EPILOGUE

A Place in
the World

In Scotland, as I walk the West Highland Way, my mind opens to the deep silence of the landscape, and my heart opens to sound: the wind, the rushing of a stream, my footsteps. Silence and sound, living within each other. There is no noise here – or in my mind.

I’m on the first of a series of walks I’ve planned for my five-month journey around Europe. I want to get to know the landscapes of countries that fire my imagination, and stay in cities I’ve always wanted to visit: Paris, Dublin, Barcelona, Prague. I have my pack and my maps, and I’m on my way.

On the first morning of my walk in Scotland, I leave the village of Tyndrum and pass through Auch-ach innis chalean (the field of the hazel meadow). The conical shape of Beinn Dorain appears before me, rising into blue sky. The weather is fresh and clear. Sunlight sparkles on the dew dotting the grasses along the track, and, on the mountain flanks, long drifts of purple heather disappear into the distance. Swallows and other small birds flit across the sky, and alders, birch and conifers cluster along the banks of streams and at the edge of a small loch.

As I walk beneath Beinn Dorain, I begin to feel its depth as my own depth, its reaching for the sky as my own reaching spirit. I’m soaring in this high, spare landscape, like the spellbound horses of the Dylan Thomas poem, walking out onto ‘fields of praise’.

The next day I walk around the head of Loch Tulla, and then onto the vast expanse of Rannoch Moor. I pass hollows of scrubby myrtle and stop to rub the leaves together for the pleasure of inhaling their sweet perfume. Although a pale sun is shining, I’m alert to the weather; I’ve been warned that the moor is the most serious stretch of the West Highland Way because its exposed track offers no shelter and no easy retreat if the weather turns nasty.

The moor is wild and high. I’m alone with kestrels and falcons, wild heather, and the wind. I pass only one other walker as I make my way across this wide stretch of land. He raises his hand in a salute and continues on without slowing. The silence here is infinite. The space eternal. I feel as if I’ve dissolved, become elemental, at one with sky and distance.

Towards the end of the path across the moor, I find myself in the realm of the massive mountains of Coire Ba: Stob Dearg, Buachaille Etive Mor, Glen Etive and Glen Coe. They rise up like great songs do, disappearing into the immense silence of sky. I see a golden eagle, wings outstretched, gliding high. I take off my pack and sit on the ground, watching this flawless bird until it disappears behind a cloud. I find my bag of nuts and raisins, and take time to savour their sweetness and the fresh mineral taste of the water from my bottle. The mountains pound in my heart like drums.

Walking up a rise in the track across the moor, I see in the distance a white speck that must be the Kings House Hotel at Glencoe. I anticipate the sensation of drinking Guinness – the pleasure of quenching my thirst, and the smooth and bitter taste as the cool liquid slides down my throat. At the end of the day, I finally reach the hotel. The first thing I do is release the straps of my pack and let it sink to the ground. Then I make my way to the bar. Quietly euphoric, I buy a pint of Guinness.

The hotel’s interior is dim, but I sense the mountains and their light all around me. I’m sore and tired, I need to have a shower and get out of these boots, but this Guinness fills me like a meal. As I sit at a table, after-images from my day’s walk drift through my mind – heather and grasses, light on the surface of the lochs, mountain peaks. Little birds flitting and dipping in the air; the golden eagle that made me think of Michael. And I think with anticipation of the food I’m about to eat and the soft bed waiting for me. Bliss. Tomorrow I face the Devil’s Staircase, and then my journey will continue down to Kinlochleven and on to Fort William.

*

After trekking along the West Highland Way, I go to Spain and walk part of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, and later I walk around the wild west coast of Ireland. In between, I travel to Copenhagen, Prague, Wales and the Lake District of England.

I also go to Paris, in memory of Julianne and the trip that we never took. As I walk along a narrow Left Bank street, my thoughts are interrupted by the sense of her presence. She’s walking with me, gesturing with her hands as she talks, her French self free and at home. The Seine flows like silky caramel between stone walls, street artists exhibit their paintings, and green sunlight shines in the trees along the riverbank.

Jules is here with me. In some reality, in some way, she is here. We’ve made it to Paris after all.

*

For the last leg of this five-month journey, Rowan and I meet up in Florence with plans to travel in Italy, Croatia and Turkey. We’re both open to whatever comes our way, and we find each other easy company. We spend our days walking arm in arm through the winding streets of old European villages and sipping coffee in street cafes. We narrowly escape bed bugs in a hostel in Florence and share a single bed in the last budget hotel room available in Siena.

On the night crossing to Split in Croatia, we stand on the bow of the ferry sharing a small bottle of duty-free apricot brandy, exhilarated by the starry darkness, drunk on the pleasure of sea, wind and motion.

In Dubrovnik, we wander along the cobbled lanes of the old town and, at the end of the day, find a makeshift outdoor bar on a clifftop. Sitting in the warm evening, I become nostalgic as love songs from the 1950s play through the speakers and the blazing orb of the sun melts into the sea.

In Istanbul, we stand awestruck below the golden mosaics in the Aya Sophia. Later, with the wind in our hair, we ride a ferry down the Bosphorus to a small fishing village.

Throughout this journey, there are experiences of art, music, people, churches and, of course, food. I’m in love with the human imagination and spirit, and with that alchemical vessel, time. New thoughts appear, and I savour the enigmatic smells and the rush that comes with the illusion that I’m a stranger to myself, as if something of our exotic surroundings has rubbed off on me and I don’t recognise who I am. Each new day is a festival, a ceremony of becoming, a rite of passage.

On the plane leaving Australia for this long journey, I wrote a poem that repeated the line, ‘Everything that has happened before now is past.’ Now, as I travel home, I grasp the truth of this thought. My madness has retreated, and I have confidence in the life opening up for me. This journey has been my pilgrimage to give thanks for the world that’s welcoming me like a mother. More often than not, I can trust my mind to be steady and benign, and I’ve rediscovered the ‘recreational thinking’ that Julianne and I so enjoyed. I’ve also embarked on a wild, audacious love affair; it doesn’t survive the distance between our home countries, but the memory remains, and the happiness.

As the plane comes in to land in Melbourne, I decide that I will go back to university and study Michael’s poetry.

*

Life is very different for me now. While studying, I work part-time in a range of different jobs, including teaching young adults with intellectual disabilities and teaching English to carers in an aged-care facility. In 2006, I’m offered a part-time job at a university as a language and learning advisor. While doing this work, I complete a PhD. This study is life-changing and deeply rewarding, alongside my work with students and my colleagues – especially my colleagues. I’m one of the lucky ones: my workplace nourishes my soul as well as my material existence. I become grounded in the world. I sleep, really sleep, for the first time since Julianne died.

During these years, my relationship with Rowan grows and develops. In spite of the challenges she faced as a child and teenager, she’s become a person whose nature is to love and create. She has a courageous intellect and has made a life for herself and a community of friends. She embraces what the world has to offer, explores ideas, and is curious and open. I’m immensely grateful to have Rowan in my life. She wants for me to be myself, despite everything, and this is what I want for her too – because of everything. Our relationship is a celebration of the life we live, sharing our thoughts and dreams, and the mundane burdens of our days.

As Michael wrote in a poem he gave me: ‘The most of love is simply sharing.’

*

At the same time as I’m finding a place in the world, my mother is losing hers. As her Alzheimer’s disease progresses and her memory fades, she loses herself, her family, her past. Every morning she looks blankly at Irene: ‘Who am I?’ she asks. ‘Who are you?’

My sister gives her a few facts, some vivid paint strokes, an outline of a person: ‘I’m your daughter, Irene. You’re Pat Keogh. You were married to Ron for fifty-three years.’

‘Did he love me?’ Mum asks.

This is the question that, for more than a year, has been her obsession. At the end of her life, my mother wants to know if she was loved. She moves slowly into the day, feeling her way into her clothes, into the identity Irene constantly creates for her.

Sometimes Mum weeps quietly: ‘I don’t know where I am,’ she says. Sometimes she’s in extreme distress: ‘Who am I?’ she cries out from the doorway into her bedroom. Leaning on her walking frame, she pulls herself down the hall of the house where she’s lived for over thirty years. ‘Why am I here?’ she asks of the space around her. Her mind is a watery bewilderness. Unborn thoughts float in her eyes. She takes tentative steps, one at a time.

My mother is a soul without a home, lost in the most absolute sense. There’s no consolation in thinking that she doesn’t know what’s happening to her. Her suffering is her knowledge. She knows. She looked up at me the other day with eyes that had no light in them and asked me, ‘Am I alive?’ In the pause before I could answer, a hole opened in my heart. I took Mum’s hand to comfort her, but she was unreachable, standing alone and lonely in some wild, inscrutable place on the very edge of life. I remembered the lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport.’ And I thought to myself, They do worse than that.

Mum lingers in a lonely twilight, forgetting herself, her life, and those who love her. At the mid-point of the disease she still had language, the occasional spark of humour, the capacity for gratitude, and the ability to take pleasure in the sight of babies and the taste of ice-cream. But now, the loss of her self is devastating, totalising. Without memory you’re lost in deep space.

When I was a child, the Russians sent a dog into orbit. I read about it in a newspaper that my father brought home from work. I remember standing at the table and staring at the photograph of a dog in a harness, sitting up in the spaceship. Her name was Laika. In response to my insistent questions, Dad admitted that there was no possibility of her returning to earth. When I was lying in bed at night, unable to sleep, I’d imagine Laika travelling alone through endless space, slowly starving to death. I pictured her sitting in the cockpit of the spacecraft, endlessly staring into the night sky. Totally alone. The only thread of consolation I could find was the hope that she didn’t know what was happening to her. It was a slight hope, though. I believed she knew she’d be alone forever, strapped into the spaceship, dying of hunger and loneliness.

*

For fourteen years, Mum has been slowly fading away. Now, it ’s apparent that her life is coming to an end. I fly from Melbourne for a weekend with her in Canberra. Irene meets me at the airport and takes me to the nursing home where Mum has been for the past three weeks as her health has deteriorated. Irene tells us that she’ll be back in the evening, and I take my place at Mum’s bedside.

During these past weeks, Irene and Phil have been constantly by Mum’s side, but Phil’s away from Canberra this weekend. He made her laugh, and I always thought he was her favourite. Even after she didn’t remember him, her face would light up when he visited, as if she knew that, whoever he was, he was someone she loved.

I spend the day with Mum, holding her hand and stroking her forehead. We sink into deep silences marked only by the sound of her breathing. At these times, as she fights for each breath, her stoic spirit fills the room. There’s no doubt that she’s engaged in a huge struggle, one harsh breath at a time. A nurse comes in and gives her morphine, then hands me a sheet of paper that lists the signs of impending death. I read it and put it to the side. I don’t have any sense that Mum is going to die today.

I tell her stories of whatever comes to mind – her life, my life, our family – letting the narrative flow along its own course. Whenever something I say catches her attention, she looks at me and I’m held there, suspended in the open space of her gaze. I feel then as if we’re floating together in the room, adrift, light as air. In between times, when my words fail and there’s only the exertion of each rasping breath, I moisten her mouth with a small wet sponge and stroke her cool forehead.

As the day progresses, her skin takes on a bluish tinge, and she drifts in and out of awareness. I think of a brief exchange we had a couple of months before in a rare, lucid moment. ‘Am I dying?’ she asked, looking up at me from her chair as I bent down to take her plate. I could see, from her eyes, that there could be no evasion.

‘Yes, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Is there any way to reverse the process?’

‘No, I’m afraid there isn’t. But you won’t be on your own. Irene’s here – we’re all here with you.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, patting my hand.

In the evening, Irene and Annie arrive, and we gather around her. She seems to know that her three daughters are all here. On hearing of Mum’s failing health, Annie immediately flew from East Timor to spend time with her. And Irene is standing by her, as she has for the past twelve years.

The night wears on, and Mum’s struggle for each breath becomes more intense, a profound and stubborn fight for air. Then suddenly it changes, becomes lighter, a kind of wheezing. I realise she’s dying. We hold her hands, smooth her forehead, talk to her softly. It’s 11.15pm, and I tell her that it’s nearly April Fools’ Day, her wedding anniversary.

She looks at me with eyes that seem to be opening into the light, not closing off from it. An expanding, deepening consciousness. As if something vast is enfolding her. A full and pure emptiness. Then she breathes out and closes her eyes, and she doesn’t breathe again. In that moment, a blade slices through my heart so smoothly, it feels like love.

*

While I’ve been writing this book, I’ve discovered that time is deep as well as long. I’ve read through my old notebooks and letters, relived experiences of love and madness, and danced again to the music I loved when I was young. I’ve also retraced my steps, returning to places that were important during the times I shared with Julianne and Michael.

I’ve walked the route that I used to take to Julianne’s house, finding my way after all these years without having to think about it. I’ve also walked around the ANU campus, along the paths between the white poplars to Garran Hall where Julianne and I spent so much time in 1968. The trees are taller, the canopies thicker, there are new buildings among the older ones, but our younger selves still exist there somehow and have left an imprint, however subtle.

The places I associate with Michael haven’t fared so well. Most of them have been destroyed or renovated beyond recognition. M Ward no longer exists. What had been the Canberra Hospital was demolished on 13 July 1997, in a staged event that was watched by over a hundred thousand people. One of these spectators, a twelve-year-old girl called Katie Bender, was killed when a fragment of the imploding building pierced her where she stood. A place that bore the histories of three or four generations of Canberra’s population met its end in a tragic spectacle.

The National Museum of Australia now occupies the site on the peninsula where the hospital once sprawled. The area of lakeshore where Michael and I discovered the green bell was unrecognisable when I visited it in January 2010: the land surrounding the museum was parched by drought, and the few willows still growing along the bank were no longer lush and luxuriant. The green willow bell had disappeared.

In contrast, Lennox House just up the road from the museum has a happy ambience. Walls have been demolished in a renovation that’s turned it into a community childcare centre. Small children play in colourful spaces that in the early ’70s were run-down students’ rooms, and workers’ rooms in previous decades.

Other places have simply been superseded. The bungalow where Michael, Richard and Simon lived at Hall has been pulled down, and a new suburban house built on the block of land. And an ultra-modern hotel now stands in the place of the building that once housed Dimitri’s restaurant.

Captains Flat is now home to a thriving if somewhat sleepy community. Empty houses have been renovated or carted away, the pub revitalised, and there’s a cafe on the main street, frequented on weekends by daytrippers from Canberra. As part of a remediation program in the ’70s, the slagheaps were covered in soil and planted with shrubs and other vegetation. Those old mounds of mine refuse have been recreated as small hills that blend into the surrounding countryside. The program has also reduced the toxic leachings into the river, and there’s hope that native fish species will be re-established. Although it’s taken a long time, the scars from the mine are healing.

Michael has gone, and lost also are the places that I associate with him. M Ward, the green bell, the bungalow at Hall and the slagheaps now exist only in memory. And in this story.

*

At odd moments I think of Michael and remember how it felt to be with him. I see now that a powerful drama was enacted in and through him during his short life. He interrogated male identity and sexuality, and he surrendered passionately to the psychological magnetism of myth and romanticism. In the crucible of his imagination and in his poetry, Michael constellated multiple identities. Ultimately, their competing visions and restless demands overwhelmed him. His death – and his identities – demonstrate the impossibility of someone with his complex psychological make-up leading a conventional life. He didn’t conform to society’s expectations of how a young male should live or who he should be.

Instead, Michael became a trickster, disobeying society’s rules and challenging conventional codes of behaviour. A boundary-crosser, wise and foolish and boastful of his exploits, he used his poetic talent to cross between the real world and the realm of the imagination. There were times when, like an eagle, his spirit soared into the heights, ‘above concrete and minimal existences, above idols and wars and caring’. Though he eventually became entangled in the depths, these experiences of soaring – and love – were his ‘desiderata’.

He was a shapeshifter, a mischief-maker; now appearing in one form, now another. And he played at the periphery of the known, using his imagination to show us new worlds, drawing on his fantasies to reveal truths belonging to the other: the outsider, the exile, the freak. Michael was a brilliant poet, hypersensitive, kind and outrageous – and he bore the burden of his unique self gracefully and with courage.

Sometimes when I read the last lines of his poem ‘Portrait of the artist as an old man’, I wonder how it would be to pass an evening with Michael as an old man, sitting by a fire together, reflecting on life and on the times we shared. I wonder what he’d say, and what I would say. And if it would be as he described in his poem:

When night or winter comes, I light a fire

and watch the flames

rise and fall like waves. I regret nothing.

I can’t say I have no regrets. There are a number of things that I would have done very differently – if I’d known how.

*

Until I wrote this memoir, the young woman I was in my early twenties was as distant from me as an actor in a film, even as I watched her enact my memories. Now, she’s here within me, a second self, a wraith just under my skin. I see scenes and events as they emerge in memory through her eyes as well as my own. I feel her emotions, her pulse; I sense what she wanted. Both of us are here in the remembered moment. I’m with her as she moves her head to let her hair fall across her face like a curtain that she can hide behind. I feel in my body her breath and her instinctual life. I know the extremity of her desire and her dread. I’ve been there, inside her madness. And I’m tuned into her sensitivity to the energies of other people, to sounds and light and touch. I know her dreams.

I’ve discovered that she has always been with me, waiting to be born into language, waiting to speak and make sense of her life. She craved a face and two hands, and a mouth that could say true words. Now she has a face, lined with age but as much hers as it is mine. With both her hands, she held her newborn baby and nothing ever mattered more. And true words now rise up within her. She can speak. I can speak. She has given me back a part of myself that I thought I’d lost forever.

There are still times when people appear as unsolvable problems, and I continue to be challenged by social situations. If I allow myself to become stressed, my mind goes on the attack. But as Rilke says, ‘What matters is to live everything.’ There’s no escape from the wounded state of the world or from our flawed humanity. I struggle with the obstinacy of primal emotions, with the daily claims of the real, and I grieve for the natural world. But I find that mostly I’m immersed in the moment, the people I love, the work I’m doing, the world I’m part of. Pain and joy, the middle way.

As I get older, the necessity of finding some meaning in the life I’ve lived becomes less urgent. Now, living life as a poem is more important than ever to me. I want to be present and aware in each moment, and eventually be awake to death when it comes. I hope to be conscious when I die, my heart and mind wide open.

In the meantime, the experiences I’ve had of love and loss help me live now, in these present moments. The enchantment and rapture of the green bell and the cold despair of the slagheaps remain as part of who I am. I love the moments of ecstasy that open me to the invisible world – but I also cherish the sensation of dwelling within the physical world and sharing ordinary human love and friendship, flawed and earthbound.

I know now that Michael was right, life is a poem, an encounter with the here and now of the imagined real. An excursion into its depths and reaches, its beauty and terror. And Julianne was right, the world is music playing. We live in this music, and it lives in us. The trick is tuning into it, listening for it. I have them both to thank for teaching me these truths. I’m grateful for everything, every moment we shared. I’m grateful, too, that the memory of our love and friendship endures and still moves me, still lives on in me. Sometimes it’s the love that breaks through; other times it’s the loss. And when they both emerge together, I find my old friends there, on the inside of my life.