a pair of black shiny shoes. Priest’s shoes, my father’s shoes, a man’s shoes. The hand attached to the shoes further up a body I could not see rattled at the door handle. I slid off the toilet and stood on the seat. I fiddled with the slats behind high up on the wall. Frosted slats that moved under the pressure of a silver mechanism to let in air or to block it. I imagined myself sliding through these slats as a way of escape, a way of slipping back outside and away from this toilet, now the most dangerous place in the world.

The shoes stood still. And waited. The shoes waited. I could wait them out. The shoes on a man who stood at the toilet door and wanted to reach me. I woke to a beating heart and the clammy skin of a person unwell, and unable to engage in coherent thoughts. The panic I could escape in my story of the dog who lived with a family who loved it.

When I was a child in bed with a book, I had no idea my life would unfold as it has. I had no idea that the making of babies is such a fraught process even as ten days after my tenth birthday my mother gave birth to still born daughter.

Born dead, as Lidia Yuknavitch writes of her own first-born daughter. No life, no pulse. A dead being in your arms whom you have carried to term only to discover this child could not make it beyond the safety of your womb. And the grief that follows for women who lose a baby in this way, including my mother, cannot be spoken out loud for fear it will wake all those babies born dead and they will wail their grief out loud. They who have started on the journey but were not able to get through the first hurdle of finding breath.