Home Triptych Andrea Goldsmith

1. Intensive Care

High on the wall behind your bed is a strip of glass. These windows are the only source of natural light in intensive care. From where you lie, you cannot see the windows, so I bring you stories from the world outside. I put rain in the drought-dry clouds that float across the endless blue sky; I create flocks of rainbow lorikeets darting through the air; I put carolling magpies on the roof of the adjacent building. And a night parrot, I conjure up a night parrot flying past the windows in intensive care.

I enter the ICU each morning around eight. I make my way past the central nurses’ station to your bed. I want you to look more energised than yesterday. I want you to be using the nose-feeding oxygen tubes and not the full face mask. I want to see you rested and alert.

So much longing as I walk the floor of intensive care.

And there you are, propped on your pillows, wondrously familiar despite the oxygen and the tubes, despite the intensive-care bed with its white sheets and hydraulic pipes. It takes a moment before you see me and then you smile as you have a thousand times before, and that funny little wave of your hand.

‘I’m so pleased you’re here.’ Your first words every morning.

You are exhausted, you say, knocked about by the chest X-ray. Every day the same rigmarole to position the plate behind your back, and such a toll it takes on your breathing. I lay my hand on the rapid rise and fall of your chest. I will your breathing to slow.

I have brought you apricot nectar, rationed during normal times because it is so full of sugar, but with your body now melting away you could drink apricot nectar to your heart’s desire and eat buckets of ice-cream as well. If not for the flood of oxygen making you feel as if you will choke on solid food I would lavish you with chips and vanilla slices and blocks of chocolate and all those desserts which come with lashings of whipped cream. Lashings of whipped cream, and we laugh at our private nod to Enid Blyton.

When life is normal I rise early, read for an hour, have my breakfast and a mug of coffee alone. Around eight I make a fresh pot of coffee. You hear me rummaging in the kitchen and by the time I walk upstairs and enter our room you are wide awake and waiting. I perch on the bed and we drink our coffee together and with your ‘What have you been doing?’ we start the talk of the day.

Here in intensive care I pull a chair close to your bed and we begin with the morning medical round. Everyone is very positive, you say. Progress is still slow, but Bill, the chief intensivist, says you are heading in the right direction. The results of today’s X-ray have not yet arrived; I check the time—this is a hard waiting, although I mustn’t let you see my anxiety. You ask me for news and before I have uttered more than a dozen words you have interrupted me. I seize on this familiar and at other times infuriating behaviour as a sign you are feeling better. You tell me you think last night’s nurse was gay. A myopic religious fundamentalist at a hundred paces in poor light would pick that one, I say. You laugh, almost energetically, and then provide a potted history of today’s nurse while she is analysing your 8 am blood sample elsewhere in ICU. You already have your favourite nurses—but then we are both inclined to make favourites. Searching for detail, I say, and what else would you expect of a poet and a novelist? And there’s trust to be had in favourites, and a familiarity too. These nurses have become your friends, a new friend every eight or twelve hours.

You have already eaten some yoghurt and jelly. I pour myself a second cup of coffee from a Thermos I’ve brought from home, and settle down to help you eat more breakfast. The nurse returns. She chats as she checks the paraphernalia around your bed and finishes by rearranging your pillows. You tell her she does ‘good pillows’.

It is the small things that matter in intensive care.

The nurse asks about the rock, as always clasped in your left hand. You turn to me with a smile. And I tell of the day long ago, of a wintry walk along a beach of the Southern Ocean, the cracking wind, the intermittent rain and the two of us wanting to be nowhere else but here. You are striding ahead, I’m strolling the sand searching for shells. And there it is, in a dimple of water, a rock shaped like a heart, and a perfect fit in the palm of a hand. The rock is scored with veins just like a human heart. I slip it into my pocket making sure you don’t see, you who are so strict about beach scavenging. Back home I wash and polish the rock and put it on my desk. Often I find the rock clasped in my hand when I have been away with my thoughts.

In January 2004 when you were diagnosed with cancer I gave you my heart-shaped rock. It has accompanied you to every medical appointment, every hospital visit, every scan and blood test, and in between you keep it on your desk. A few days ago, when the ambulance people came to take you to hospital, you could hardly breathe, you could hardly talk, you couldn’t walk, but you asked for your rock.

Breakfast is cleared away. And with you now relaxed and easy in your pillows it is time for poetry. I take your two amulet books, Bruce Beaver’s Charmed Lives and Judy Beveridge’s Wolf Notes. I choose from the ‘Tiresias sees’ section of Charmed Lives because it is your favourite, and read the mysterious ‘Visitation’ and the ironic ‘Rejection’. You smile as I read the last lines of ‘Rejection’, when the lady poet is asked if she could use the narrator in a poem and her reply is scatological.

‘Bruce could be so naughty,’ you murmur.

From Judy’s book I choose ‘Tigers’, the poem which inspired your own ‘Smelling Tigers’. Your eyes are closed, the lines have disappeared from your face, the cheekbones and curve of your jaw are perfectly aligned. I tell you how beautiful you look, knowing that interruptions, even of poetry, are entirely justified when vanity is involved.

You’re very pleased. ‘But it won’t last. It’s the oxygen. It smoothes out the wrinkles.’

‘So, if ever the words dry up, we could open an oxygen clinic, promise everlasting youth and charge a fortune. Although,’ I add, ‘your words will never dry up.’

‘Never take the Goddess’s gifts for granted,’ you say.

I read you the poetry of your great and good friends; I read you juicy snippets from the newspaper; I ornament an article about the Liberal Party leadership stoushes and you add a few ornaments of your own. I have asked your old friends and family to send me stories of your childhood, and now I read to you about your high jinks at summer camp forty years ago; I read you through long walks in the Blue Mountains. The bells and alarms, the wheeze and sigh of oxygen, the voices of nurses and other patients, all the clamour of intensive care recedes, leaving us in a warm quiet world, just the two of us, with trees swaying in the breeze and parrots perched in the branches and wombats and echidnas meandering about. And as you sleep I keep my hand over yours, reading silently now through the passing time.

On the bed-end, directly in your line of vision, I have stuck pictures of a rainbow lorikeet, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, and a hand-painted galah; there’s a postcard of Akhenaten, the renegade Pharaoh who inspired your first verse novel, and a photo of Wystan asleep on my lap—your blue-eyed Jew and your blue Burmese cat together in the one frame.

‘All my favourite creatures,’ you said when I put up the display.

And now, awake again, you look at the pictures and point to the one of me and Wystan:

‘I like my two blues with me in intensive care.’ You’ll sleep some more later; for the moment you want to hear who has rung, who has not, who has e-mailed and who has not. We talk about your family and my family, we talk about friends, we crack jokes, we acknowledge disappointments. And we gossip as we always do. If people could hear us, we often say, they would be shocked at the banality. But they can’t hear us. This is our talk.

So much to do in intensive care, each day passes quickly. Tubes are checked, blood is taken, temperature recorded, your oxygen saturation measured, the flow of oxygen adjusted. No matter what else is happening I watch the figures on the screen. Every time your oxygen saturation rises and your breathing rate drops I feel a private joy, a private relief. Better breathing and less need for pure oxygen means your lungs are recuperating.

And so much to do to pass the time. I help you with food and drink, I read to you, I give you reassurance, we rake through literary gossip, most of it old, but plenty of pleasure in revisiting familiar entertainments. Some time during the morning I go outside to phone your family in Sydney and mine here in Melbourne to give them the daily update. Around lunch time I go for a walk in the Exhibition Gardens. You’re the Pagan not me, but as I stroll the paths I stop at trees, lay my hands on the bark and offer up my clumsy prayers.

I’m never gone for long but you are always pleased for my return. I relay news from the phone calls, but family and friends feel very distant here in intensive care. It is the present which occupies us: this room, the people in the other beds, their visitors, the doctors and nurses, the paramedics. It’s an island world here, I say, small and self-sufficient.

You nod your agreement and then laugh: ‘More Gilligan’s Island than Lord of the Flies.’

We embark on island one-upmanship—Treasure Island, Ithaca and Calypso’s island from The Odyssey, The Story of San Michele, The Magus—and would have continued if not for the arrival of the physio. She admires the frieze of pictures at the end of your bed.

‘Andy makes good home,’ you say.

Late in the day when Bill makes his evening round, you are lively, you crack jokes, you tell him you’re feeling stronger. You are marvellous. And later still when the night nurse comes on, you’re so happy because he’s one of your favourites. We both feel secure in the night ahead.

While the handover occurs you ask me for a last story before I leave.

‘Take me away,’ you say. ‘Take me somewhere special.’

2. Antarctica

Sailing south from Ushuaia, it is our first night at sea. It has been light since 4 am, although the roll of the ship woke me much earlier. Black-winged gulls swoop and circle about the vessel, their white breasts tinged rose from the narrow sun. Elsewhere is bleak and grey. The ship rises and falls in the treacherous waters of Drake’s Passage. Keeping my hands tight to the deck rail and my gaze streaming to the horizon, I let my body ride the ship’s movement; up and over and from side to side. Rain begins to fall and I pull a hood over my head. When the rain turns to hail, I step back from the torrent, shove my hands into gloves and watch the green decks disappear beneath a thick layer of white ice. A short time later come showers of sleet laced with flakes of snow. The ship tips and tosses, and as I sway with its sway and roll with its roll how very comforting it is. And then—as quickly as it began—the precipitation stops, the air clears and I can see all the way to the horizon.

I am aware of the distant burr of the ship’s engine, the clash of waves, the raging wind, yet as I gaze over the ocean, even with the wind furious on my face, I feel swaddled in this wild chill. Huge petrels and albatrosses now fly with the ship, guiding and protecting us, it seems to me, as they soar through the roiling air. And suddenly I spot a fin whale, and then another, huge smooth creatures close enough to hear them blow, and a rush of excitement bursts through me in unison with their eerie explosions.

I am standing at the ship’s rail when I see the first sea-ice, transparent pats floating with the swell. Soon, white pancake-like ice floes appear, and finally the first icebergs—smallish this far north, the size of a house or a rural bank, many weathered to ice sculptures. In the distance I imagine I see a man steering a white boat and, closer, a dinosaur nose to nose with a giant wombat. A wombat in Antarctica! By 11 pm on our second night there are huge floating masses of ice, other-worldly in the dusky light.

And at last, the land mass of Antarctica. The mountains of snow and rock plunging to the water, glaciers filling the spaces between the peaks and sliding into the sea. We are sailing through the sublime, like surfing the notes of a Bach fugue, like sinking into the canvas of a Rothko painting. Just let yourself go, lean into this brashly inhuman, incomprehensibly beautiful place. Ah the seduction of it, pulling you down through layers of consciousness to the bottomless depths of pure imagination. This is no landscape for the ditherer; when you fall for Antarctica you fall hard and heavy. You’d die for its untamed and uncorrupted heart.

Not even in your dreams is there such an absence of human breath. It is not simply the silence or the pure air or the lack of dirt, although these are persistently strange. More eerily poignant are the animals: they are not afraid of us. Fin whales cavort in the waters around the ship, and orcas too, so glamorous in their polished black and white. Birds fly close enough to look you in the eye. And the seals—the lethal leopard seals, the slender crabeaters and the cat-faced weddells lazing on land or sea ice—none of them stir as we pass, nor do the elephant seals humped on the ice like bags of blubber. And the gentoo penguins with their white eyebrow marking, and the little chinstraps, and my favourite, the Adelies, with their white necks and bellies and smooth black backs; when we land on Antarctica itself, penguins waddle around and past us not even bothering to be curious.

When there is too much ice for landing on the continent we putt about in our Zodiac inflatables. Down here at sea level the ice-sculptures glisten wetly; they have intricate peepholes and elegant Barbara Hepworth curves and bulging Henry Moore bodies, and blues and greens so astonishing you think you can taste them. We move through a thin layer of ice; it breaks like toffee.

Other times, the katabatic winds, the wild unpredictable blustering unique to these parts, keep us on board. There are one hundred and thirty of us on this expedition, but sometimes only five or six of us on deck. I pull my hood down low, I am wrapped into myself, a tiny breathing organism, a speck tossed around in the vast breathing organism of Antarctica.

I think I have experienced the best imaginable, but as in the best year of one’s life, there is always better to come. The Lemaire Channel on the north-western side of the Antarctic Peninsula is a body of water about a mile across at its narrowest. The mountains slope down on both sides, the water itself is filled with ice floes and bergy bits. And the atmosphere is misty-magical: even while immersed in it, it is hard to fathom. I remain at the ship’s rail throughout the slow passage through the seven miles of Lemaire. With so much sea-ice the vessel requires a delicate manoeuvring. The air is brutally cold, there’s intermittent sleet and snow, yet I cannot drag myself away. The noise of the ship’s engine no longer impinges, nor do other people, even the cold recedes. And my own edges dissolve; the clamouring self is quiet as I nestle into this place.

We anchor off Petermann Island and take the Zodiacs to shore. At the edge of the steep cliffs, deep crevasses slice through the ice; the deeper the fracture the bluer the aquamarine flush. In time, huge chunks will calve away and become new icebergs. High on the slopes of Petermann Island I look down the Lemaire Channel. I take in the water, the icebergs, the cliffs of ice scored with deep cracks, and I want to wait, days or weeks, to witness the moment when the cliff will calve off and fall into the sea. And the water will rise in a shock wave and the huge city-block-sized mass of ice will right itself and float off down the channel out to the open sea.

The snow is deep and soft on Petermann Island. I sink to my thighs and have to be rescued. Chilled and wet, my face stinging with ice, my feet lumbering with cold, I am shamelessly happy.

There are no human fingerprints here. Away from the tiny pinpoints of the stations, there are no pots or jewellery, neither bones nor ruins, and it occurs to me that archaeology could well be a form of colonisation. Lacking co-ordinates from history and cultural memory I resort to the imagination to embrace this landscape, to take it in. I slough off self-consciousness, I silence my narratives, and I know the world anew among all this ice. And perhaps it is not so remarkable that the vast majority of fiction and poetry that exists about Antarctica has been written by people who have never been here: Dante, Coleridge, Jules Verne, Nabokov, Ursula Le Guin—even the imaginary Ern Malley had a turn with Antarctica. Antarctica as a flight of the mind, the great imagined place. Indeed, there is no more precise metaphor for the imagination than Antarctica, and I find myself wondering if it is possible for the imagination to imagine itself. In the next moment I decide it doesn’t matter, not when I feel so drawn to this vast place. And suddenly, out of nowhere it comes to me: this sensation, this experience of Antarctica is incessant wonder. You cannot remain in the landscape as yourself, with your usual ways of seeing and hearing and moving and smelling and breathing. Everything that you have known yourself to be, and not just your perceptions but your memories and language and the identity they support, all need to be cast aside when this great white land begins.

I stand among ice and icebergs surrounded by icy mountains on all sides; I stand in the cold and shuffling silence. I recognise this place from dreams, from yearnings, from the punch of illusive passions. I feel as if I have come home.

3. Between covers

Your absence is always intolerable.

You are where my home begins and ends.

Bruce Beaver, ‘Heart and Home’, Charmed Lives, p76

The Australian cricket team is playing South Africa and D is not on the couch watching the TV. Not there with her feet up on the coffee table, Wystan on her lap, an array of books around her, a mug of tea in reach. D is not on the couch, she’s not in the house. Wystan and I wander around alone.

From room to room. The kitchen, the lounge, past her grandfather’s bookcase, into her study. Sit on her chair. Stare out her window. Touch her computer, her iPod, her glasses, the scatter of model animals on her desk. Sift through her papers, flip through her notebooks. Back to the kitchen—her mug on the bench, her shortbreads in their jar, her roasted almonds going stale. Outside to the garden, touch the apricot tree as if I might draw her from its leaves, gaze up at the sky as if I might pull her down from the clouds. Never still, nothing works, I’m trapped in a space I hate, a place that demands such effort, a place that could be Hell.

I count the weeks since she died; each Wednesday, the day of her dying, brings a migraine. I wonder when one stops counting the weeks. Or is one tethered forever to a zero of a new era? Don’t know what to do and I always know what to do. I keep thinking there must be something, some strategy to bring her back, I just need to work it out.

Such a thin soup is ‘my future’ when compared with ‘our future’. This month. Next month. Next year. A life without the shared blessings, the celebrations enjoyed, the disappointments cushioned, our political discussions, our family talk, the gossip and laughter, our walks, our meals (I can’t walk, I can’t eat)—and our rituals. The wine at 6 pm, the thanks for our good fortune, our glasses always raised to her health, the libations at the apricot tree. (The apricot tree which died and is now thriving again. Why did it survive and not you?) So many rituals established over the years: the ice-cream at the cinema, holding hands during the film, the dancing in the lounge room. And our morning ritual: me sitting cross-legged on the quilt, you still in bed. I’ve been up an hour, you are not long awake, and here’s your coffee and here’s my second cup of coffee and Wystan snuggles between us as we talk.

So many poets

starve

in the cold faery spaces

between their frost-bitten ears

How lucky I am

to hear you, darling,

coming up the stairs

to smell the coffee

floating ahead of you

like my favourite incense.

I am shoring up our past—the photos, cards, letters, e-mails, text messages—so much paper and so many words to brighten the bleak future. In these early days of her absence, I actually add to her visibility in our house. She is gone so the note in her handwriting to put out the rubbish bins, her place on the couch, her favourite mug, the books she was reading, her fossils, her favourite jumper, the pen next to her bed assume talismanic qualities. I touch her things all the time. Very occasionally it is as if I touch her.

Valium puts me to sleep, but it lasts only a few hours. And there are no dreams. Up at 5.30 and while I try to act as if everything is normal—breakfast, my morning reading—everything is spoiled. Except her work. I decide to start at the beginning, her first book, impose some order—as if that might restore my equilibrium. But there’s no familiarity with Little Hoodlum, no touch. I take from my DP shelf (See, I said to her, years ago, a whole shelf of you.) my various copies of Akhenaten, make myself another coffee and withdraw to the couch with ‘the book that made you look at me twice’—D’s inscription in the splendid Hyland House reissue.

It was May, 1992, and the Victorian Women’s Writers’ Train, a National Book Council initiative which brought together eight women writers to travel through rural Victoria for a week giving talks, readings and workshops. There was a reading on the first evening and how shocked I was when D stood up and read from Akhenaten. This annoying, noisy, intrusive woman who from the moment of our first meeting earlier in the day had rubbed me up the wrong way, performed like no poet I had ever seen before, and with poetry that was, literally, breathtaking. And it’s working again. Akhenaten is working. I read very slowly, the whole so familiar but many individual poems forgotten. It is such a passionate work: Akhenaten’s vision, his yearning for more and different, the fire and the disappointments, the achievements and the losses. D always said Akhenaten was the most autobiographical of her characters.

I have taken the turquoise scarab from her desk and carry it in my pocket. You can’t separate / a heart / from its brother, Akhenaten says in ‘Scarab’, his prayer over Smenkhkare’s dead body.

I love Akhenaten.

Days of panic, days of attack, the point of a knife poised to plunge, and my own voice haranguing me: what do I need to do to help her, what do I need to do to bring her back? Nothing has prepared me for this. The interminable longing, this interminable missing. I struggle to get through each day only for another impossible day to loom. I flitter from this to that, I can’t stick with any task. But most of all I can’t make sense of her death. Suddenly my whole life has become linear A.

I used to take walks alone to think, to work in my head; I can’t walk. I used to cook delicious meals we would eat together; I can’t cook. I used to enjoy food, now I feel a boulder in my stomach. When first we met D hardly noticed food, and not simply because she was riding the riffs of a new passion: I soon realised she was not interested in food. About three months after the writers’ train (D could tell me the exact date—for a girl who ‘didn’t get numbers’ she certainly got dates) she managed a stopover in Melbourne on her way from Sydney down to Hobart for a gig. I decided to cook for her—always such a personal gift—tomato and roasted capsicum soup, pasta with my home-made pesto, a rocket and pear salad. D shovelled in the food, she hardly chewed much less savoured, she heaped salad on top of the pasta. Finally—I couldn’t stop myself—I asked whether she was enjoying the food. I might just as well have asked if she liked the décor of the house. She never warmed to décor, but she did to food. So many rituals developed around food that, over time, cooking and shared meals formed part of the connective tissue of home. Cooking was for us, cooking fed our shared narrative.

Now the narrative has been blown up. No slow unravelling here, what has happened is immediate, instantaneous, explosive. I had a life that was infused with D, now it has burst. And I have no desire to rebuild it differently. Grief is like the hard edge of even numbers. 10/12/2008. The date of her death is sharp and steel-plated.

Hours would pass in this house, D downstairs with her books, me up in my study with mine; I can’t read for more than thirty minutes. And music, always my emotional interpreter and comfort, I can’t listen to music and I certainly don’t dare play the piano. I can stroke and cuddle Wystan. I can go to the letter box and collect the day’s condolence cards. I can read the cards. I can look at photos. And I can read her books. Sometimes I think the screech of my own longing actually blocks her out.

After a while photos lose their power: they don’t recall the living person, they recall only themselves. And memories are no help either, their immateriality only reinforces the very real palpable life you have lost. The books are better—D’s books, other books too. I am calm when I read, and time passes without my having to shove it along.

After Akhenaten I start on her 1996 collection, Crete. The inscription in my copy is all wind and spark: ‘For my-at-last leopard, music, park-stripped-to-its-bones, beautiful friend, Trojan Horse, honey Daimon.’ I begin at the beginning then cheat and whip across to ‘Why I Love Your Body’.

I put your body

between me

  and the terrifying future

    of my body

This poem was written only a year or so after we met. It gained in its truth. Night after night these past nearly five years D would wake in the dark and turn to me. And I would put my body between her and the history of horrors, between her and the terrifying future of [her] body. I would keep her well.

I fill up on her books and all the while the house is emptying of her. I’ve finished the honey we used together, the Vegemite is getting low; her peanut butter will go rancid before I throw it out. I never have any fresh milk; there are two unopened boxes of her blueberries in the freezer; wherever there is running water there is a container of antiseptic liquid soap which, like the peanut butter, has remained untouched since D went to hospital; yesterday I threw out her mouldy yoghurt. And this morning I used one of her towels clean from the linen cupboard, and on my skin was a long straight hair and now that too has gone. These things which linger and go bad, the other things we shared but I finish alone, all these things which have out-lasted her.

It’s just our things

that survive

dissolving in the end

even the most sticky

of our clutching

   smudges.

I wonder what Dot would do if I had been the one to die. And I find myself smiling: she had such a poor tolerance for misery.

I first read CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed in 1973. Mine is a slender Faber and Faber edition. The glue of the spine has hardened, a bunch of pages at the beginning has broken free. At my first reading, Lewis’s grapplings with his God were irrelevant, but now I find myself longing for faith.

Be still, is the message of this book, let your mind wander, make space for her—H for Lewis, D for me—to come to you. You cannot summon your beloved on demand simply because you are desperate. You can’t make the dead live again—Lewis doesn’t think even his God can do that. I don’t need CS Lewis to tell me that intoning to a photograph is no substitute for conversations with D, but it helps to know there are facets of this state shared by others.

Lewis writes: ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.’ Not for me: I’m not afraid. And as time passes, I am realising it is not grief that is the issue for me, it’s loss and the chill of homelessness. It’s this alien existence, this hostile future, this aloneness which is fast lurching into loneliness, the people who don’t understand and those who nearly do, the crushing house, the food mouldering in the pantry, my life hacked from its moorings. Out in the open and shockingly exposed, I have lost my bearings.

Books, books, I grab anything that might stop the attacks. I read for calm, I read for consolation. I read for familiarity and understanding. I long to feel firm ground beneath my feet. I read Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ and wonder as I have before at Alfred’s depth of passion for Arthur Hallam—betrothed to Tennyson’s sister but occupying the better part of Tennyson’s own heart. I read Rilke’s ‘Requiem For a Friend’, written for the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker who had died following the birth of her only child. Paula married and she wanted to paint, but the times and her milieu made it impossible for her to do both. Only after she was gone did Rilke realise what a great painter she was. With Tennyson I am interested but not moved; the Rilke I find unbearably sad.

David Rieff, in the memoir of his mother’s dying, Swimming in a Sea of Death, is wracked by guilt. I don’t understand it, or at least not from his rather costive and polite account. Susan Sontag was desperate to live; in her last illness she was prepared to suffer terrible treatments offering only a remote chance of success because of her love of life. It was her choice: her son could not have stopped her.

D loved life like no one I have ever known; life was her great and good fortune. And she was terrified of death. But she would never have chosen as Sontag did. I know this with certainty, for as we stood together in a Brooklyn gallery back in January 2007 surrounded by Annie Liebowitz’s horrible theft of Sontag’s dying, D told me so. I read Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened of, a book exploring the author’s fear of death. (Shocking title, I say aloud, forgetting that D cannot answer me.) I have no fear of my own death, but many of the issues Barnes raises as a non-believer are relevant to me now. I know I can’t summon up faith at will. I have, however, created an afterlife consisting of spirit dimensions—no God required—that are beyond our comprehension and certainly beyond description. I imagine these dimensions to be like the almost unimaginable quantum world. One can’t ascribe thoughts, feelings, sensations to them—such responses are all too human. So I am thinking instead of a wave-like/particle-like X out in the cosmos with which I can connect. And that’s D: happy, without anxiety, without cancer. The thought eases my distress, but it does nothing to fill the terrifying spaces.

And at last to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, recommended by many but deliberately avoided. There’s history attached to this book. Inscribed in the copy I bought for D I have written: ‘To my healthy D, How lucky we are that your experience was a dream run from woe to go—and on’. It is dated 30/10/05—just over three years before she died. I read the book now in a single sitting. What a disappointment it is. Rather than the raw unflinching grappling with death I expected, Didion tries to skirt around, leap over, even silence thoughts of her recently dead husband, John, and of her seriously ill daughter, Quintana. I do the opposite: with the real D gone, I grab on to anything and everything that is associated with her, as if I might build up a proxy Dot. And Didion writes from a distance, as if she is describing a film; even her ‘waves of grief’ are cool. What I feel is not waves but a welling up, as if someone is squeezing me from my feet, and the moisture sweeps up through my body and oozes from my eyes, leaving my body limp like an empty tube of toothpaste. Maybe waves, so smooth and well-shaped, attach to grief, while welling (such messy spilling) is loss. I feel lost and empty, I feel fury and hatred. I feel nothing so civilised as grief.

My weeks and months of loss is everyone else’s getting on with their lives. Of course they know D is no longer in the world, but they are not bludgeoned with her absence over the second cup of coffee, cleaning up the kitchen, changing Wystan’s litter tray, receiving advance copies of my new novel without a shared celebration, sitting alone in the middle of the couch, the silent drink at 6 pm, her empty bathroom, the solitary bed. And mostly they don’t want to know about it.

People fall short—and how can they do otherwise? What I want they can’t give me, no matter how understanding they are. You have to do this suffering alone. But the house has become a cage, a cell, a barbed-wire enclosure. Far from the sanctuary of the past, this place is now endless solitary confinement. I rage and rage within these walls. I am furious at Kübler-Ross with her smug, orderly stages of grief. I’m furious at those distant friends and acquaintances now showering me with sympathy and embraces, who not only dismissed D in life but actually did not like her. I rage at the heat, at the drought, at the empty house, at the food rotting in the fridge. I rage at Telstra and AXA and Westpac. I rage at the cancer itself. And so much anger over those articles written by people who ignored her and her work in life, yet now have leaped on the death-wagon for their own self-serving purposes.

So much effort and yielding so very little. I explode at the Telstra guy who deserves it, I explode at close friends and family who don’t. I explode at the sky, the stars, the dishes in the sink, the dead grass, the dusty earth. I’m an addict to e-mail, to anger, to anxiety, to human contact. Stop, I tell myself, you’re making it worse, you’re driving yourself mad. And then quietly quietly I read her e-mails to me and mine to her, I read our cards and letters. Our voices so close and clear.

We were indeed imperishably marvellous.

Some days drag. Others gallop along. I see many people, I read, I think, I fill the days in activity and silence—all in service to the fact she is not here. And I look for omens. A single rose suddenly blooming in the garden in this hot dry summer, surely a sign of her spirit, and a white-faced heron down at the Yarra another sign. I latch on to falling photos and sulphur-crested cockatoos; I never stop searching. And it’s exhausting because it is not faith or omens I am wanting, but D. I look for her in trees and birds and the shapes of clouds; I look for her in the inexplicable happenstance of everyday life.

I play with Wystan, I do the dishes, I shop for food, I talk to the neighbours. I do these things consciously, as if I could trick myself into forgetting that life as I know it and want it has gone up in smoke. Poof! But death will trample the fresh grass whether I understand it or not, death will house the nettles whether I see them or not. Death is the sting.

Another Wednesday, another migraine. A real shocker this week. Is death always so punitive? And suddenly out of the pit of the morning my computer slips into the photo library screen-saver and there before me is a photo of D taken from behind as she marches in her sturdy, healthy way down the street toward the park.

I plunge into my photo library, find the photo, print it and perch it on the coffee table, this oh-so-familiar figure. D would complain she does not look sufficiently sylph-like. But it’s her, dressed in her purple fleece, her ‘best’ black, now-very-faded Versace jeans, white runners, arms bent at the elbows, the broad back, the strong stocky legs. I send the photo to close friends and family. They agree: it could not be anyone but Dot.

It is August 2009; eight months have passed. There are periods now when I am not thinking of her, not struggling to hold her close, not struggling at all. I berate myself: I don’t want her to slip away. But the fact remains, there are moments of normality, unrehearsed normality. Even the incomprehension—she can’t have gone forever—can become normalised, and hard on the heels of that: I am here without her—no howling, nor even resignation, as if her death is a fact like my being small or Jewish or living in Melbourne. Just an ordinary fact. I would prefer the pain and the howling, I would prefer the loss and longing. I hate that I would ever calmly accept her absence, hate that I would calmly accept being alone.

But you have to make a life alone. It is almost as if you have to push the absent beloved aside in order to go on living—even when you don’t want to push them aside. I feel the world tugging at me. The rhythm of conversation, the play of music, a spattering of rain on parched skin, the hot hungry skin itself. Dot died and with her my collaborator in this wonderful wild world. But the world remains and it does beckon. The two things—keeping her with me and having a future—are so unfairly opposed.

This house, our house, is filled with books. Thousands of them, Dot’s and mine, and surprisingly little overlap. I wander the shelves of my library. Now and then I take down a book and recall the circumstances of its reading. Other books I have forgotten completely. Plenty of pleasures to be had here, I say to myself. My entire life’s journey travelled with books, in words, in what is portable and invisible, what can be carried with me when life slips off the rails. And fiction most of all: I have always found a natural home in the mutable texture of narrative. And it is a home in uncertainty. You pick up a book and you don’t know where it will take you, but you trust it to take you somewhere. Throughout my life, in calm times or tumultuous, home is where the books are, raucous and uncomfortable, vibrant and enduring.

I read for hours now, and no longer just death books. I read Sebastian Faulks’s Human Traces and his excellent Engleby, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, David Malouf’s Ransom, Steve Carroll’s The Lost Life, Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. And biographies, too: Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch, and new studies of Anna Akhmatova, Thomas Mann and Robert Oppenheimer. And old favourites: Henry James and Edith Wharton, Milosz and Whitman, Virginia Woolf and EM Forster. While I am reading the storms recede and time passes without leaving scars.

Henry James wrote: ‘It is art that makes life.’

I am reading and writing again. There are times when I am living again. As I read, my mind wanders off just like it used to do, and I find myself in the rough and tumble of the imagination. What a relief to find I still can go there. And the familiar process brings such consolation. How I love the surprises to be found, the wonder of a mind released from all restraints. I feel properly alive again, and it doesn’t matter that it won’t last; it is enough to know the lolloping mind hasn’t deserted me forever.

Each night I go outside and stand in the chill night. I no longer search in the dark for a face, a voice, an embrace—I look up into vast space and wonder what is out there, feel the temptation and danger of unknown and uncertain possibilities. Back inside I sit at the end of the couch and reach for my books. I am reading Barenboim’s A Life in Music; his passion, and he’s such a passionate man, becomes my passion. And Philip Fisher’s Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences to understand better the texture of being alive. And Thomas Mann’s magisterial Buddenbrooks. I hover over the books and then select the novel. I am two thirds of the way through: how it pulls me along, how it pulls me away from myself. I settle into the couch and read my way home.

All unattributed poetry by Dorothy Porter. Taken from Crete (Hyland House, 1996), Akhenaten (Hyland House, 1998) and The Bee Hut (Black Inc, 2009).