broken wrist – Sixth in Line

Precursors to death

‘All Stubborn acts are childish acts.’ Hanya Yanagihara

Was it stubborn of me to insist we hike over to Office Works that day in search of a chair mat for underneath my writing desk. Something inspired me and although time was limited I had it in mind I needed it that day. A spring day with the first promise of warmth peeking through the clouds. And my husband, who like me relished a trip to office works as much as any one of us stationary fashionistas was keen to come along.

We located the section where they sell desks, and office chairs, all the bric-a-brac of secretarial life office managers dream of, at the back against a wall. There underneath one of the desk chairs someone had piled three thick sticky floor mats alongside a loose one already dragged out.

I made the mistake of standing on this loose mat not realising it was upside down. Its rubber lumps giving the mat suction on hard wood floors were to the surface under my feet while the shiny plastic surface, slid against the floor with me perched on top.

I toppled and fell. As you do in such moments I flung my left arm out to cushion my fall and it buckled under my weight. I didn’t hear a crack but felt it. Nine out of ten on the pain scale and I knew my arm needed attention.

It was late Saturday morning and busy enough, but the streets were not clogged when my husband bundled me into our car and we hop frogged between traffic lights all the way along Bridge Road as fast as we could to the Epworth Hospital and emergency.

There was no delay once the triage nurse took one look at my wrist.

‘Get those rings off now,’ she said and helped me peel off gold wedding and eternity rings, as I winced in pain.

‘In another five minutes, we’d be cutting them off,’ she said. Handing the rings to my husband who pocketed them, as if they were left over change.

My fingers had morphed into fat pink sausages with purple threads swimming in all directions across my wrist and I had no energy to ask him to take good care of my rings.

A doctor came by. An Xray later and he said kindly, as if talking to a small child,

‘We’re just going to give you a quick something. You won’t feel a thing. We’ll wrench your wrist back into place if we can. And if that doesn’t work, you might need surgery.’

I didn’t even have time to hope for the best when the procedure was over and done.

‘It didn’t work,’ the doctor said. ‘We’ll admit you now. You’re scheduled for surgery this afternoon. Three o’clock or thereabouts.’ And he was gone.

The wait passed in a fog of pain and apprehension. Then as predicted a tall smiling orderly came by my bed and wheeled me into the waiting room for surgery. My husband left soon after I was settled in the ward and I had left my phone behind with my valuables locked in a nearby cupboard. Now out of range of loved ones and reassurance.

I figured it would only take minutes but as they ticked away I could feel my panic clutch at my throat. There was a huge television screen overhead featuring a David Attenborough special. No volume so I could only imagine the story from its action.

I’m not snake phobic but there on the screen a writhing sea of black snakes, their reptile skins slick in the sunlight were coiling and uncoiling nearby a small mound of what looked like fresh soil, enough to make me gag.

From underneath this mound one after another, A series of tiny baby lizards popped out, just hatched from eggs, and were skittering across the ground in search of safe haven. As soon as one appeared the snakes uncoiled and were after it. It bolted away on its tiny legs and the chase was on.

Even freshly hatched into the world, it was as of these tiny creatures had a sixth sense on how to evade the creatures trying to eat them. They swirled and swung, then wheeled into a corpse of bracken and disappeared. And we viewers could sigh the relief of those saved from death. They were safe.

Then the next and the next. I watched in horror. David Attenborough’s usually genteel show, even when he portrays the seeming brutality of the animal kingdom, was never as much a horror show to me as that day when one after another of the lizards came into the light for the first time only to be greeted by those ferocious predators.

If they were human their cortisone levels would be full up and they’d be traumatised for life.

Time passed and a young woman was wheeled into the pre operative area and then out as I waited my turn. Eventually a nurse came by, and I asked why it was taking so long. I asked as politely as I could knowing the way hospitals work and how it does not do to become a difficult and demanding patient. You get a better deal if you’re docile, even if it means you’re more invisible. She shook her head and went to check her notes.

So, I waited, and despite myself, tears trickled down. I let them fall, a measure of my misery and wondered whether the nurse might notice and offer me a tissue and words of comfort.

She did not. By the time David Attenborough had finished speaking at the end of his program, not that I could hear his words, but the credits were rolling, the nurse came back to me.

‘The person before you broke both wrists after he fell from a roof and it’s taking longer than we thought it might. You’re on next though.’

I thought of my mother who lost her last baby at 43 years of age. Her eleventh baby and only her second one who did not make it past infancy. A still born girl she called Anne Marie. My mother told me the story years later. How soon after the baby was born they moved her into a room with another bereft mother, a girl whose baby had been taken from her at birth because she was young and unmarried.

My mother felt so sorry for this young woman that she could not complain too much about her loss. After all she had another nine healthy children back home.

How could I complain of a short wait on the surgery floor when in time a doctor would tend to my broken wrist, and all would be well?

The same tall orderly arrived at last, still smiling and wheeled me along white corridors with dazzling lights over head into the operating suite with even more dazzling lights not only overhead but on all sides, as though we were in a photography gallery with cameras poised high on tripods in every corner ready for action.

A nurse tapped my arm seconds before the anaesthetist jabbed something into my arm, ‘Your blood pressure is at 200,’ she said, and before I could respond, What can I do about it? I was asleep.’

Where does stubbornness come into all of this? My fall and broken wrist, a punishment for my haste or something else. I know many stubborn adults, I would not think of them all as childish, but Yanagihara is right when she allocates the sensation to a quality of childhood.

I think again of those baby lizards determined in their stubbornness to survive and the swirling black snakes equally determined in their hunger to be fed.

It’s not always such a bad thing to be stubborn unless your refusal to budge off course is accompanied by a will to refuse life and push in the direction of death. However much the act of death is the most stubborn move of all. It will not let us be.

Cruel optimism

My wrist has made these holidays difficult. In the normal course, I would be cleaning out rooms, shifting obstacles, filling a skip with unnecessary junk.

But not this year.

This year my still healing wrist means I cannot lift anything with my left hand, heavier than a coffee cup.

Nor even a teacup, as my husband jokes. The weight of a cup of coffee is the extent of it.

I tried the other day to sift and sort my books, but they too are heavy and one book at a time becomes tedious, so I resorted to reading through a box filled with letters from my past.

Letters that, like so many things in my life, remain unsorted.

I found letters from my first boyfriend – who proved to be more dedicated to me, at least from his written letters, than I remember – mixed in with letters from my older sister while I was at boarding school, and with letters from my mother.

So many of my older sister’s letters are addressed to my younger sister and me while we were together at boarding school and during the last two years of my schooling when we were farmed out, first to a Dutch family and then onto boarding school to give our parents a chance – as my oldest brother put it at the time – to sort themselves out, unencumbered by the burden of small children.

Not that I was small. I was fifteen when this saga began but my youngest sister and brother were still in primary school and although they were farmed out to family – in the form of an older brother, who was the first in our family to be married, and with two small children of his own – they did not find it one bit easy to be taken from their mother, however much it spared them the agonies of being near their father.

Likewise it was for me. I was adolescent and ambivalent about my mother, but I still wanted her love and care. I did not want substitutes in the form of a Dutch family or the nuns.

Even so many of the letters, particularly from my older sister and brother, encourage us to enjoy ourselves.

‘Now that the novelty of your stay with [the Dutch family] has worn off,’ my older sister writes, ‘I want the two of you to make a really conscious effort in being helpful and happy. When you do get depressed, just keep on smiling and cover up, otherwise you will make [the Dutch family] think you’re not happy with them – and I know you are!

‘Please don’t think I’m preaching to you. That’s about the last thing I want. But I know from my own experiences in the past that it’s not fair to show anyone that you’re miserable or depressed.’

Even if I’m wary of judging the past by present standards, I reckon this type of advice is misguided.

We were unhappy, we tried to cover up and it still backfired.

Later, by chance trawling through Google, I came across Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, the notion that we tend to cling onto ideals and attachments from the past about how we want our lives to unfold, even when such ideals are no longer feasible in the world today.

Clinging to such ideals interferes with our capacity to flourish.

I resonate to this notion and reading these letters from my childhood and adolescence I’m struck by the number of useless ideals to which I once clung, including the notion to keep up a good front, not to complain, not to give any inkling of my unhappiness, and always to keep on a good face.

My mother’s letters are the most telling.

In one letter she writes about the death of a beloved uncle and how sad she is not to be able to talk to ‘nice’ people like that ever again.

‘But don’t think that I am depressed or anything,’ my mother writes. She would not want us to think she was depressed. And then in the next sentence, as though the thought has just occurred to her, the reason for writing this particular letter in the first place, about how only half the child endowment of $18 arrived, instead of the $36 she had expected.

When she rang the relevant department, they told her my mother was no longer eligible for child endowment for my younger sister, as by then this sister had left school and although still a student at teacher’s college, the government now paid her an allowance, a studentship, and child endowment no longer applied.

My mother relied on these endowments, which came to her and not my father, to pay part of the school fees.

She wanted to pay the school fees because the ‘nuns have always been so good to us’ and therefore wondered whether my younger sister and I might be able to offer her some money to offset the shortfall, ‘only this once’.

Such a sad letter and those comments were prefaced by other thoughts such as ‘Are you still slimming or gaining? And the boyfriends?’ she writes, without qualification.

The boyfriends as though they were some blemish on our skins like pimples. My mother had trouble with the idea of boyfriends.

She wanted us to marry not spend time with boyfriends. She wanted us to marry as she had done, but even she admitted to the idea that her marriage was ill chosen.

I read excerpts out to one of my daughters and she said: ‘It’s hard to know whether you should feel sad or guilt tripped’, which is exactly how I felt when I first received such letters, not so much sad because in those days I had difficulties seeing things from my mother’s perspective.

I blamed my mother for not leaving my father. I blamed her for her Catholicism and her religiosity. I blamed her for not putting her children ahead of her husband, as many a child has done before, including no doubt my own children at times.

Now when I am older than my mother was when she wrote these letters, I recognise something of her struggle and wish I had been more able to see how hard she tried and how humiliating it must have been for her to have to ask her just-out-of-school daughters, who by then lived away from home on small scholarships – the first time any money ever came our way, and needing to stretch it out to pay rent, buy clothes and food and survive – to have our mother see us as flush enough to be able to offer to help her pay school fees for our younger sister still at school.

It must have galled her.

My mother around this time.

It would gall me to need to ask my children for money in this way, but my mother asked all her children for financial assistance when we first came into money. After my father died when she became a little more self sufficient but then she remarried a man who cared for her well when he was alive for some seventeen years, but even he managed not to leave her much to go on with for the next fifteen or so years and once again in her old age we kids needed to support her.

By then I did not begrudge it, and wanted to protect her from the humiliation of her unmet needs, a woman of her times, a woman who left school at fifteen to help her parents keep house until she married and then had countless children and then migrated to Australia and lost much of her family support, even though a number of her brothers also migrated to Australia.

A sad story, a common story, a story that bears retelling.