On to some rocks that you can see at low tide but not high water.
No collision, no skid marks or anything.
My mother kept the newspaper cutting, I still have it somewhere.
Who knows what might have appeared in the road coming towards him.
The rest of his life maybe.”
Hoban, R. (1975) Turtle Diary p. 76. London: Bloomsbury Publishing
Read Russell Hoban, he is an author to read. His words are touching, at times he tells the story from right inside your head. His words grab me, I sit on the tram with Turtle Diary on my lap and eyes moist, early in the morning. I try not to glimpse my life down the road, and can imagine my reaction if I were to see it. What are we living for?
“My despair has long since been ground up fine and is no more than the daily salt and pepper of my life.” same book, same tram journey, same moist eyes and me sighing.
With his words Hoban reaches into my chest grips my heart, twists and squeezes. I gasp for air, relieved. That’s what I live for, the experience of breathing.
A journalist’s personal and moving story published this weekend.
“Every 15 minutes someone in Australia attempts suicide. Every 4 hours someone… succeeds. One desperate life lost because that person felt they had no one to turn to.
Ninety percent of people with physical illness gain access to ready good quality care in Australia; only 35 percent of those with mental illness do.”
I sometimes like to ask “If your life was a movie and it had a soundtrack, what would the theme song be? ” It’s a great dinner party conversation, the songs we love, the songs that say something about me (or you).
Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen was first released in 1984.
As is typical of Cohen’s style it is lyrical and sober, a moving song, with a knock-out liturgical chorus.
Mottsu and I played the Jeff Buckley version in the car on weekends. We would throw back our heads and howl the words of the emotion laden chorus.
K D Lang sang a moving cover of the song too, but it was the Buckely version we enjoyed most.
Hallelujah was a perfect threnody for Mottsu’s funeral, particularly knowing Jeff Buckley also drowned in a river, albeit accidentally in Buckley’s case.
“Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya
And it’s not a cry that you hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
When I needed to arrange a funeral service, almost without warning, I thought of songs that meant something to Mottsu and me.
The first was K D Lang’s rendition of The Air That I Breathe. Simple, languid, a threnody filled with longing. It became the first song played at Mottsu’s funeral.
“If I could make a wish, I think I’d pass, can’t think of anything I need…”
We heard the song at the Three Monkey’s Cafe on Monkey Forest Road in Ubud, Bali. Three Monkeys made great coffee and played K D Lang’s Drag CD day after day. The words from the Hollies song matched how we felt on that holiday.
“There’s nothing left to be desired….
Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe,
and to love you all I need is the air that I breathe”
The simplicity of the air that I breathe, ironically, takes my breath away.
I have learned it is all I need. Well along with good coffee, the smell of a dog, and a smile that is – and I am still travelling light.
Needing only the air that I breathe is a secret for happiness that I started to learn over coffee with Mottsu in a place where we could breathe, and it took some years for the truth of the lyrics to really sink in.
Dictionary.com has a Word of the Day. Yesterday the word of the day was threnody[thren-uh-dee]. A threnody is a funeral song, dirge, a lament for the dead.
I know of a couple of instances of people who selected the songs (or threnodies) to be played at their funeral. Trooper, who had lived through the war, chose a song from the era: Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye. He was much loved by his family and the community, people attending his funeral filled the local hall. His coffin was carried from the hall to strains of the song he chose, we all joined together to sing.
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye
Cheerio, here I go, on my way
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye
Not a tear, but a cheer, make it gay
Give me a smile I can keep all the while
In my heart while I’m away
Till we meet once again, you and I
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye
Cheerio, here I go on my way
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye
Not a tear, but a cheer, make it gay
Give me a smile I can keep all the while
In my heart while I’m away
Till we meet once again, you and I
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye…
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye
Trooper with his plucky humour, gave us cause to smile through our tears while singing a farewell, just as he wished. A jolly threnody that embodied how he lived his life.
I visited my Mum in hospital today, she is in bed 6 of her ward. After a couple of hours and as I was leaving I stopped to chat to Val in bed 5.
Val is going home tomorrow, she will be under the care of a palliative nurse who will help moderate her morphine levels. Val is not quite ready to knock on heaven’s door, but she is walking up the steps.
She has no illusions about what is happening to her, and she is afraid of dying, she said. I agreed it must be scary, I would be scared.
The thing that hurts her most are the tears in the eyes of her children when she talks to them, she said.
Val’s children love her they can’t witness her death without tears in their eyes. We can only do what we can do, and they can’t help the tears.
Who of us knows how to die? Who of us can witness the slow death of someone we love without tears in our eyes?
I reached for Val’s hand and we clung together with warmth, caring and fear.
Research published this month in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that there is a cause and effect relationship between smoking and depression.
Cigarette smoking, like depression, is not readily explicable. It is not straight forward. When the police came to tell me that Mottsu’s body was found I asked a friend to buy me cigarettes. There’s not research on cigarettes and consolation – not that I was consoled. Smoking then was almost in defiance. I have smoked a lot of cigarettes since then and then stopped as readily as I started.
I enjoy cigarettes, and I don’t smoke, that is I don’t identify as a smoker. I remember enjoying being a smoker way back a long time ago. I breathe deeply as I run the gauntlet of people who stand on the city streets smoking. I can’t watch an episode of Mad Men without longing for a cigarette. It’s deplorable and delicious.
Breathing, consciously inhaling and subsequently expelling air is one secret to surviving emotional distress. I remember waking and reminding myself to breathe. To thoughtfully produce each breath, a sign of living even when almost asphyxiated by grief.
Smoking didn’t foster depression, I enjoyed it too much for that.
