‘Losing a person could make more of us. Make two,’ writes Ocean Vuong when he reflects on the death of his loved one. Is this true? Could it be so? When you lose a person you have the person you once knew or you have a new someone, a person now dead. Is this what Vuong means? Or something else altogether. There is the actual person and then there is the person no more. A memory.
Memory offers us a second chance. Vuong again. This makes sense. Memory as a second chance to have a stab at something we once lived through that changes almost every time we remember. The curves and cadences shift ever so slightly along with our emotions about this memory, they soften. The way reading a book can introduce us to characters with whom we might have little affinity but with whom we begin to experience with lashes of empathy because the writer has taken us into the shoes of this person and for once, if only briefly, we see through their eyes.
Even if they are a person filled with self-loathing because of life’s cruelties, we do not despise them the way they hate themselves. If anything, we can urge them to be kinder to themselves in the theatres of our imaginations where anything is possible.
Weather, too, gives us second chances. It’s April in Australia and the seasons are turning with the red leaves about to drop brown and crinkled on the ground. I gather my woollen jumpers and shake them from their summer sleep.
I have a day of visitors mapped out today. A small grandson who will doubtless play along with whatever toys he can find. We might go to the movies and later, a sister who is troubled as one of her children is seriously ill. Different people and different moods and I will adapt to each as required.
My husband and all four daughters are attending a ceramics class in Fitzroy today. Each wanting to try their hand at creativity of a different form. Each keen to experiment with clay. One son in law reminds me, when he was a school kid he despised art classes involving cay. He hated the feel on his hands. The way the stone drew moisture from his fingers and palms. The sensation of dryness as if friction on his skin.
I know what he was talking about. I have the same sensation in my mouth when eating scones. Something about the mixture of flour to moisture draws moisture from my mouth. My teeth grow sticky and the taste, however pleasurable, is subsumed by the sensation.
There are those who might suggest such sensibilities be speak to a person who struggles with neurodiverse behaviours but these are the thin edge of diversity. We all have our peccadilloes. Not always problems but sources of great joy.
‘Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.’ Ocean Vuong. On earth we are briefly gorgeous
And distance can be reversed when a hunter loses their weaponry and the prey rise in retaliation.
I need not give examples. During the weekend of the Melbourne footfall grand final many people stopped to watch. Two teams, the Cats and the Lions, slogged it out. The cats were favourites and the lions won. The Lions team was once called Fitzroy and a beloved friend was devastated when the Fitzroy club lost its stripes as an AFL club and morphed into the Brisbane Lions a whole state away. I’m not sure his loyalty could ever extend to the transmogrified team which now stands glorious.
I do not care about this myself. I have never been a football die hard. Never quite understood the hype, though I see it all around me. Especially in one of my grandsons who is a devoted Bombers follower at the age of five, as his father was before him. Such are the power of parents to form a lifetime’s allegiance to football.
For me, when I asked my husband who takes a vague interest, a compulsory thing for men in this country it seems, who was playing. He listed the cats and lions and I was amused. Just the titles. Cats and lions are the two animals which feature in my dreams to represent my shadow side. Occasionally I have also dreamed of sharks, but wild cats like lions take the cake. Often they are stalking outside in my dreams while I’m bailed up inside terrified to see hem stalk behind the thin layer of glass.
These days we’re caring for a daughter’s cat. An orange tabby who goes by the name of Willis. Willis the proverbial scaredy cat. Whenever someone comes into the house Willis races to hide in an upstairs cupboard and he won’t come out until they are gone. He stayed hidden in the cupboard for a few hours when he first arrived, but he has stayed with us before and each time he comes, his hiding out reduces to the point where he is now at home with us as long as we don’t have visitors. An indoor cat, but not acrophobic. I can see he’d depart for the great outdoors, but we will not let him out. This territory is dangerous and unfamiliar to a timid cat. Besides we rarely see cats roaming the streets these days. Nightly curfews and the like and so many people deciding cats are better off indoors even if the cats dislike it, to preserve other small creatures in the dark.
We have cared for many cats over the course of our years in this household. Tillie, Pickles, Chan Cho, Molly and Anoushka among others whose names escape me, but they will come back when I ask for reminders.
Cats rabbits, frogs, birds, and more recently two dogs who moved out with my daughter and her partner some time ago rehomed in Preston.
People can map their lives over the course of their pets. When I was a child there were cats. So many I can’t remember any names, only I have photos of me carrying a kitten in our backyard. But for me most significant of all was Peta, the black mongrel cross between know not what.
We loved him, but he being a female kept getting pregnant and the story goes, a woman up the road volunteered to take him off our hands and have him spayed to spare the unwanted litters of puppies and my mother agreed.
With all her many children in her care she could not be persuaded otherwise. And we kids had no say in the matter. At least as far as I could tell. Peter loved to chase cars up and down the street ats they rounded the corner into Wentworth Avenue. He knew to run close by their tyres but far enough away to stay safe. It was heart attack material to watch.
I have a strange day ahead. I will help one of my daughters prepare her house for the arrival of her newborn, due any day now, though officially not for at least two months. But this little one might need to enter the world sooner than ideal because her mother’s health is compromised through high blood pressure, that thing they call pre-eclampsia.
It happened to my elder sister seven months pregnant with her first, a child conceived out of wedlock to a priest. A scandalous story. A life and death story. She had travelled to Tasmania to hide the fact after she discovered she was pregnant. Staying with a catholic family there and helping with their children as her pregnancy advanced.
I thought she had gone off on an adventure to Tasmania to teach. I was sixteen years old and she not much off twenty. But she could not bear to bring shame upon herself and her family it seems and this is what young women did during the 1960s if they fell pregnant without husbands, especially Catholic ones.
But she could not stay away and when she returned revealing all, my mother let her stay with us. We were then living away from our father. A whole year in a shack in Parkdale near the beach. A rental my elder brother had organised to help our mother escape our father, but she could not leave him for long.
In this year my sister’s pregnancy unfolded. She stayed in a small bungalow in the back garden attached to this shack and one day called my mother with a splitting headache, a sure sign. My mother went with her to the hospital and for several days my sister was lost in a coma.
The baby died and she nearly joined her. A little girl whom my sister never saw. Another helpless decision in those years. For my sister at least. Dead babies were shipped away never to be seen. Buried in a communal grave somewhere near the women’s hospital. So many lost souls.
And such grim territory while we await this next little one.
Life and death and I’m struck all the time by how precarious life can be. I hold my Rosie beads to my chest and hope for the best. May this little girl live a good long life and may she help to make the world a better place. Simply by her presence.
