denial – Sixth in Line

Heat radiated up from the concrete footpath through the soles of my sandals and onto my feet. I knew I should have worn rubber-soled sandshoes for the extra protection they gave but they covered too much surface area on top and did not breathe.

All morning on the radio there were reports of bushfires throughout country Victoria. Even the Dandenongs were under threat.

I had looked across to the edge of the horizon in the gaps between houses and imagined I could see the glow of fire in the distance, or at least the smoke. I could smell smoke. And not just the residue of the burned toast from breakfast, nor of my father’s cigarettes in the hallway. This was a different type of smoke. This smoke stuck in your nose and left you feeling you were in danger.

There was nothing to worry about, for us in built up areas my brothers had said, fire would not travel into built up areas.

Why ever not? Hadn’t they heard of the Great Fire of London, the one Samuel Pepys wrote about in his diary, the one where more than half of the city of London went up in smoke.

‘But that was centuries ago,’ my brother said when I reminded him of the story. ‘And the houses were all made of wood and set cheek by jowl. It’s not like that today.’

Maybe not, I thought to myself but there were other dangers closer to home.

I wanted to walk in the shady side of the street but by the middle of the day with the sun immediately overhead there was no shade, only the relentless yellow orb blazing down. Most of the year I loved the summer time. The freedom of movement it offered, the long periods of daylight and the summer holidays but here we were two weeks before school went back and I found myself dreading the thought of more heat. If only the promised cool change would come and I could stop worrying about going up in smoke, not only our house, the houses around us but me as well and other people.

Death by fire was not a death I could think about for long before it became unthinkable and my thoughts ran on to Mrs White in the old people’s home. Mrs White the woman in her eighties whom I had chosen to visit one day after the parish priest told my mother a good way to get your daughters from worrying about things at home is to get them out there doing good deeds.

‘They can help other people and why not start where you work, at the old people’s home.’

We did not grace older people with honorarium such as ‘senior citizen’ or the elderly, they were old people and with the label went all other insults imaginable, the sense of being past it. Of no further relevance.

People like Mrs White, who told me she had no family left as she had never had children of her own and her nieces and nephews were all spread throughout Australia and had no time for the likes of her.

It made me wonder in the first instance about the cruelty of these people who could so neglect their elderly aunt and then about Mrs White.

I was no judge of character then, though I thought it best to trust my instincts and to go for the person in the ward who best represented someone I could help. I imagined a friendly warm person on the receiving end of my ministrations but Mrs White, who looked for all the world as though she would be gentle, turned out to be bitter and cantankerous and demanding.

Once I chose her as my target each week, the one I should go back to visit again and again, I was trapped. I decided to ignore her taciturn ways and make the most of my visits as though I were like my namesake Saint Elisabeth of Hungary who cared for the sick and the poor and who sought nothing in return. I tried to figure out what it was Father Brackyn the parish priest had imagined might work so well for me and my sister through this process and how it might take our minds off worries at home with our father raging and drunk in his corner of the house.

Beyond Farm Road the bitumen pathway turned to grass and it was not so hot on the soles of feet though in parts the ground was lumpy and the rhythm of my walking adjusted to take in the occasional unexpected rise and fall of the ground.

I needed to walk the full length of the old people’s home when you approached from the seaside end of Warrigal Road and it took another ten minutes before I reached the entrance then down the sloping gravel path to the red brick building that housed the several old people who were waiting there to die, or so my brothers said.

My mother worked at the old people’s home, as a cleaner mostly, but one of her jobs was to go through the old people’s effects after they had died. She could then decide what should happen to these objects, spectacles, gloves, scarves, hats, dentures, the works, only when there was no family left to collect them, or even when there was family most did not want this stuff. It could go to the local opportunity shop or the rubbish bin but not before my mother had retrieved the things she might find useful at our place, things we kids despised for their old people smell and feel and sense of general uselessness attached to spectacles designed for one person’s eyes that could not be adjusted to suit my mother’s eyes and other personal objects, even wrist watches, which in those days were still considered precious but to us another person’s watch, unless that person was close to you, felt like wearing someone else’s underwear.

Mrs White sat beside her bed dressed in her lacy pink matinee jacket over a thick white nightie too think for this weather, but old people felt the cold my mother had told me often enough. There was a large jug of water by her bedside and more than once during the course of my visit a nursing assistant came by and told her to keep up her fluids.

Mrs White sipped only one or two drops before going back to her sour, dry non communicative stare that left me having to make all the conversation.

‘Did you bring my antacid powder?’ she asked. ‘The one I told you about.’

I had it there tucked away in my dress pocket. A blue and white roll of white tablets that I tried once before from my mother’s stash. De Witte’s antacid tablets for her digestion.

Nothing agreed with Mrs White, neither food nor company, nor the efforts of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who tried to bring a sparkle of sunshine into her world, not for Mrs White’s sake but for the girl’s own because as the parish priest had told my mother. When things are most difficult, it’s always good to look towards helping others more needy.

And so began the mantra of my life.

St Nicholas the patron saint of good deeds.

As a gift for my birthday yesterday, I chose a new desk chair, one described as a saddle. Backless, armless and perched on top of a metal post (instead of a horse’s back) it forces me to sit in a way that uses my pelvic muscles as if in Pilates, and helps prevent a bad back.

It’s an odd sensation to sit this way, though not entirely new to me.

In the past, I’ve used one of those backless kneeling chairs, but the man in the chair shop recommended I go for this variety and stop my kneeling as he reckons the kneelers are meant for short term only, rather like kneeling in church. You do it for a time, otherwise you risk cutting off circulation and you can develop trouble in your knees.

What a birthday it was. My daughter and I spent several hours in the afternoon in a vet clinic waiting to have our dog diagnosed.

He’d been vomiting and had become dehydrated to the point where he needed an overnight stay in the emergency department. They speculated he might have had pancreatitis or simply that he ate something toxic.

‘Dogs are scavengers,’ the vet said.

‘A bird will fly over and poop on the ground. The dog will see the poop, think what a tasty morsel and swallow it in one gulp. It could be the size of a pin prick but it can make him very sick.’

Two hours after rehydration, the vet told us Ralph was already much better, but they kept him overnight to be sure and given he was not in his usual bed, he barked all night long, kept the other animals agitated, and barely slept.

I dreamed last night that I rang the vet to ask if Ralph was okay.

‘No,’ the vet nurse said and my dream morphed into something else. I woke relieved to imagine it wasn’t true. Relieved on two counts, for the sake of the dog and for the sake of our budget.
We picked Ralph up early this morning bright and bouncy. A happy dog, tail wagging and ready to go back to his usual life. Only he’s now on a diet of boiled chicken mixed with rice for a few days and I can see he’ll soon tire of that.

This blow-by-blow account of the antics of our dog reminds me of a recent lunch I shared with a group of lovely women.

For the first hour at least we talked of nothing but the state of our internal organs, our digestive systems, our bowels, what we can eat, can’t eat, and our general health.

The lunch was at a café attached to an organic farm of sorts, Ceres, where people offer classes to teach the next generation about things like permaculture and biodiversity and all that stuff.

Ceres caters for those of us who care about the future of the planet and the menu appeals to all manner of discerning guts. There’s soy and almond milk and kombuchas made of ginger and beetroot juice. There’s also this new favourite thing on the trendy drinkers’ market called a Turmeric chai latte with coconut.

So much fuss. I detect an unspoken etiquette around these things.

At Ceres you can quote specifications, milks or substitutes, with a sprinkle of whatever herb or otherwise your stomach demands, and you can be as nit-picky as you like.

It’s all about healthy living and individual requirements more than taste because some of these drinks – I tried the ginger beetroot Kombucha – were awful. Like medicine.

So we women emulated this recent preoccupation with of the state of our dog’s gut and our conversation took on that endless quality of bodily introspection which bores me even as I write about it.

We even joked about the fact that three of our party were about to have colonoscopies.

And then the news came, two days ago, that my ninety-year-old uncle, a Fransciscan died in Brazil. There he had spent the last several decades of his life dedicated to his parish in an impoverished community called Alcobaca.

From all accounts, this uncle, whom I met only a few times when he visited Australia, was a good man. He was a man who cared about his calling, who cared about his parishioners and did not reflect the image of Catholic priests today as paedophiles and hypocrites.

There have been many Facebook tributes to my uncle floating through cyberspace and most of them in Portuguese.

My mother had five brothers, only one of whom still lives. Her sib ship of seven is nearly over and it saddens me to think of my mother’s family, her great anchor in the world, as coming adrift, as no more.

My mother loved her siblings in a way that sometimes left me feeling as if she cared more about her brothers and sister than she cared about her own children.

Something of her childhood stayed with her. The greatest childhood imaginable she told me, but then again my mother was prone to look on the bright side and I suspect there were many times when it was not so wonderful.

Certainly, it was not so wonderful for the ones below my mother, or so my aunt would tell me when she too visited Australia or when I visited her in Holland.

When I pored over the photograph albums in childhood there were pages devoted to the ordination of two of my mother’s brothers, both ordained Franciscans, both dedicated to the life of the priesthood, though one became a missionary and the other’s life seemed more troubled.

The older of the two went blind several years before he died. He suffered the same macular degeneration my grandfather suffered. My grandfather also spent something like the last decade of his life in blindness.

It becomes one of my pet horrors this blindness, which seems to be a genetic attribute from my mother’s side.

The irony does not escape me. My mother who was adept at turning a blind eye at times when she should have had her eyes wide open, came from a family with an affliction that could cause blindness.

When things get tough, don’t look. Don’t see. It works for the blind person up to a point, but if a bus is hurtling towards you, even though you turn your back on it, the bus will bowl you over if you don’t get out of the way and you’re more likely to get out of the way if you can see what’s coming towards you.

Or so runs my understanding of denial.

‘We do as if nothing is wrong’ my mother said more than once.

Let’s just carry on as though the dreadful things around us, a drunken father walking naked through the house is not there, not to see, not to worry if we just close our eyes and minds.

It drove my father even madder than he might have been. Not that paying attention to him helped either.

I imagine, my mother would have much preferred the life of a missionary in the villages of Brazil with her beloved brother visiting the sick and needy, helping with Mass on Sundays, but instead she landed in Australia with nine kids and a heathen drunken husband.

I’m lucky. I have so much less to complain of, an ageing body and a nine year old dog with gut problems. Plus, I have a great chair in which to sit pain free, however many hours I write. But I must beware of my PollyAnna impulses and my mother’s blind eye.

Tag: denial

The dangers of doing good

Dogs, death and denial