The posthumous godfather
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Dear Joan,
I hope this finds you and the rest of your family well. I’ve been thinking of you often since David’s funeral, but particularly in the last three and a half weeks. Three and a half weeks ago something awful happened—while I don’t want to distress you, I feel like I need to tell you because I have an odd request to make of you. If it is too much, please just let this letter go by the by and I promise never to pester you again, and apologise for pestering in the first place. But grief is a strange thing which can make you behave quite oddly, so I feel compelled to write on the off-chance that you don’t mind.
Three and a half weeks ago I was involved in a serious car accident. I had been driving to my dad’s house with my partner Rima (who you met briefly at David’s funeral) and two of Rima’s daughters (my stepdaughters) in the car. I was 34 weeks pregnant—with a baby we had been planning and trying for for about four years via assisted conception.
Four of us survived the crash, but our baby did not. We were sent to three different hospitals—all injured but thankfully with no serious brain or spinal injuries. We are still recovering now, and will be for some time. I am writing because in the days after our little daughter died, the thought which was driving me mad with grief was the thought of her being alone—crying and not understanding why we were not there to comfort her. No baby should be alone and uncared for.
And then, after I thought my heart would burst with tears, a little comforting thought came to me. I thought, this is why parents give their children godparents—to care for their child when they are not able to. And that, wherever our baby is, we would need to find godparents in that place to hold her and to explain to her how much we love her and how badly we wished we could care for her ourselves, but that a terrible thing had happened—not her fault and not our fault—which had stranded us in different worlds.
So we needed to think of godparents who were in the same place as our little girl. We first thought of Rima’s cousin, who was like a brother to Rima, and passed away very suddenly in April 2008. We also thought about a dear family friend of mine in the UK, who had died of breast cancer nearly two years ago, and who had been like a mother to me at several times in my life when I really needed her.
And I thought of course of David. Because David really was more like a godparent than a mentor to me in his generosity with his time, energy and guidance. He shaped my teaching, my research and my writing more than I realised at the time, but was also incredibly supportive in his personal capacity.
I imagine he might make a slightly gruff, but very loving and extremely knowledgeable and protective godfather for our daughter. We would be honoured if you felt able to give your consent as earthly guardian of David’s memory.
I’m not sure what your beliefs are on what happens after death, so I sincerely hope this request is not an offensive one. Up until now I’d had the luxury of never having to think too hard about it. I’m still quite fuzzy about it but I realise I do believe that souls go somewhere, and that where that somewhere is really doesn’t have too much to do with what religion the person has followed during their life. I really hope that this is the case, because the three people we would like to have as Z’s godparents are each of different faiths—Ahmed Muslim, Rosie Christian and David Jewish. If this godparent arrangement ‘works’, at the very least she will be well educated in the religions of the book!
My partner Rima has similar beliefs to mine, but within the framework of the faith she was raised within—Islam. It was very important to her that our child be Muslim (at least until she could make a decision for herself) so we have given her Muslim rites and an Arabic name.
This is all a lot to take in. Please have a think about our request—if there is any more information you need to know please let me know. Or, if it is easier, you may wish to talk with Rosalind (who also came and spoke at David’s funeral).
We are having a multi-faith memorial service for our little girl on Sunday, 7 February down at Somers on the Mornington Peninsula. We have included an invitation and you would be very welcome, but please don’t feel obliged to come. I realise interstate travel is expensive and disrupting. If you are happy for us to nominate David as a godparent, we will include something brief in the ceremony to this effect. We’re not sure how cryptic we will be about it—the whole concept (as you can see from this letter) takes a bit of explaining.
If you could let us know either way before the 7th of February—either directly or via Rosalind—that would be much appreciated.
With love and the fondest of memories of David,
Hannah
•
Prior to our accident, my longest stay in hospital had been as a seven year old. I’d always complained of ‘tummy aches’, but the winter my baby sister was born, the tummy aches got worse, and were eventually diagnosed as recurrent kidney infections. My mum realised that this wasn’t an ordinary tummy ache when I couldn’t leave the couch, squirming and weeping with the pain. Even the novelty of having a doctor come to our house was only a minor distraction from the dull but intense ache in my side. Once the kidney infection was diagnosed and being treated, I underwent an unpleasant test involving a catheter, an isotope and an X-ray machine, and it was revealed I had a congenital defect. The ureter on my right side was misplaced, and was allowing urine to flow back up to the kidney; hence the recurrent infections and damage to that part of the kidney. I was going to need an operation to correct the ureter and to remove the damaged part.
At seven, I was delighted by this news. In primary-school currency, a broken arm or leg brought instant popularity; the thought of hospital and an Operation (just like the 1980s electric board game!) made my small mind explode with the possibilities. Indeed, when the Operation was delayed a week, I turned up to school, and everyone was making get-well-soon cards for me and hastily had to hide them away. I still have the photo of all those cards Blu-tacked around my hospital bed, with me grinning smugly in my new pyjamas in the middle of them all, clutching my Care Bear—another hospital trophy.
It was in that hospital bed that I learned to read properly. Not to spell out letters or say the words; I’d learned how to do that at school. But to read—to breathe in a story, to weave your own dreams from its dangling threads, to leap wholeheartedly and without realising you’ve leapt into another person’s world. At the start of my week in hospital, my parents took turns reading to me; by the end of the week, I was reading to them.
The book was The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren—it still rates as one of my favourite books of all time. It didn’t strike me until recently that perhaps a book that starts with two little boys dying might be considered morose reading for a seven year old in hospital. But it wasn’t morose, not in the least, because dying was just the kicking-off point for marvellous adventures for these kids, in a world where they could fight dragons, and lead revolutions, and learn that sometimes, even people you loved failed you. This wasn’t ‘heaven’ and it certainly wasn’t a cushy affair with clouds, harps and eternal life. In my pink pyjamas and with my seven-year-old certainty, I wasn’t scared of dying, and I didn’t find out until years later what a close thing it had been, for a moment there. But when my grandparents died, I thought of them as there, in Astrid Lindgren’s Nangijala, going on with their slightly more adventurous lives and sending us a dove every now and then.
I hit a snag, though, in another hospital room twenty-six years later, when the buzz of medical people doing things to various remote parts of me had stopped at last, and I was left alone, and with-it enough, to think for the first time since the accident. My belly was still so swollen, but not with Z—so where was she? We’d just farewelled her cold little face, so where was my moving, hiccuping baby? What exactly did I believe happened after death? Rubber, meet Road.
I’d been to Sunday school and to church with my parents for a short period, but none of it rang true for me. If I had to sit through a Christian service, I would find myself going in argumentative circles in my head. So if I couldn’t bring myself to believe in heaven or hell, could I believe in Nangijala? Another life, just as mortal and complex as our own, with some familiar characters but different props? It seemed to work okay for my grandparents, but what about Z? She was too small for adventures, too small for riding horses and fighting dragons. She was still too small to be away from me and my heartbeat, or even to know how the whole communication-via-doves thing works. If small babies have trouble knowing that their parents still exist when they play peek-a-boo, then what hope did Z have of knowing how much we loved her, stranded as she was from us by death?
All I could think of was her wailing, in a rustic-looking basket on someone’s stone doorstep, and her little hands searching, and rustling the swaddling clothes. Someone would come, of course, but who? Some anonymous pre-modern wet nurse? I couldn’t work out which was worse—to think of her annihilated and stopped forever, or to think of her continuing on without us, lost and disconnected. Both scenarios made me howl and choke.
This was why I had to invent the idea of godparents, to populate her imaginary world with people we loved, who knew us and who could tell her how much we loved her, who could sort out doves for her. It kind of worked, but it still felt like an invention, a delusion to make things feel okay. And it still tore my heart to imagine her crying, and not being able to pick her up.
The week after I had been released from rehab, I sat down to write my rather odd letter to Joan Philips, the mother of the late David Philips, who had supervised my master’s thesis, and who had employed me in the history department for four years as a sessional tutor while I was finishing my MA and law degree. David was South African. After doing his first degree, at the University of Witwatersrand, he’d won a Rhodes Scholarship to study for his PhD at Oxford. He was passionately involved in the anti-apartheid movement and decided he did not want to return to South Africa while that regime prevailed. So he took a job at the University of Melbourne, where (a couple of decades on) I encountered him in a first-year subject on comparative colonial history. He was an imposing man—an associate professor by that stage—and he unapologetically took up space both physically and intellectually, and demanded that you, in turn, stand your ground and explain your position. He was fierce, but funny and good hearted. In a year when I was heartbroken from breaking up with my first girlfriend, David and my co-supervisor, Pat Grimshaw, helped me refocus on the thesis and get it written.
In August 2008, David had just retired, and was on holiday in Broome, when he died suddenly of a heart attack. Rosalind Hearder, a friend and colleague who’d taught with David and me, called. I was delighted to hear from her, but when I heard her tone, my heart dropped. It hadn’t occurred to me that David wouldn’t be here forever, and there were so many things I’d neglected to tell him. Rosalind and I asked David’s family if we could attend his funeral, and offered to say something on behalf of his students and university colleagues. David’s mother, Joan, welcomed us, and so we went along to the funeral, and spoke briefly about David and his significant impact on our lives and the lives of his students and colleagues.
Eighteen months later, the January after our accident, I was thinking a lot about David. He appeared in one of my dreams, in the crowds outside Shea Stadium in New York, which we’d visited in the months after he died. I was shocked to see him and said, ‘David, I thought you were dead.’ He guffawed at the idea and said, in his characteristic style, ‘Hannah, you are clearly incorrect!’
Joan wrote back, giving her blessing for us to appoint David as a posthumous godfather to our daughter, and recommending we go see the movie Invictus, which she thought he would have loved. The night before the memorial, I dug through the filing cabinet in the garage to find a page with his handwriting on it—the first page of the final draft of my master’s thesis. Seeing his lead-pencil handwriting, I blinked. I could see his office; I’d always have to move a pile of books so I could lean my notepad on the desk to take notes during our meetings.
We took the page with us to Somers. There, my dad folded it into a paper aeroplane and gave it several maiden flights before the service, when we buried it with Z’s ashes.
•
For a while after the memorial, the sadness made me paper-thin. Just breathing, opening my eyes and looking at my surviving loved ones felt so hard. I was glad of the automatic breathing reflex, because I certainly couldn’t have bothered doing it consciously. The rich smell of lillies pervaded our house. Not everyone had got the ‘no flowers, just donate to Oxfam’ memo, and I couldn’t just throw them out. They were beautiful. They were tangible expressions of love and sorrow. But watching them open, spill their pollen and slowly die, was less heartwarming. Still life, indeed. We’d had enough of that.
The memorial was hard but good—in a painfully satisfying way. We felt so loved, by everyone who came, and by everyone who didn’t come but sent messages or cards. It felt strangely like a wedding (perhaps because my dad and stepmum got married there nearly twelve years before), except for the volume of the weeping. We may not have been allowed our own wedding in this country, but Rima and I were now wedded in this grief.
An hour before the service started, I left things in everyone else’s hands and hobbled off to the beach with Rima, my sister and my brother. Jez and I went in the water—him rapidly, like an otter (his stubbly beard adding to the otter impression), and me slowly, letting the water lap its way up my broken body. It was warmer than usual, crystal clear and with very little seaweed.
I dived down and opened my eyes, feeling for the bottom with my hands. I came up, rolled onto my back and let myself float. How many days and hours since I last did that—but in the ocean baths in Sydney, and with Haloumi also floating inside me? And I thought of the spectacle I presented then, with my belly popping above the water like a fleshy island. The girls had thought it was hilarious when I took them to the pool and did backstroke; my belly sinking and rising with each stroke.
Now my fleshy island was just a wrinkly belly below the surface. I sobbed and let my tears mingle with the big, salty sorrow of the sea.
And, as always happens when I float like that, I realised that I’d stopped being aware of time, and was startled back into myself. When I opened my eyes and rolled over, Jez was floating right there beside me.
Somehow, time disappeared and, although we’d arrived about two hours early, we didn’t get a chance to test the music system, with the result that none of the music played properly. We would get the first few stanzas, and then it flickered in and out and was awful to hear. The songs I’d listened to on repeat in the hospital, which had come to feel as if they were written about us and our loss, were reduced to crackling static and snatches of a tune. I was cranky about it, but Rima was philosophical and calmed me with little pats on the arm.
Afterwards, we dried our salty cheeks as we walked back from the bush chapel, and ate and laughed and hugged people we hadn’t seen for months. I had made platters and platters of haloumi and zucchini fritters. The zucchinis had gone crazy in the vegie patch we’d inherited from our tenants. A friend had asked, half-seriously, while I was still in hospital, ‘Does this mean you can never eat haloumi again? Because it will be kind of like eating her?’
‘No, no,’ I’d chided. ‘We will eat it in remembrance of her!’
The next day, there were plates of the remaining haloumi zucchini fritters in the fridge. I didn’t want to throw them out; doing so felt sacrilegious. Our friends and family had gone home with full bellies and sore eyes, and now this leftover grief was ours to continue eating, day after day, magically renewed every time we finished it, like a weepy magical pudding.
An old friend who lived interstate called—could she come and visit? Was it okay if she brought her baby daughter?
People had been extra thoughtful about not bringing babies into our presence, as though I might be allergic to them. ‘No, please bring her. That would be lovely.’
She did, and the minute she walked in the door, asked, ‘Do you want to hold her?’ I did, and we looked at the pictures of Z and talked, while fat tears dropped onto her baby’s wispy head.