Live from the sidelines

One must imagine Sisyphus haunted

Two of my closest friends, W & G, are expecting a baby—their first!—very soon, and, through a series of circumstances related to a brutal housing market, very nearly found themselves without a place to live. It got so that W was attending rental inspections solo, lest an agent spot a visibly pregnant G and silently, illegally disqualify them from the running, because who wants a pleasant, house-proud young family with a newborn and a large dog (not to mention an impeccable rental record) in their property.

The last place W inspected seemed okay. Not great, but fine for a short-term roof over their heads while they made it through the wilderness of the newborn phase. He took photos and shared them with G. What’s that, she asked, peering at one of the images. It was black mould speckled across one of the walls. The flat was struck off the list.

This was how they came to stay at my family home, the one recently vacated by my late Dad. He went into hospital on 24 April, returned once, for minutes, to stand on the front verandah as I unlocked the front door; where he fell and suffered the cerebral haemorrhage that would send him to hospital, then palliative care, and would ultimately be listed as his primary cause of death by the coroner.

My sisters, their partners and I stayed in the house most of the time Dad was in hospital. In his final week or so, my sisters and I slept on the ward, and then in his room at the pall care unit, returning to the house for an hour or so every few days to shower and collect clean clothes. My psychologist sister’s partner slept there at nights, ensuring the dogs were fed and walked, and then returned to the hospital early every morning.

After Dad died, we all stayed at the house for another few weeks, as we waited to learn whether his death would be investigated by the coroner, as we planned his burial and memorial, and as we began to undertake some of the more urgent grim administrative tasks. It was an impossibly difficult time, and yet it was both soothing and necessary for us all to be together. We alternated between cooking nourishing meals, hungry for fresh stuff after weeks of hospital cafeteria food and a grief that had eclipsed our hunger, and ordering takeaway with vouchers kindly sent by friends. We commenced a rewatch of Vanderpump Rules, beginning at season 1, and sat up late hooting at the enormous television, which Dad had purchased only six months before he died.

Friends called round to visit. My best mate took the day off work and we sat on the sunny porch. At that time I was still waiting on a call from the coroner’s office, and she—a lawyer who often works on coronial matters—was able to shed some light on the process. My sisters’ friends dropped by, too. We slept in late and took long walks and answered a billion text messages from Dad’s friends. Sometimes I would set aside an hour or two in the morning and again in the afternoon to do just that. The days lost their rhythm, or perhaps they developed a new one. The air had turned cold while Dad was dying; the days had become shorter. I woke with no sense of urgency to greet the day.

A few days after the memorial, we all returned to our own places. Since then, I’d only returned to the house once, I think, to undertake death admin round i with my sisters.

When W & G first mentioned their struggle to find a place to live, we offered up the house immediately. It’s not close to the city, we said. You’ll be far from all of our friends. It could be isolating. And it’s a really old house. It’s not fancy. It has one bathroom.

The house was initially a back-up option, and then it became the option. Still, I said: Come and see it before you commit. Make sure it’s okay for you guys.

I am not ashamed of the house—I loved growing up there, and have no desire to sell it—but I wanted them to know it was modest, with the idiosyncrasies of an old weatherboard place. They visited for an inspection and moved in the following day.

I am surprised by the sweetness of it all; how good it feels to know that someone’s in the house. My sisters and I keep saying: It’s what Mum and Dad would have offered, wanted, et cetera, which is true. They always went out of their way to help others. But I think they’d be glad to know the house is breathing again, too.

W. messages me that the vibes are good. Daily, I receive updates: their dog reclining happily in a pool of sunlight. A selfie of W. on a work call in front of a photo of my sisters and I. A picture of the cupboard with the caption Strong novelty mug game.

I send the neighbours a text to let them know about the tenants, and to pass on W’s phone number. B., a man in his sixties who has lived next-door with his wife for decades, replies:

Lovely to know that your home will have a newborn living there soon. We saw the lights on a couple of times this weekend but had a really busy one so didn’t get a chance to meet them. I reckon Dad would be tickled pink to know they are keeping it a home.

I also learn that Dad’s high-school friend I., who has his own garden and landscaping business, has been maintaining his fortnightly mowing schedule. He’s had keys for years, and has long been accustomed to coming and going if no one was home: we would leave cash in an envelope for him if we were out. Dad always made a point to be home when I. came by, of course, to catch up. The two men would sit out on the back deck shooting the shit over a cuppa and a ham-and-cheese toastie.

It had not occurred to me that I. would continue coming by to keep the lawns and edges tidy even while the house sat empty. I’m embarrassed: I send him a message to apologise, and let him know I’ll make sure to leave several weeks’ pay for him next time, though he brushes it off in his laconic way. I tell him about our tenants, too, and ask if he wouldn’t mind keeping up the lawns while they’re living there. I’ll make sure W. and G. know where to leave the cash if they’re out or catching up on sleep, and how I. takes his coffee (instant, white with one). He writes back: I’ll keep coming until I’m no longer needed and adds a smiling-face-with-single-tear emoji, which touches me.

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A young woman approaches at the farmer’s market. Excuse me, she says, Are you Jennifer Down? Yes, I say.

This happens to me rarely—maybe once or twice a year. To be an Australian author, particularly one without much of a social media presence¹, is to be more or less unrecognisable. Once it happened twice in the same night, when I was with some mates at a gig at the Forum. They ribbed me about it, but gently.

Anyway, I suspect this woman recognised my via my dog, who is more photogenic than I am, and whose countenance consequently appears more frequently than mine on social media. She delivers some lovely compliments about my most recent book—I think she even says it’s among her favourites, although I can never retain kind words. She says, I hope you’re still writing, or perhaps I hope you keep writing, or something to that effect.

I take my coffee and groceries and move off to sit in a sunny spot with my book.

I think of friends returning to work after maternity leave, or taking up a hobby or practice they’d forgone in the earliest weeks or months of new motherhood. The friend shimmying into a dress she hadn’t worn in years because she hadn’t gone out anywhere to wear it. The friend taking a blissful drag from a stealthy cigarette. The friend who undertook her first creative residency in over a decade now that her children were old enough, and her partner in a position to solo parent for a fortnight.

I have never parented but I’ve often considered the parallels between parenting and palliation, especially in those twinned acute periods: newborn and near-death. The vigilance, the close scrutiny, the sleeplessness, the sense of existing in a hermetic capsule, only to emerge, eventually, astounded that the world beyond is still there. The disbelief that the world beyond is still there, and largely untouched by the seismic blast and aftershocks of your own strange new life.

I think of something my therapist asked me some years ago, when I was emerging from an extended depressive episode and told her I could finally concentrate long enough to read again. I wonder if you might have a sense of coming back to yourself? she asked.

Sitting in the sun, with my book and my dog and my fresh vegetables and bread, I think about coming back to myself.

On a good day—sure.

Most of the time, though, the sense is more of becoming someone entirely different; of having walked through a doorway from which I cannot return. I am on the other side of an enormous hinge. I only hope that there is time yet to prevent my new self from becoming bitter and sclerotic.

I’m railing against that, but god, it’s like pushing shit uphill. A Sisyphean haunting.

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Every day I force myself on a long walk. I don’t have a job, you see, and I do love walking, always have. But these days, when the mornings are bitter and we have to plod through thirty minutes of concrete just to reach the river, I find it harder. My dog stops to sniff the piss at every pole and storefront, profoundly unhurried. She’s scrolling her feed, my sister says. I never rush her unless, say, she decides to go piss sommelier in the middle of a road. But I feel my mood darkening as we stop for the fiftieth time and I watch rubbish flapping down the street in the gritty wind.

Down by the river I feel calmer. There are bright constellations of wattle and sweet onion. Once, a single nasturtium by the enormous old oak tree near the Children’s Farm. Bicycles whiz past. We always stop at Dights Falls to look out over the fast-rushing water. There is a part of my new novel set there, and I realised I have been trying to commit it to memory in all weather, at all times of day, from different vantage points.

I feel calmer. Still the tears well uselessly. I keep thinking: I have nothing to look forward to. I have nothing to work towards—nothing I care about, anyhow. I can’t picture what the future might look like. I feel quite certain I will die by 50 or 55, probably cancer, and I would like to make the most of the time between now and then but there’s nothing I really want. Sure, I’ll keep writing books, but for what?

It’s not a conscious monologue but low-level background noise. Whenever I catch myself thinking this way, I interrupt and redirect. I distract myself the way one might a toddler or a dog.

What can I do to claw my way through this? I think. I’ve tried baths, yin yoga, pilates, running, studying, screaming, bushwalking, cleaning, organising, acupuncture. I’ve tried not drinking. I’ve tried listing good things. The fact of the matter is, I am grateful for my first coffee of the morning, and for clean bedlinen, and for a glimpse of the magnolias coming into bloom. But I don’t want these things to be the highlight of my week or even day. It seems a pitifully low bar.

I don’t need validation: I know my feelings are reasonable and my depression largely situational. I am bored of thinking about it all.

In desperation, I book myself a facial treatment using a voucher Dad gave me a couple of Christmases ago. The facial therapist smiles broadly as she explains how things will run; asks a few questions about my skin type and ‘concerns’. I lay in a quiet room wrapped in heated blankets, which remind me of hospital, and I have to not think about that. It’s very dim and soothing essential oils are being diffused. For ninety minutes, the therapist’s hands barely leave my skin: she massages my neck, shoulders and back, then has me roll over so she can administer the facial itself. I think of something I once read from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors; how Ghislaine Maxwell had instructed her in massage, telling her to always keep at least one hand on the client so as not to startle him with touch. I have to not think about that.

I almost doze off, I’m so relaxed. When the treatment is over, I re-dress sleepily and shuffle to the front desk with newly hydrated skin. I hand over my gift card. If Dad were alive, I’d have texted him to tell him: I finally used your voucher! It was soooo nice! Instead I settle for telling myself he’d be happy I did that on a drizzly, unemployed Tuesday afternoon. He would have said: Oh, good on you, honey. I’m so glad!

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D and J invite me for lunch at their chic new office. It has been a long time since I’ve seen either of them. I arrive with a bagful of lemons and oranges from Dad’s trees. D is in the kitchen preparing a leek omelette for me, the pesky vegetarian. We sit around the leather-topped dining table, which I remember from their old office. Indeed, I once spent hours working at it, when D and I were writing a book together, and when I put my palm to its soft surface now I am filled with surprising nostalgia. I remember interviewing the assistant of a Japanese architect, in Japanese, and then painstakingly translating the notes. I remember J bringing me endless cups of Greek coffee. I remember D commenting on how filthy my laptop screen was, and insisting on cleaning it of smudges with a cloth.

The conversation roves here and there: the upcoming census, J’s children, D’s recent months in Paris, the wildfires in the south of France, the upcoming French election, US politics, my raggedy work output. I tell them that I enrolled in a Master of Public Health at the beginning of the year. D asks about my study load, and I tell him it’s full-time, which is mostly fine given how pathetically underemployed I’ve been over the last twelve months. He sets down his cutlery and gives me a Mona Lisa smile that means he’s about to hurl a bomb. He says: Have you considered punishing yourself less?

We all laugh.

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Cooking dinner, I listen to an episode of The Daily. It’s titled: Why Adults Are Getting Cancer at a Younger Age. Sure, I think, I’ll bite. It takes a good ten or more minutes before the host and his interview subject—one of the paper’s health reporters—get to the eponymous question. Before then, the reporter interviews a young woman, Whitney, who was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer at thirty-six. Whitney describes the weirdness and devastation of it all; the impact on her relationship with her boyfriend of two years; the sudden, urgent decisions about egg-freezing and chemotherapy and a double mastectomy; the distance she felt from her partner, as, she explains, we’d had no practice: none of her friends had experienced a similar diagnosis, nor had any cared for a partner undergoing aggressive cancer treatment. She envied people who were older when they received a diagnosis because their relationships might have been better primed to withstand disaster.

The health reporter tells the host that many of the young people she’d interviewed had recounted feeling a sense of profound isolation from their loved ones. ‘It was hard to watch their friends and their peers and their colleagues moving forward in their lives while [they were] just sort of stuck,’ she says in summary, ‘or maybe even moving backwards.’

Then, a clip from Whitney describing just that: ‘Your friends are who you spend your time with, who you kind of compare yourself against, and so they’re kind of able to be taking these next steps in their lives as I’m, like, taking a step back into nothingness and the unknown.’

Standing in my tiny kitchen, one socked foot balanced on the other, tipping sliced onion into a pan, I feel concussed. I know that feeling, that distance—have known it for years. I was never the patient, of course, only the carer. And yet I know so well that feeling of being a fly in amber, of having been rudely relegated to the sidelines only to find oneself trapped there.

I wish the interviewer had asked Whitney, who is presently in remission, whether she ever clawed her way out of the bog, and whether she felt a sense of belatedness—living after the gold rush—or of atemporality, or perhaps the anxiety that now that she had come to know that sinister place outside of society, she might be banished there once more at any moment. I hope she only felt the ecstasy of rejoining the side.

Thanks for being here. Take care.

1. Of course I’m on Instagram, desirous as I am to divest from the Suckerberg empire. But for better or worse I’ve always treated it as though I’m speaking to a bunch of friends, the way I did when I transmitted slivers of my life back in 2012 or 2013. I’ve not evolved since then, I fear: I’m still posting banal, offhand, sometimes deeply personal bullshit on my public account, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t have many followers <3