Tag: optimism

Fluent in silence

‘So, if you are too tired, sit next to me, for I too, am fluent in silence.’ R Arnold.

In my nineteenth year there came a day when I walked alone through the city surrounded by people. The peak hour homeward rush and every person hell bent on a destination, be it tram stop or Flinders Street station. They brushed past me with one intention alone, to leave this place. 

I did not want to leave. Not yet. In every face I imagined the round-faced sweetness of the man I had come to regard as my one true love. He had disappeared from our workplace that afternoon before my shift ended without a goodbye. 

Why leave me in limbo? Why leave me waiting, hankering, caught in the not knowing when I might see him again.

Over a decade later, the first time I met Mrs Milanova, I did not tell her about this episode in the city when I thought my heart might break with longing for this man who re-materialised sometime later but not before the damage was done. 

I did not tell her of a time when I was small, but not so small I could not remember. The house was filled with visitors. My mother’s family from the Netherlands.

The house suffused with the smell of cigarettes and port wine glasses passed around. Coffee and cake. Smoked oysters from oily tin cans, on round crackers and my mother in her element. 

I had watched her prepare earlier. Saw the pleasure she found in visits from her loved ones. But we younger children were ushered off to bed without so much as a good night cuddle.

Did I call out to her when I heard her footsteps pad past my room?  Not sure. But after a while, long enough for my younger sisters to drop into sleep, my mother pushed through my door.

I asked if I, too, might have a cup of tea like all her guests. She was busy, she said, but would bring me one in a minute.

The minute never came. It went beyond several minutes and I fell asleep waiting.

Early in 1986 when I met Mrs Milanova for the first time and offered her a potted version of my life up to my thirty-third year, she did not blink. It was only when I told her I was thinking of having an analysis and could wait till she had space that she questioned me. Should I really wait?

Her use of the word ‘wait’ and memories flooded in. 

My sister and I at the East Camberwell railway station waiting as train after train arrived empty of our mother. Desperate for her to return from her work. Our bare legs in shorts sticking to the hot green paint of the slatted platform seats.

Life in our house without our mother in the company of our drunk and unpredictable father was unbearable.

Waiting for the face of my beloved boyfriend to materialise in the crowd. Waiting, the unbearable state of being when you cannot see that something you hope for will happen.

In all likelihood it might not, but still you hope.

I usher in my mantra. ‘Something good will happen.’ Knowing well one day good things will stop happening, for me at least, even as so many good things are punctuated these days by the not so good and the downright bad. 

We all need to find ways of coping. My way to cope with waiting has been to fill the waiting time with a useful activity. A distraction. 

When Mrs Milanova questioned my capacity to wait, and all my tears, she was right. I should not wait.

Such an odd expression. I cannot wait. Even when we know we must. I cannot wait for the next good thing. 

When I was a young person I imagined good things would happen in my life such that eventually, before I died, everything would be put right.

Such a self-satisfied notion, as if all good things congeal around me. 

I have been through enough political cycles now to see the ebb and flow. The way we move a few steps forward towards greater equality and bat off oppression, then slide into the cruelty of our unequal world where the rich get richer and the poor poorer.

When the revolution?

When the change of heart. And all the time the waiting. I have yet to find the silence Arnold describes. Even as I say I, too, know about the longing for it.

As I sat beside my dying brothers-in-law in recent years and watched their faces slowly shift out of this life and into wherever they might have gone, into death, I began to think about the peace of passing. Even as neither man passed so peacefully, there came a time when it was over. And we, their family sat around these two who were dying, a decade apart, and felt the ache of longing their mother might have felt had she herself not left this earth decades earlier.

When someone dies, we latch onto our own, especially when we get past an age where youth is no longer on our side.

After my mother died I saw instantly that I, along with my siblings, was next in line. And when my own brother died, I could not feel as much as I felt when I was ten years old, and he left home for the first time and a couple of decades later when he moved with his young family to another state far away.

I grieved then in a way I could not grieve at his funeral, distanced from the pain his own children felt. Distanced from the pain I imagined I might have felt when one of my siblings died.

Death is final. The waiting is over. But the waiting. It has no finality. It goes on and on and on.

And in this moment, while I am waiting for a good outcome to a painful situation that in itself seems interminable, I can find no way of settling my troubled mind. 

I am back in my small bed waiting for my mother to bring me a sweet and milky cup of tea so that I might feel remembered and less alone.

I am stalking the streets of the city searching for his face, the round glow around his bright eyes that might light up at the sight of me as mine would light up at his.

In this waiting I do not find the comfort of silence but the ache of a heart that’s breaking. And the words of a song rattle through my brain: The Proclaimers: 

My heart was broken. But the singers at least have the benefit of past tense while for me the heart break repeats again and again with every new disappointment, every new disappearance, every new failed hope. 

Every step closer to death.

‘No one is as old as me’

The rose bush outside my window is top heavy with flowers. Full petalled cups that drop down as if they are too heavy for each stem to support.

 My head feels the same this morning, top heavy and ready to topple. Too full of thoughts to be able to tease them apart.

Ours is a winter sky today and winter skies remind me of Europe, that first time we visited when I was still a young woman, though then I thought myself quite the sophisticate.

 In 1980 when my aunt met me at Schipol airport in Amsterdam she told me later she had been fearful of who and what she might find.
‘But you were just a girl,’ she said, ‘just a young girl.’ And no longer did she feel intimidated.

Now, thirty five years later, my aunt is dead.

My aunt in Holland, the year I was born in Australia, when she herself was a young ‘girl’.

 My aunt who goes by my two middle names, Margaretha Maria, was a twin born half the weight of her twin brother. So sickly was she during her early life that her parents sent her off to live in Munster, where she was allegedly spoiled by her childless aunt and uncle, away from the rigours of life with her parents and six other siblings.

 This was a commonplace event in those days perhaps but one I suspect that had a profound effect on my aunt. Sent away for her physical health with little regard for her emotional state. She felt abandoned.

 My aunt was so unlike her sister, my supremely optimistic mother, who is six years older and very much the opposite.

At 92 years of age my mother wants to live forever.

 My mother believes the world is full of goodness and help is always there when she needs it. Before my father died he told her that although he had not provided well for her after his death, he was sure she would find someone else to take care of her. Not that he took much care of her other than to provide her with many children.

 My aunt on the other hand, did not trust that the world would provide. And on her death notice which recently arrived here in the mail, her children had included these words:
Ik voel me stokoud. Niemand is zo oud als ik. I feel I am so old. No one is as old as me.

 My mother protests. How could my aunt say such a thing? She was not sick. Old, yes, maybe, but not sick.

 Try as I might to explain to my mother that her younger sister had lost the will to live, my mother remains confused, even after she reads Tonny Van Tiggelen’s eulogy.

Tonny, who had been my aunt’s friend for nearly eighty years wrote the eulogy in the form of a letter to her dead friend.
 ‘You would get angry when I told you to eat, otherwise you would die. But you were not interested in living any more.’

 After my aunt’s husband had died in 1994, Tonny said, her friend lost her way. My aunt’s husband as he was dying had arranged for her to live in a new house in Castricum, custom built to suit her needs but for my aunt:
 ‘The house was too big. There was too much sun. You had to walk the stairs and look after the flowers in the garden and you did not like that at all. The next house was smaller but it was too cold with not enough sun. The view was good, but you did not like it any more.’

 Slowly my aunt had stopped eating, Tonny said, and she stopped sharing a glass of wine with her friend. She stopped going out to eat.

 Tonny remembered their friendship. How they walked as flower girls together, on religious occasions, dressed in white with veils; how they rode on their bikes during the war to a village, Boverkaspel, to get food, but had then to flee because someone shot dead a National Socialist in front of them.

Tonny remembered how one of my aunt’s mothers friends had given them brown beans and oliebollen (dough balls) to eat and all the way home they had to stop by the side of the road to relieve themselves. The food had been so rich.

 Tonny remembered the two years they had worked together in a crèche, again during the war, and how they licked the pots and pans clean.

 She remembered the red cabbage feast at my mother’s place with candlelight and in evening dress…and how my aunt had so often said that when she died she would she see what there was to see.

My mother is certain of what she will see after she dies and yet she is reluctant to go off to see it. My aunt on the other hand, who kept an open mind about what she would find, has gone off in search of it.

I miss her already.