Good mourning

Grief makes people uncomfortable. I have discovered this because my sweet lovely mother died on the 17th of January – just over two weeks ago now.

We’re encouraged to feel certain emotions – love and happiness for example are perfectly acceptable. But grief, sadness and mourning have to be swept out of sight.

On the day of my mother’s death when we were still numb with shock, people who genuinely wished us well said, ‘You wouldn’t want her to go on, would you? She was ill and she was a good age.’

And I wouldn’t want her to have gone on any longer. She’d suffered enough. My mother died at 84, a very good age, after an uncommonly good life. She had known sadness too, but she was aware of her good fortune. Her death is not a tragedy. But it’s nevertheless a loss – a huge one for us, her family, who will never know again her warm smile, her embrace, her handwriting on a carefully chosen birthday card, her eggplant dish or her chocolate mousse; in short, her love.

‘But you have so many good memories,’ they said. ‘The world doesn’t stop turning, move on.’ And those things are true too. But don’t we owe her – and perhaps even more, don’t we owe ourselves – this period of mourning?

Pardon us if we inconvenience you by our occasional tears, our sighs, our desire to slow down for a while. Where are you all going in such a hurry anyway? What are you so afraid of? Is it Death’s fetid breath that you smell? Is that what we remind you of?

My daughters tell me there’s a formula for how long the breakup of a romance is allowed to hurt. A day for a week or a week for a month; some allowance, anyway, that’s made for the pain caused by the end of a relationship with some boy whose name you’ll probably have trouble remembering eventually. So where’s the formula for a whole life of being loved, worried about, laughed and cried with? A day for a year? Two? Three?

What sort of human beings would we be if we didn’t mourn, or mourned for only a day or three? How could we ever experience true joy then? How would we ever be deserving of true joy?

Perhaps grief is so frightening and discomforting because we’re afraid of seeing how small and fragile our lives really are measured against forever.

I don’t like it either. I don’t like reminders of death and I don’t enjoy feeling grief: it’s a painful messy emotion. But I did love my mother and I know that I owe her this, and that my facing up to it will be her final gift to me. Thanks for it all, Mum

In a Jam

Last night I made my second batch of raspberry jam for the season. This is the easiest jam to make because raspberries have so much natural pectin, and one of the nicest because of its riotous pink colour and sweet yet tart flavour.

I weighed equal quantities of fruit and sugar and while the sugar warmed on the rack above the woodstove, I cooked the berries on low heat for several minutes, mashing them and pouring in some water so they didn’t stick.

I added the weighed sugar to the berries, stirring well to ensure it was completely absorbed and then moved the pot to the hottest hotplate where I boiled it furiously for about three minutes.

I tested to see if it was ready by putting a small dob on a saucer that I’d had in the freezer. But raspberry jam sets quickly so I didn’t fret too much over testing. Oh, and I skimmed the froth off too.

The hardest part of making this jam is keeping birds and people away from the fruit. And it's best served spread on a slice of freshly baked bread. Yummo!

The Cure

This is the time of year we here in Mole Creek suffer from an acute form of hay fever. This condition involves constant observation and discussion of the weather and an inability to make firm plans, and is only cured by a barn full of hay.

Yesterday was the day. We were on standby for the call from the baler and as soon as it came we swung into action. I was in charge of driving and ropes.

We’d discussed and planned the manoeuvre for weeks – who’d do what and what equipment we’d need. We even took torches in case we had to finish unloading in the dark.

Our team of five swarmed across the paddock, and by dark we were already inside toasting our success, the hay barn replenished and ready for winter.

We’d suffered from hay fever for weeks, but as always the cure was actually enjoyable, working together against time and the weather, and now we can relax and enjoy the summer like everyone else. Except maybe for the fire-fighters.

Same old same old

Recently I met up with an old writer friend. She told me that she’d been struggling for weeks with an impossibly unwieldy chapter, until suddenly she realised it was actually two chapters. Once she realised that, she said, the pieces pulled apart easily at a natural division.

I loved her story because that had just happened to me too, and not for the first time.

The other thing she said was that she’s been doing anything to postpone writing because it seemed too difficult, but finally she got down to it and it wasn’t as hard as she'd feared. She discovered yet again that the only way to do the work is to do the work.

Me too, I thought. I just have to get down and start it, no matter how afraid of it I am.

I’m afraid of the history chapters in my book. I find them so daunting to write I was even hoping my publisher would tell me I didn’t have to write them, that the book would be better off without them!

Funny how you need to learn the same things over and over again and also how universal these issues are.

Alzheimer's: A Love Story

I’ve sold my book about my mother's Alzheimer's. (This is not a picture of my mother, but of Alois Alzheimer who discovered the disease.) The book's working title is Alzheimer's: A Love Story.

I originally thought I’d wait until I finished the first draft before sending it off to a publisher, but I changed my mind. I began to feel that I needed editorial assistance with the structure, and without that I thought I’d waste a lot of time.

I submitted the first ten chapters to Scribe, the first publisher on my list, and three days later they offered me a contract.

They called it ‘impressive and moving’. Yippee!

It makes me nervous. This book that thus far has belonged only to me now has to answer to the outside world. But I’m thrilled and excited too, and I look forward to working on it with an editor. And of course to seeing it in the hands of readers.

Writing As Therapy

People often make a sympathetic face when they learn I am writing a book about my mother's Alzheimer's. 'That must be therapeutic for you,' they say.

I find that condescending and insulting. How would they like it if I said to them, 'Oh, plumbing/social work/law/medicine, eh? That must be therapeutic for you,' as though all their training, experience and professionalism was cast aside in the drive to make themselves feel better.

I like writing or I wouldn't do it, but it's work to take my own particular experience and shape and form it so that a fragment gives the impression of being my whole life in a way that illuminates for the reader their own.

Lying on the sofa this cold wet Saturday afternoon, I read this in Robyn Rowland's essay in the current Meanjin:

The writing of poetry is lived. It is not something we do, but something we are. It requires a life of observation, an openness to experience, an ability to empathise, an engagement with the transforming power of image and metaphor. It requires a moment when the self is put aside, akin to meditation: an absenting of the self, so that the poem may appear...It also requires technique....Then comes the real work - the shaping, the editing.

If writing is personal, is it cathartic? When people say, 'it must have been really cathartic to write that', it irritates me. It's a statement that casts poetry into the realms of therapy and creative writing is not therapy. It's an art. One that requires practice and patience and skill. Yes, the writing might be therapeutic in that it might uncover for us our own understanding of what we feel or believe. But that individual experience needs to be made universal so that it reaches out to the next person.

Fiction as truth

This evening I watched Australian Story, about Richard Flanagan, the Tasmanian novelist. As a writer, as a person and as a Tasmanian, I found it very inspiring.

It seems funny in a way that a fiction writer is such a steadfast truth teller, but I think telling the truth is what good fiction does.

Flanagan is a brave man who has written some of the best journalism I’ve read. He has spoken without hysteria against a corrupt and vindictive government and its allies in big business. You might think that’s no big deal, but sadly, in Tasmania, it is.