A LONG TIME AGO, but still barely more than ten years, I had another life. In the fast lane. But death changed all that. My brother, John, and my husband, Paul, slid slowly away within three days of each other and nothing was ever the same. Grief sent me mad for a while, although I only understand that now.
I blunted the razor edge of loss in the shadowy secrecy of an illicit affair and the bottom of a wine bottle – or two or three.
Which is just about as ugly as it gets. Was that the goal, I sometimes wonder, when I look back? To wipe myself out, forever?
Then one day I sat across a desk from a doctor and heard the words we all dread. 'You have cancer,' he said. 'It's malignant.'
There it was. Wipe-out. And I finally understood I didn't really want the end at all. Such hideous irony, that I needed the threat of death to fall in love with life. Ironic, too, that cancer gave me a wisdom I doubt I would have learned otherwise. Life is precious. Catastrophes happen. Make every moment count.
In those first terrifying days after my diagnosis, I hesitantly stretched one foot forward. Gently tapped the earth with my toes. Like my mother does now she is old, making sure there are no bumps and she won't fall. And I began again. No falls for me, not this time.
By some strange, miraculous stroke of – what? Luck? Fate? Maybe both. It certainly had nothing to do with good planning – I bought a boxy, pale-green tin house on the edge of a secluded bay about forty-five minutes north of Sydney's CBD. Waterfront property usually costs the earth. Not this home, though, because most people want to drive into a garage at the end of the day, not jump into a small, unstable aluminium boat to navigate dark waters in the blue light of the moon. Friends told me I was mad. 'Too isolated,' they insisted. 'Who wants to go home by boat? Where will you find an early morning café latte? How can you manage without restaurants?' As if they were the fabric of life. I ignored their dire warnings. Risked everything. Because sometimes that's the only way to ever make a real commitment.
My tin shed hovered over the green waters of Lovett Bay, close to where a creek named Salvation tumbled in a delicate waterfall to the sandy tidal flats. It is one of five bays on the western foreshores of Pittwater that spread like fingers poised to grab Scotland Island, which rises like a mossy hill out of the waters beyond. It is an ancient landscape of ragged burnt-orange escarpments, soaring sea eagles, leaping fish and timber jetties.
To get here, we park our cars at Church Point then catch a ferry or clamber into a tippy boat for the final leg home. Called 'tinnies', they are mostly banged up aluminium tubs with outboard motors hanging off the back. Pull the engine cord, grab the throttle, rev to the max, then fly through the water like a winged chariot. Laughing. Even when there's a gale and the water's so rough every wave feels like a concrete hump hit at speed.
Mostly, our houses perch about forty-five feet beyond the high tide line, which is the legal building boundary. A few older homes, though, are built at the water's edge and have historic rights to be there.
The north side of Lovett Bay, where I live, backs on to the wild Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. From a distance, it is as still as a painting. Up close, it teems with life. The bush never rests, not even at night when you hear the heavy drumbeat of wallabies on their age-old tracks, or the scream of a barking owl. And all around, always, there is the faint chorus of the water.
I moved into the tin shed only three weeks before being told I would lose a breast and all my hair. And perhaps my life. For a while, I thought I'd made a hideous mistake, that my friends had been wise after all. But slowly I learned a new set of values that had nothing to do with the fast lane, or proximity to café latte.
I learned that if you are weak of body and spirit, you can still find strength by being useful in a community, a community that takes you out of your own messy despair, re-anchors you in normality and puts you in touch with optimism. I learned that control is an illusion, that it is better to embrace change than to fight it. I learned to let go of wanting and, instead, focus on being. I learned that when you are forty years old, the best years are ahead, not behind, which is what we are so often told. I learned that when you are past fifty, adventure lurks in every moment if you look for it. I learned that it is cynicism that kills passion, not age. And after a lifetime of flitting, I learned where I belonged. And with whom. I learned all this in my simple tin shed where I sat on the deck on cold winter nights with a cup of tea and a blanket over my shoulders, breathing in the briny smell of oyster shells, wet sand, sea grass and mangroves. The fresh clean of high tide. Savouring the smallest details of a world I thought I might have to quit soon. But I am still here. So far so good.
In time, I began a friendship with Barbara, the woman with beautiful blue eyes who lived in a pale yellow house called Tarrangaua, on the high, rough hill at the mouth of the bay. And she passed on her love of the bush, her passion for all things Australian, as we drank tea together on her elegant columned verandah in the late afternoons. We talked about everything but death in those days, although it shrilled silently between us because she, too, had cancer. She died late on a hot autumn night, as gracefully as she had lived.
For a while, her husband Bob and I were friends, helping each other through his grief and my fear. Then, returning from a dinner party one starstruck night after a wild storm, he stopped the tinny near the crumbled shore of Woody Point and kissed me. We married on a brilliantly sunny June day in 2001, on a lovely old boat in the middle of Lovett Bay, surrounded by family . . . and, of course, dogs. It was a new beginning. A relationship that grew out of respect and friendship. The strongest of all foundations.
And this is what came after.