Death is round the corner

My head is dizzy and not just
figuratively.  Either I’ve copped a
virus, or else I’m having a stroke.  Or
maybe I have a brain tumour or some other sinister event is taking place within
my body. 
The hypochondriac in me tells me
this dizziness signals disaster.  The optimist
reckons its nothing short of a virus that will pass. 
But I’m surrounded by illness and
it can become contagious. 
A friend rang this morning to ask
my middle name, she’s making out her will and needs such details. It’s a
comfort to imagine she might be planning to remember me in her inheritance, but a grim thought to consider she might die soon.  She’s just turned 85.
And then there are other reminders
that death is around the corner. 
I scan the death notices most days,
looking for signs that people I once knew have died, but we only subscribe to
the Age and most of the names that
appear there are those more conventional Anglo-Saxon types who also subscribe
to the Age. 

To read the fuller death notices in
Melbourne you have to subscribe to the Sun
Herald where hundreds of notices from different nationalities ring out the
news.  It’s a depressing thought. 
One day my name will be included in
those notices, just as we included my mother’s name last year and my father’s
before her some thirty plus years ago.
My niece on the cusp of forty may be dying from a rare form of cancer and the very idea fills me with  grief. 
Too young, too soon, and yet she has told me, when she goes to the Peter
Mac Callum clinic for treatment, she’s not a rare case.  The waiting room is filled with people and
many of them are under forty. 
To me, under forty is still
young.  Too young to die. 
The longer you live, the older
you’ll get, the statistics tell us, as if that too might be cause for comfort.
These grim thoughts need an antidote.
In the shower this morning as I
reflected on my night’s dreams, two things struck me. One is the degree to which
the babies in my dreams, and I often dream of babies, are a mixture of infant
and adult, as in they can talk fluently, they eat adult food, and they can sometimes
walk even under six months. 
I drag these babies along with me
in my dreams and they tend to fit in and survive.  Make of that what you will. 
Then the other feature – a pleasure
in my dreams beyond those occasional dreams in which I find myself flying over
rooftops, elevated above the ground simply by willing it to happen – I find
money.  And not just small amounts of
money. 
There’s a fifty-dollar note I see
tucked behind a rock.  I pick it up and
there’s another and then another. I stash them into my pockets keen to gather
as many as I can. 
But this money belongs to someone
else. I should not take it or else I must grab it fast because soon they’ll
return and lay claim to it.  I’ll be
caught out. 
Adam Philips writes about ‘guilt as
the psychoanalytic word for not getting caught’.  I write of the horrors of getting
caught.  Of being found out and then of
having to suffer the consequences. 

I can’t trick my body.  It knows when something’s wrong, but whether
or not I pay attention is another matter. 

The threat within ourselves

Inside the front cover of a paper back copy of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice –faded yellow with its
spine held together by sticky tape – someone has scratched out the first
initial of my older sister’s name and changed it to a younger sister’s
initial.  The book was presumably a
hand-me-down for school.

Underneath my sister’s name, my father has written the words:
GEKKEN EN DWAZEN SCHRYVEN HUN NAMEN OP DEUREN EN GLAZEN, which translates into
‘People who are silly and mad write their names on doors and windows’.
My sister gave me the book recently.  She’s going through a phase where she wants
to rid herself of all negative energy and the words on the front cover of this
book exude just that, at least they do for her. 
For me these words are intriguing and given I do not have many
examples of my father’s handwriting, they’re a treasure.  However much I might disagree with the sentiment
they express. 
When I was little I wondered what these words could mean.  How could it be such a stupid thing to write
your name down on the front of your books? 
Or maybe my father was having a go at those who write their names on
trees and walls and fences, graffiti artists and the like. 
They do more than inscribe their names, but certainly the
mark or tag of a graffiti artist seems to be an important part of their work.
 I still write my name
in the front of my books, mostly as a territorial thing.  I claim this book as my own.  Not that it helps the book to stay in my
possession. I am an inveterate book lender and even though I once tried to keep
a list of all books borrowed out to others so that I might remind the borrowers
in the fullness of time they have my book, I forget to fill in the list.  It’s incomplete and then I forget where I put
it. 
So my books with my silly name in the front cover are scattered
all over in other people’s libraries. 
As long as they’re loved, I say. 
I made my annual pilgrimage to the Freud conference
yesterday.  The two main speakers from
Germany spoke about fundamentalism, fanaticism and religion to a large
audience. 
The topic was daunting, not least because during the
introductions the conference organiser told us that ‘for reasons of security
for this particular conference’ they would lock the doors during sessions and a
body guard would protect the premises at all times. 
She told us this in case we decided to go outside during the
breaks.  She told us this in order to
remind us that should we go outside during one of the breaks we should return
at least ten minutes before the proceedings resume so that we are not locked
out.
Moreover, the conference organiser told us to keep our nametag
on at all times. 
‘If the guard sees you without your nametag, you will be
escorted from the building’.
 
I call this overkill.
 
Some said it was necessary. 
Maybe it was.  A duty of care, one
person told me during the break.  Maybe
again it was, but it also created an aura of the enemy, the ‘other’, the one
lurking outside who might at any moment enter with a machine gun or hand
grenade to attack us in our seats or to take us hostage. 
And so we experienced the effects of terrorism first hand, albeit
at a distance.  After all, terrorism is
designed to terrify.
This contrasts with other injunctions from government
spokespeople and the like who say, go about your business as usual and don’t be afraid.  Be alert, but unafraid.
The conference made me more afraid than I might otherwise
have been but even though the threat of terrorism is real and there are good
reasons for all of us to pay attention, the greatest fear I reckon lies in
ourselves. 
Our own tendencies to look at life in terms of the black and
the white, insiders and outsiders, clashes of identity.
During the breaks I managed to speak to many people, some old
acquaintances, others new, but always I had the sense – as I so often have at
conferences – that we are ships who pass in the night. 
Some of these people I saw last year at the Freud conference
and I will see them again in a year at the next Freud conference. 
Conferences like this one that happen every year have the
quality of Christmas family get togethers. 
Not everyone in the family comes, but there are enough of us
who get together, along with a few extras, occasional friends or extended family
members, to create a strange tension. 
It reminds me of the energy my sister talks about from the
front cover of her book. 
The pride and prejudice of it all. 
I suspect my father’s words might reflect his own
difficulties in acknowledging his identity. 
He was proud of his name, the same name as that of his father, his
father’s father, his father’s father’s father going back through the
centuries. 
But he could not wear his name with the confidence he might
have liked, given his decimation through war and family trauma, and so he could
not tolerate the idea that his children should wear their own names with pride.  
Especially not his daughters.