WAGGA, APRIL 2012
David won the battle so I will be leaving him for just over two weeks and honouring my commitment to the Indian trek. We decide to drive to Wagga and check out the radiation clinic and Lilier Lodge, the guest facility where he will be staying. It will ease my mind to have a mental picture of where David will be staying while I’m away. We make a mini-holiday of it, being on the road for three days just a week before I’m due to fly to India. We stay overnight in a motel, have a country town dinner, explore the countryside and enjoy some precious time together. I suddenly recall the name of a woman from this region who came on one of my China trips more than twenty years ago. She was a marvellous soul, full of life and fun, and I decide to contact her and see if she can spend some time with David during that first seven days when he’s alone – before I’m able to join him.
Then all too soon I’m on the early morning flight to Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, and feeling anxious because for the first time I just don’t seem mentally or physically prepared to meet the eager trekking group that will arrive over the next two days. I’m fretting about David, worrying how his body and, more importantly, his mind, will be coping with the assault of radiation.
For those who love India, as I do, it’s thrilling to step off a bus or a train or a jeep onto the main street of Darjeeling and realise you have time-travelled back to the era of the British Raj: the colonial hill station architecture; the sprawling, grand old hotels that serve high tea every afternoon; the Christian church spires and British-style boarding schools that still thrive – these days filled with aspirational students from Kolkata and Delhi. Darjeeling has a turbulent history and a fascinating mix of people and cultures from the surrounding regions of Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and the plains of Bengal.
It’s a well-preserved reminder of what is promoted as a ‘romantic’ past but in truth was a maelstrom of upheavals, uprisings, and political and economic power struggles. The tension continues to this day as the militant Gorkha movement agitates for autonomy.
At an attitude of 2100 metres, it was the temperate climate and pleasing views of the mountains that first convinced the British to create a summer escape from the hellish heat of Calcutta, as Kolkata was then called. Our charming hotel – the Cedar Inn – is very Raj-style with gabled dormers decorated with ornate trims. On arrival we’re served fine china cups of local tea before being taken to our spacious rooms, each with an open fireplace for winter guests. The hotel has fantastic views but that comes with a steep walk up and down from the main shopping street. If the mist lifts, it reveals the world’s third-highest mountain, Kangchenjunga, in all its glory. It will take a day or two to acclimatise before the next stage – the trek into Sikkim – so we spend our time walking from one end of the township to the other. Many of the buildings are slightly decayed but this only adds to the charm. There’s a gymkhana club, a district library crammed with ancient tomes, several traditional churches and cemeteries with names like St Andrew’s and St Paul’s, a Loreto College, a posh Tea Planter’s Club and a UNESCO-listed railway station. All cheek by jowl with Buddhist monasteries, Hindu temples, a Tibetan refugee centre and the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute where all the guides for our various adventures have been trained.
The British left India in 1947 when Partition ended Crown rule but a few brave souls remained in Darjeeling and many other parts of the country with their families – the children who were born here wouldn’t have known any other life. Every so often I catch a glimpse of an elderly, neatly dressed Englishwoman – eighty-five years plus – out and about shopping, laughing and chatting with the locals, and walking slowly up and down all these steep streets without footpaths. In a local bookshop I discover a delightfully well-written account of these remnants of the period, complete with photographs of dignified men and women, some obviously now living in genteel poverty, sipping tea and talking about their lives in this faraway corner of the world. I completely understand why they decided to stay. It’s such a captivating place, and for those born in India, being outcasts sent to live in England would have been anathema.
Then there are the tea plantations. As a tea lover I have mixed feelings about the picture-perfect rolling landscape of hillsides smothered with neatly clipped Camellia sinensis tended by teams of local women colourfully dressed in saris. It’s pleasing to the eye, but the underlying story reflects the downside of colonialisation. As the species name (sinensis) suggests, the original tea plant was smuggled out of China by plant hunters and controversially introduced to India in the 1830s as a hugely profitable agricultural crop. The history of the British and plant exploration or exploitation, whichever way you like to look at it, is politically and ethically not a palatable one. Although the tea plantations of Darjeeling are vital to the regional economy, the conditions for the women who tend and harvest the crops are far from ideal. They rise very early to pluck leaf tips before the heat of the day, then return to the fields again in the evening. Their wages are meagre considering the retail price of the product.
Our local guides take us through an extraordinary and cavernous old tea processing factory, where the freshly plucked leaf tips are half-dried, rolled, fermented, sorted, graded and then packaged. I’m not a coffee drinker – never have been – so here I’m in a tea lover’s paradise. I buy packets and packets of variously graded leaves to take home, both as gifts and to enjoy drinking myself. Darjeeling tea is sublime; possibly the best in the world. At the Cedar Inn you can order early morning bed tea – my most treasured indulgence. At 6.30 am a man arrives (I leave the door unlocked) with a silver tray and teapot, a fine china cup and saucer and one plain digestive biscuit. I’m still warmly tucked up as he places the tray at the foot of my bed and sweetly pours the fragrant tea. I can’t imagine a more blissful way to start the day and it reminds me of how things are at home, with David bringing me tea in bed every morning.
This is a different group from my typical botanical treks. Yoga is the focus, and that brings a distinctive group dynamic – mostly women of a certain age who like adventure and love yoga. They are relishing Darjeeling, but after two days we get organised and head up to Sikkim, home of the nature-loving Lepchas. Sikkim was once a kingdom and it, too, was affected by British colonisation, becoming a protectorate. We have to hand over our passports and be issued with visas before entering the ornate gateway that marks the beginning of our journey into the mountains.
We are met by our trekking crew – cooks, porters, guides and the horsemen who wrangle the ponies that will carry our gear. It’s all very civilised, really. We carry light daypacks – just an emergency raincoat, hat, sunscreen, water, camera. The porters and cooks go ahead with the tents, the food and our luggage so by the time we’ve huffed and puffed up the side of the mountain our tents are up, the kettle is boiled for tea and the ponies are grazing all around us. The trek is from the village of Yuksam to Dzongri, which is just over 4000 metres above sea level. The views are sublime, and we pass hillsides of dwarf rhododendrons and delightful villages where the local children rush out to greet us.
Although trekking can be tough at times, there is unquestionably a meditative aspect to the rhythm of our walking. Time for talking, too, as we gradually ascend, and also to stop and take photographs and soak up the beauty around us. We are a small group of eight, which makes it possible to bond with everyone along the way. At various times I walk alongside and talk with each person, sharing some of my funny and encouraging anecdotes from previous treks. I have an oft-repeated mantra: ‘Trekking is more in your head than in your legs’. At the beginning of every trek a few individuals can be daunted at the prospect of lengthy walks uphill at altitude, and this expresses itself in a fear of ‘holding everyone up’ or ‘slowing down the pace’. In groups, people always walk at differing paces and I’m happy if we spread out a little – each mini group with a guide nearby. These treks should never be seen as a race or a competition. It’s an experience to be savoured, not a gruelling ordeal to be endured. If you walk too fast you miss the scenery along the way, all the small things like birds and miniature alpine plants. This trip has the added bonus of two yoga sessions a day; the first before breakfast to loosen our limbs for the walk ahead; the second after we have wound down a little, and before the evening meal is served. Sunrise and sunset. It’s deeply satisfying for all involved. Everyone makes it to camp each day and I love the expressions on the faces when we first catch sight of those orange tents in the distance.
I get to know one delightful woman from Melbourne who lost her comparatively young husband to cancer several years before. I confide in her, describing my fears for David. Her insights into that period between diagnosis and death are fascinating to me, and her pragmatic empathy is a great comfort. She and her husband had such a different journey. They went to seminars and workshops on death and dying and they tried a range of alternative treatments and management regimes. They had counselling and did meditation. It seems to me that all David and I are doing is avoiding any discussion of what lies ahead. Oh, and having afternoon naps. It’s comforting to know that I’m not alone in this harrowing reality and I’m grateful to be living at a time when we can discuss death and dying more openly, and share knowledge and ideas. When I was growing up in the 1950s, cancer was such a terrifying concept nobody ever spoke about it. People who were sick and dying of cancer were hidden from sight and only mentioned after they had politely died.
I’m glad I went on this trek. Even though it has taken me away from David during a critical time of his treatment, it’s given me some much-needed thinking time, a little distance and a lot of strength.
I don’t carry a lot of technology when I travel, especially on treks to remote places. I have an old Australian mobile which I switch off most of the time, and I don’t want the hassle of carrying a laptop. Back in Darjeeling after the trek, I ask the hotel for access to a computer so I can send an email to David. When we visited Wagga where he is having the radiation he sussed out an excellent local library which had a well equipped computer room. He planned to drop in once or twice a day to keep in touch with our children and his wide circle of film industry friends. Like a lot of blokes in his age group, David was slow to embrace technology, but once he got the hang of sending and receiving emails and playing around with Google, there was no stopping him. He’s definitely an obsessive, so I know he will have been spending hours and hours every day at the library.
In my email I describe Darjeeling and the trek in Sikkim in some detail – the people and the scenery with a few amusing anecdotes, such as the herd of goats who chewed our wet washing draped over the bushes in the late afternoon sun, thrown in for fun. Several hours later I check for a return email and, sure enough, there’s a long, newsy letter from him. He seems in great spirits, saying the place he’s staying is marvellous and that he’s bonded with the other patients and also spent lots of time with my old tour buddy, Olga, who he describes as ‘an absolute gem’. She has cooked him soups and baked cakes, and they go out for coffee every day. I breathe a sigh of relief because he hasn’t slumped into melancholia, although I’m still very anxious to get back to Sydney and catch the flight down to Wagga to join him.
I see him standing behind the fence at the small country airport to meet me, grinning ear to ear. How many times has he come to pick me up after a trek, waving from the safety barrier? We hug; a long, hard hug. The patient accommodation at the clinic is attractive, comfortable and homely. We have a large en suite bedroom with an outdoor sitting area, television and small dining table if we decide to eat alone, a huge communal sitting room with television and a well-stocked library. There’s also a kitchen large enough for four or five people to cook at the same time and a long, shared dining room table. We go shopping and I start cooking – all his favourite soups and stews and baked custards.
A bus picks us up every morning to transfer us to the radiation clinic. The drivers are volunteers – cheery older retired blokes mostly – who personalise this service with humour. The procedure is speedy with virtually no waiting time. I’m beginning to think that David’s decision to opt for rural rather than big-city care is an intelligent one. It’s friendlier and more personal. I wonder if patients and their carers feel lost in a big city hospital or clinic.
The next two weeks are spent enjoying country life, although David is starting to feel the acute effects of the radiation. We were warned that radiation would stir things up – agitate the tumour – so we were mentally prepared. David finds it increasingly hard to swallow food and Dr Death’s prediction of starvation haunts me. I make softer food – what my Mum would have called invalid food in the old days – but loaded with flavour. His tastebuds are still working and he enjoys his strong coffee, his creamy soups and the odd gin and tonic. I get to know some of his new friends. It’s a strangely convivial time.
Driving back to the farm after the treatment’s ended, we don’t rush, meandering and enjoying pretty country towns where we stop for food, coffee or beer along the way. Now at home we face the reality of the months ahead – the chemotherapy. This is described as the most traumatic stage of cancer treatment as the drugs take a huge toll on the human body while they are attacking the malignant cells. I’m not sure about David, but I’m dreading the prospect of seeing him suffer through this.
By the time he’s due to start the eight rounds of chemotherapy, there’s no longer a permanent specialist visiting rural Bathurst so we’ve been referred to one in Sydney.
Our response to meeting this doctor is a revelation – we instantly feel confident with him and his treatment approach. He is honest and practical, yet offers hope of a decent quality of life, and encouragement like this is essential for us at this critical time, both mentally and physically.
David establishes an immediate rapport with him and his upbeat approach – he couldn’t be more different from Dr Death.
Among many things, our new doctor gives us advice about the toxicity of the drugs being used, pointing out the dangers of my coming in contact with any of David’s body fluids – saliva, blood, urine or semen. In a roundabout way he is warning us that, as David’s carer and wife, I need to be cautious about any intimate contact. It’s obvious that for six months sex will be completely out of the question. I expect he is more accustomed to giving this sort of advice to much younger patients and their partners but he is covering all the bases. It gives us pause for thought.
While in Sydney we visit our newest grandchild – our tenth – a precious little girl named Alena who is the firstborn of David’s son Tony and his wife, Leslie. She’s exquisite, just a few days old and I’m struck by the importance of this new generation in helping us to come to terms with what we are going through. David hasn’t reached that stage yet, of appreciating the importance of being able to let go and hand on to our children and grandchildren. This new life touches me deeply, reassuring me that what we are facing is simply what nature intends. That we are just part of the normal cycle of life, and that death is just one more step in this cycle.
It’s all very well and good for me to think this way – I’m not the one with cancer cells bouncing around and destroying my body.