Making light

+ the vacuum of it all

It’s been over a month since I last wrote. That’s not unusual for me: among the many reasons I suspect I could never ‘monetise’ this newsletter is that I doubt I could produce it with the grinding consistency required by paying customers. Not that I lack dedication, necessarily, nor the ability to adhere to a deadline; but that I don’t really have that much to say week in, week out.

Also, for the last few years at least, the rhythm of my days has been hostage to hundreds of minor interruptions, not-infrequent disasters, all of which ultimately take precedence over whatever half-formed thoughts or memories I might have planned on disgorging here.

Who cares, anyhow. I’ve been spent the last month frantically trying to get back on the horse of my studies—I foolishly enrolled in a Master of Public Health at the beginning of the year—which I was managing well until the actual moment of Dad’s death, at which point I dropped my bundle entirely to focus on other practical matters of burial and memorial arrangements, and the beginning of the long list of legal-administrative tasks that follow a death, and, I suppose, grieving, although even that keeps getting pushed to the bottom of my to-do list.

(I think of that Succession scene, Tom sneering at Shiv ‘scheduling [her] grief’. I think of it partly because I mentioned Succession in my eulogy for Dad, too, so I suppose it’s been on my mind. The show’s string-led, off-kilter trip-hop theme, composed by Nicholas Britell, was Dad’s iPhone ringtone. It was among several series Dad and I watched together, a few episodes at a time, in the years between his diagnosis and death; along with Nurse Jackie, The Pitt and The Americans—my all-time favourites.)

In between the overwhelm of long-overdue essays, critical reflections, critical analyses, intervention evaluations, and so on, I have thought about what I might write here, or what I might want to express. I haven’t landed on anything (spoiler alert). I have too much to say, and nothing at all.

No one’s got a gun to my head, so it doesn’t really matter.

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I’ve thought about the congealing of roles that happens post-death.

My parents always referred to my sisters and I, in the collective sense, as the girls. I’ve now found I use the same term when talking to friends and family. The girls and I are going to the cemetery tomorrow. It’s been difficult for the girls and I to coordinate a time. I need to check with the girls first.

It’s not only me. Family friends send text messages, emails, sympathy cards, letters. You beautiful girls. Ross was so proud of you girls. You girls were his entire world. He always spoke so proudly of Liz and you girls.

Last year I undertook a residency with the illustrator and memoirist Kyo Maclear as my mentor. During one of our discussions, she pointed out this descriptive tendency. It’s like you sort of became a unit, she observed in her soft, shrewd manner. Like the March sisters, or the sisters in The Virgin Suicides, I said, and we laughed.

The girls are 25 and 30 years old. Probably they—we—still be the girls in several decades’ time. Our existence as a single unit, a molecule, has nothing to do with age.

My sisters and I are equal parties in everything, in theory: in legal, financial, and all decision-making matters. This is—has always been—unlikely to present a problem, given our closeness and the straightforwardness of our father’s estate.

When Dad’s death was referred to the coroner, I wound up being the Senior Next of Kin. This meant that my sisters and I were entitled to the same information; either of them could phone the coroner’s office to ask the same questions, and would be afforded the same access to information and the same input on decisions. But I was effectively the family spokesperson; the person who would be contacted in the first instance. It was not a difficult job. In fact it was, in the end, immaterial, since Dad was not required to undergo an autopsy.

I don’t recall how I became the Senior Next of Kin. I suspect it was by default; my sisters and I glancing between one another. I recall my nurse sister completing a clipboarded form as part of the certification of death, but that’s all. At some point I must have volunteered. Sometimes you just play things as they lay.

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I’ve thought about my parents telling me, around the time I turned 18, that they were considering amending their wills and powers of attorney. My youngest sister was then eight. They asked if I would feel comfortable taking custody of her and my 13-year-old sister should anything happen to them. Of course, I said. I asked who was currently listed as the person recommended to take custody in the event of their demise. They said my uncle and aunt—my father’s brother and his wife, who we saw once a year, and with whom we shared little common ground politically or generally. Of course, I said again. I don’t think I truly understood what I was saying. I would say it a thousand times over. I would say it now. I believe my parents did the right thing in asking me: their request was absent of pressure or moral imperative. They recognised my youth and my personhood and my right to my own life. They gave me an out.

Still I don’t know anyone else who was asked that question, age 17 or 18. I don’t know many people for whom it would have been relevant.

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I’ve thought about how several times since Dad died, I’ve had the impulse to send him a text checking in, asking how he’s going. I never had that with Mum. It’s as though her death were immediately reified, whereas Dad’s is somehow unresolved. I think part of this is due to communication styles and relationships. Mum and I used to text constantly, in a kind of unending conversation. We could hang up mid-conversation with the knowledge we would pick up in the same place hours later. Dad sent me extensive messages, but our exchanges were more sporadic, and often I was the one to instigate them. How are you feeling. How was the play. How was chemo.

When I say ‘more sporadic’, I mean every day or so. I always knew what he was doing or had done or was about to do.

I always knew that one day I would long for his long, newsy text messages; his memes and links to YouTube clips of Janis Joplin shredding at this or that tiny venue, or of Maddow destroying Trump. I even said it to my therapist once: One day I’ll miss this. She said, smiling, At least you’ll have plenty to look back on. But it’s not enough. I want more.

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I’ve thought about how I have felt myself, guiltily, allowing my nurse sister—the most financially literate of the three of us, and also the most assertive, and also the most geographically proximate to our father’s house—to take charge of many elements of death admin. The closing of bank accounts, the chasing of this or that piece of documentation. It’s not that I wouldn’t have done it myself, but that she is more on the job than I am. I’ve not been in a hurry. Everything feels so recent; so current. Also: that I find the prospect overwhelming. I would have waited longer than she has to take care of matters like a minor outstanding credit card debt. I am grateful to her, and also guilty.

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I’ve thought of writing about the funny stuff, too, since there was a lot of it.

My psychologist sister arriving home after a 14-hour stint with Dad in the E.D. I had collected her from the hospital’s pallid, unnatural light, where we left our father dozing in a cubicle. It was close to midnight. I put a bowl of soba noodles before her and she ate quickly, fulfilling a need, and we talked. Afterwards she set her chic handbag on the dining table and asked: Do you want a What’s In My Bag?

She pantomimed an influencer, extracting one item after another, narrating as she goes. Lip balm. Pen. Another pen. Oh, this is my little pouch with everything—chewing gum, tampons, Panadol, bobby pins, tweezers, lighter…Hairbrush. Charger. My planner. Wet Wipes. Men’s jocks, clean, size XS. I took these in case my Dad shit himself in the car on the way to the ED. He’s never not been continent, but today was a special occasion, so I thought, Might as well.

Or when Dad, shortly after being informed of his grim prognosis by a physician, said: Lucky I bought a double [cemetery plot]. Later, he would say: At least I’ll be with mama, meaning our mother, his late wife, which was more gutting than funny.

In the interim, I remember relaying the first quip to my best friend when she came to visit him. T and I have been friends for some decades now. My psychologist sister jokingly referred to her as my partner in Dad’s eulogy, which does not feel incorrect in the platonically betrothed, Broad City sense. We met at a scholarship test, aged 10, in the year 2000. My parents loved her as another daughter. She has a beautiful story about my mother counselling her over the phone one long weekend, when I and my other housemates were away camping or somewhere, and T had to stay home studying for her law school exams, of which she was despairing. I can’t recall, now, who phoned who, only that my mother was aware T was home alone and feeling increasingly anxious about her exams; and that they spent a while on the phone chatting, Mum cheerleading her and insisting that she could do it; that it would be worth it.

All of this to say: T knows my family intimately. Moreover, she works in community legal aid. There’s not a lot that fazes her. But when I told her about what Dad had said—lucky I bought a double—I saw her blanch.

She recovered quickly. Laughed. Said: Your family is fucked.

Or the night on the ward when, shortly after the dinner tray had been retrieved, Dad asked for his phone, and we realised we couldn’t find it. We spent ten minutes searching for it among blankets and sheets; on the floor beneath the bed; in handbags and overnight bags and various implausible locations. The room was small, and we’d tried to keep it as tidy as possible, but things were cramped. Our bags were piled in the bathroom. The side of Dad’s bed with his IV pole remained accessible, but whenever the Airvo, on the other side, required adjustment, we had to shuffle chairs and a commode around. Most often when a nurse came in to take vitals or start a new infusion, we all left the room simply so they had space to work.

What if it got taken away with his dinner tray, I said. He hadn’t even touched the food: we’d pinched the juice and Fortisip for him to sip on later, but he wasn’t keen, understandably, on the greyish lamb slop. The nurses changed his bedlinen at about four-thirty, one sister said. Was it possible the phone had gotten caught up in the dirty sheets? Surely not. But the more we searched the room, the more certain we became that the phone was gone. One sister squinted at her own device, trying to locate Dad’s via Find My Friends. It’s in the hospital, she announced, pinching and zooming on the map. I think—I think it might be in with the laundry.

Or the day when my aunt L and cousin B—Dad’s older sister and niece—arrived from Sydney, which turned out to be the day that Dad died. Important context here is that my aunt, a children’s book author and illustrator, is a triple amputee owing to a near-fatal dose of meningococcal she miraculously survived a decade ago. She is ferociously intelligent and good-humoured, and taught herself to draw and paint again with her non-dominant hand following her illness (her right arm was amputated below the elbow; her left hand was retained in part, but without fingers) navigates her disability with the combined use of prostheses, mobility devices, wonderful carers, and grit.

She and my niece arrived at the palliative care facility on the Saturday morning. They’d wanted to come earlier, but L’s mobility limitations and the need for a daily carer, despite her independence, make spur-of-the-moment travel particularly complicated. When they pulled up, my nurse sister’s partner ran outside, offering to park the car so L and B could get inside to see Dad. He asked L, who was fussing with her handbag: Would you like a hand? and she said, I’d like two, actually, if you’ve got them spare. It was maybe the second or third time they’d met.

I don’t know if it sounds funny in the retelling, though. Does it sound funny in the retelling?

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Mostly I’ve thought about the vacuum of it all. I am trying to make sense of my days and of my life. I am no longer a caregiver. I no longer need to give care, and I suppose that I don’t know who else I am any longer.

I keep returning to a few lines from this poem by Traci Brimhall, ‘Vive, Vive’, where she writes: ‘God, god, what do I do / After all this survival?’

I don’t have a sense of survival, necessarily; more a sense of having outlived—or lived through—disaster. The one thing I can be sure of is that there will be other disasters, which is why I cannot relax. But until then: what do I do?

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Thanks for being here. Take care.