The Attachment Read online

  I think that the reason for this is that the tradition I come from, the literature which is important for me, takes death seriously.

  This morning a woman came to the door with her husband. Her 94-year-old father had just died—fifteen minutes ago. He’d been sitting up large as life last night watching the footy with his son. This morning dead.

  Coming to the hospital, I anointed him. His family was there—five of them. We prayed. We talked about him. We sat round the bed. My feelings were of having a strong connection with the members of the grieving family. It was deeply human. Cuts through the other stuff that we pay so much attention to. It’s balancing somehow.

  Despite the immense varieties of belief, and the different reactions to the death of a parent, or anyone I suppose, I get the sense that prayer works.

  These are words I sometimes use in a funeral service:

  Sometimes I wonder what prayer really is.

  Well, here’s a couple of things that it is not . . .

  Prayer is not the fashioning of unfamiliar, stumbling

  words to a distant God;

  Prayer is not some form of magic

  or merely the delusions of a frightened people

  Prayer is actually a form of loving.

  It is a rich juicy language of love.

  Love of the astonishing gift of this planet

  Love of the people who have touched our lives

  Love of the mystery that has given us life and embraces us

  Throughout our journey.

  To leave a father happily caught up with a football match one minute, dead the next morning . . .

  There is something cruel about it. To be with a parent when they die may be scarifying, but it is also sacred. To have been with both parents as I was is, I imagine, quite rare.

  Dad died in a veterans’ hospital aged 75.

  At the age of nineteen, a boy from Broken Hill, he had volunteered to slog through the mud and the blood of France in ‘the war to end all wars’. In the bitter Australian campaign to regain Villers-Bretonneux, Dad’s field artillery piece was struck by an enemy shell, knocking him unconscious and leaving him with a mild but continually irritating speech stutter.

  Six months before he died, he suffered a cerebral stroke, and entirely lost his ability to speak. An earnest young therapist, ignoring the clear evidence that he only had a few weeks to live, took on the seemingly futile task of helping him regain his speech. She employed the therapy of song to restore her patient’s voice.

  When I visited, Dad would greet me with a dazzling smile like a passing car with lights on high beam, quite unlike the man I’d known. But more to the point, one morning he greeted me with a song he had learned as a WWI digger all those years before—‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’.

  He was irresistible. Lazarus coming from the tomb . . . singing!

  Don’t tell me miracles can’t happen. The care and belief of this young woman therapist gave us one. A gift to his wife and children in the last days of his life, never adequately able to be repaid.

  The singing digger died at night. Mum and I were next to him. His last battle was to breathe. His body fought to the last gasp. The song ended. The old digger slumped and left us.

  His wife of 45 years lowered her head on to his chest and broke down in grief. I had only infrequently observed any demonstrations of affection between them, and so I was taken aback by the passion of her response. It was beautiful. My own sobbing rose up from some primitive part of my body, never before visited.

  Mum lived on, placing bets, sipping whisky and squeezing every last drop from her days. She died in her 99th year. Those decades after Dad died were as packed as a bulging suitcase returning from a trip away. A woman of remarkable energy matched by a determination for life that would make an Olympic athlete pale. Her capacity ‘to party’ as kids say today, had no limits. She made friends wherever she went. In her nineties, at her frequent visits to a Sydney racecourse, she held court over her own circle of punters, mostly men, under a tree close to the Tote betting window.

  The last couple of weeks of her life were spent in a small sunny room with the Little Sisters of the Poor, a religious order of nuns who define gentleness. Who will replace them when they depart this city, a place that at times can be as tough as teak?

  The sister taking care of her called me.

  ‘She hasn’t got long to go, Father.’

  Leaving my desk, I grabbed a toothbrush and razor, and moved into her room on a mattress on the floor. Mum was not conscious, I thought—breathing from some shallow place, but not uncomfortable. Being with her brought a swirl of emotions, but strangely not all grief-laden. There was a deep feeling of being secure, somehow.

  Strange at such a time. That feeling of holding your own mother, who had been the source of so much of life’s rock-like security, while at the same time being acutely aware of the many times those very roles had been dramatically reversed.

  But the memories—ah, the memories!

  A little chap, cuddling her leg while a violent thunderstorm broke overhead, I can still feel the rough texture of the plaid skirt she was wearing. Hanging out the family washing on a windy, sunny morning—realising the difficulties associated with pegging out large sheets in the wind. Having her correct my diction in a city department store—not yeah, but YES Mummy! Insisting that I learn to play the piano, in the teeth of my equally stubborn resistance.

  I prayed. God, I prayed!

  I prayed with her as her breathing became a gentle mantra. I prayed for her with the deepest prayer of thanks that I could ever remember fashioning. I prayed the Office of the Dying—‘We shall dance and rejoice in your mercy, Lord. We shall never hope in vain.’

  I just sat and held her hand through the night.

  The morning sun splashed through the window. I felt our relationship, as mother and son, as never before. Someone brought me the morning paper, and as I sat reading, distracted by some story of cricket, a nun came to the door with a cup of tea.

  ‘I think she has slipped away, Father.’

  The stupidity of it all. She quietly left this world while I was idly glancing at the sports page. I comforted myself with the belief that her Celtic sense of the absurd would have left her with a long-suffering smile of resignation, so familiar to me, knowing the son she had raised even better than he knew himself. Ignoring her, blissfully, with my head in a newspaper.

  I don’t think that death, or at least the death I encounter professionally, makes me sad. But it sure makes me reflective. And, a faint hope . . . a little more human.

  Think I’ll get into my camino shoes and do some walking this weekend in sympathy, or empathy, or some other connecting thingy.

  Not sure how to finish this. Perhaps with a full stop.

  Ant

  Hi Tony,

  I guess death is the big full stop, isn’t it? And the memories have certainly made you reflective. I am the beneficiary today and my inheritance is the gift of your stories. Thank you so much. How could you possibly become ‘more human’, I ask myself. What could that mean?

  You are right about the privilege of being present to farewell a parent. Mum’s death was not particularly easy—they had to manage the pain, and at only 57 she still had several lives to live—but I have always been profoundly grateful that I was there with her during those final days. It was right somehow, even if it felt deeply wrong to me at the time. I wasn’t angry about it I don’t think, but I did have a strong feeling that it wasn’t just. She had such a capacity for life, when so many people seem to hang on a long time, not wanting to be here and not valuing their days. But such thoughts are pointless. A waste. She went with a kind of honour that I loved.

  I think I understand what you say about death balancing the other stuff of the week. It’s impossible to live constantly with that visceral awareness of mortality and the clarity about priorities that we feel when we lose someone, but there is no doubt that death can bring gifts to the living, whe
n and if we are able to see them. It’s much easier when someone has had a long and full life, I think. Your perspective on it is different to mine—how not, when you are so regularly with people at the end, or at funerals?—but I sense some common ground, too.

  My first close experience of death was at seventeen, when a girlfriend died of bone cancer. It was a sharp lesson for all her friends, particularly because back then the treatment was quite harsh. One of her legs was amputated. She was a beautiful creature. A kind of angel, but with mischief in her. I still think of her when I hear that Simon and Garfunkel song ‘Cecilia’—she did a dance performance to it, lighting up the stage and all who watched her.

  I lost a lot of friends in my twenties—overdoses, anorexia, and then the big one, HIV/AIDS. One day, when I have time to write it properly, I’d like to tell you about my funny friend, Greg. He died a year and a day after my seemingly unstoppable mother. I was with them both, doing some of the practical stuff that bodies need when they are letting go, in the lead-up to their deaths. I was lucky to be there.

  I’ve often marvelled that although I’ve been around a lot of death, I’ve never seen a human birth. People tell me that’s a shame, and I’m sure they are right, but I think death can be beautiful. Some find that a macabre or weird thing to say, but I have seen astonishing things, in myself and others, at the end times. I’ve seen people rise and rise.

  I’m sorry, Antonio, I must dash. I hope that the grieving family continue to hold each other—and to pray in whatever way is right for them. I’ve often looked to sunrises and sunsets and inky night skies at such times—and at the new growth on burned tree trunks, and the birds’ nests that survive. I am reminded of mystery, and comforted by new life. Doesn’t necessarily stop the tears, but they are my prayers, and they are solace of a kind.

  And while I think of it—why do we use the expression ‘reduced to tears’? What does that imply about us? I never think someone is smaller, or less, because they weep, and mostly, if I have been brought to tears, I am healed by letting them flow. Reduced? I don’t think so.

  I’m up at our shack in the goldfields. We’ve had this block of land for 23 years. It’s twelve acres of pretty stony ground, with a cedar kit-home and a dam. Sounds ordinary, and I guess to most other eyes, it is—but every inch of it has been worked over by Peter and me. Well, mostly Peter. He rakes and burns and digs. We have both carried rocks and pulled out acres of weeds, almost every year. We’ve mowed and mowed with his old Victa push-mower. And we have shared it with friends . . . so many friends . . .

  But today it is just us and the wildlife—of which there is plenty. Magpies and kookas and wee wrens calling to Pete as he piles up fallen branches for bonfires. Meanwhile, I have a pot of rhubarb, apple and ginger cooking for tomorrow’s breakfast, before I set off to walk my legs into the ground. Oh, the ground, the earth, the road. On Sunday and Monday I plan to walk more and to write while Peter will clear and burn in prep for the summer season. Rural days. A blue wren is tapping furiously at the window—a little crosspatch telling me to get on with life because it won’t wait for me.

  See what I mean about prayers? That’s another, right there.

  Here’s to sympathy, empathy and connecty things!

  Ailsa

  Ailsa,

  Rhubarb for breakfast? Don’t you know anything about sensible diet? Remember—you’re talking to a 1950s man. Porridge for breakfast and rhubarb at night.

  I like the way you interrogate language. You’re right about ‘reduced to tears’. Where did that come from? And why are men not allowed to cry? Or is it that we are not capable of crying? An echo of parental advice in the half-forgotten childhood?

  Some claim it’s not sex or survival that fundamentally drive us, but our efforts to continually try to please our mothers. For some of us old enough to have been affected by it, it may be the necessary repression that came from living through war.

  Whatever its source, there is a fully equipped sentry in many of us, standing guard over the gate that allows men’s emotions to pass through—above all, the human emotion that displays tears in public.

  Here’s a bit of theory for you, shanachie.

  I once heard—the idea has never left me, really—that we all carry heavy saddle-bags of distress. They weigh us down. Distress is an accumulation, sometimes over many years, of grief and hurt. Even caused by events that we seem to have long forgotten. Lost loves, bitter criticism, frequent put-downs, relationships we have mucked up, times we have disappointed ourselves—all manner of things leave us with what could be called distress. It sits inside us, not budging, like stones in the gall bladder. It eats at our capacity to love, our ability to say what we mean, it can even take the zest out of life.

  As little kids, we knew intuitively how to rid ourselves of this distress. Two ways. Firstly, crying. Little kids cry easily, they even throw tantrums. Secondly, they claim the attention of another person, often their mum.

  Sadly, as we grow, we are discouraged from crying—not just men, by the way. There are real constraints on women as well, I know.

  And to receive the unqualified attention of another in these grossly distracted days, is a rare event. This theory adds an interesting twist to the universal lack of people who will genuinely listen to us—it holds that the one we seek attention from is blocked by their own weight of distress.

  So, to be denied the opportunity to weep, or to deny yourself the freedom of tears, may have deeper ramifications than at first recognised. Tears do not reduce, they have the capacity to irrigate our spirit, our heart and our mind for a fuller, more liberated life.

  And after all those wise-sounding words, I still cringe when I imagine myself shedding tears. One memory sums me up . . .

  It was at Michael’s funeral. He was 90 years of age. ‘Not a bad innings,’ we consoled ourselves. He had been the parish priest at Maroubra for fifteen years, after quietly working away in other places for over six decades with his gentle human touch. He had an unnerving resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock—rotund, little turned-up nose, fairly bald—but it was the waddle that nailed it.

  I loved him. Loved him like a son loves a father.

  We had been working together for the last ten years. Lovely relaxed relationship of mutual respect thinly disguised in the familiar male manner of never losing the opportunity of ‘slagging’ one another.

  There’s another behaviour that will set you wondering, I know. Already I can hear you mulling over why it is that we show affection by disparaging those we love. It’s the Irish in us, some claim.

  Anyway, as we placed his casket in the hearse, I was totally swept away with tears. Not just wet eyes, but uncontrolled weeping, wracking sobs coming from I knew not where. That’s not the way it should be, I told myself. I’m a priest. Funerals are an important part of my ministry.

  Accompanying the deep grief of others is such a familiar experience for a priest, that a tough skin can grow over natural feelings. However regrettable it may be to admit it, it helps to hold some ‘professional’ distance, they say.

  This particular morning, none of those rules applied. I was awash. I was embarrassed, and also embarrassed at being embarrassed. I looked for some corner away from the gaze of the dozens outside the church. Big boys don’t cry. Priests have to have broad shoulders to support others, don’t they?

  An old Jewish saying holds that what soap is for the body, tears are for the soul. Well, Michael’s final gift of friendship to me was the treasure of passionate tears. They reminded me that we can’t distance ourselves from life, or from grief. Those tears enlarged me.

  Tony

  Dear Tony,

  ‘That’s a good girl. You just sit there and have a good cry.’

  I remember being told that as a little girl by my grandparents and by elderly nuns and by Mum and Dad and aunts and . . . well, everyone. I don’t know if my brothers were given the same message.

  As I got older, I did begin to feel embarrassed by tears—t
o associate them with weakness. But nonetheless, I can still let them fall when they insist. And I’m glad I can. I’m not a weeper, but boy do I understand, in my cells, the release they bring. The change. And yes, the expansion.

  Thanks so much for the story of your Michael. He must have been quite a man.

  Now, to change the tone, pilgrim . . .

  I’m writing to you out of left field! It’s looking like I may come to Sydney for a flying visit very early next Friday morning, and leave on Sunday. Any chance of a sighting?

  Ailsa

  Great news!

  Saturday morning for coffee or lunch—I have a wedding at 3 pm—or late afternoon 4/5.30, is fine. Sunday is a somewhat crowded day.

  You’ll recognise me from my walking sandals and my staff.

  Tony

  PS Have you heard the saying that there are three things that can cure anything—sweat, tears or seawater. All of them salt.

  I think it might be true.

  Dear Tony,

  Yippee! 11 am on Saturday will be grand. I’m staying in Lewisham and need to be in Elizabeth Bay at 1 or 1.30, so that gives us plenty of time. I’d suggest a mini-camino, but won’t have my boots—or a staff, sadly. We will have to make do with city sitting. I await instructions!

  And now I might go and sweat around the block in celebration.

  Ailsa

  PS You wrote—‘Sunday is a somewhat crowded day.’

  Ha ha! Funny man.

  But tell me, out of interest, what does a typical Sunday usually involve?

  Ailsa,

  Sunday in the trenches—would you seriously like to know?

  It’s busy with people and events, but it always comes with a buzz. We have three masses here at Rose Bay and a Saturday afternoon mass at Dover Heights. Five or six hundred people. Then there will be two or three baptisms after the 10 am service. They will bring their own gang. It’s never dull. Kids everywhere.