Memory days are perfectly ordinary days when thinking about Mottsu sort of sneaks up on me. Some days just remind me of him, quiet rainy ones in particular.
Rainy days evoke memories of Mottsu, maybe because I love how the rain falls and quietens a day. Everything shushhed, like the sound of car tyres on the wet road. I think those are days when you huddle in closer with someone, share an umbrella, shelter together. Rainy days and Mottsu and I would slip into a cinema for the afternoon. Rainy weekend evenings we’d cook, bake, roast, time in the kitchen warm and safe, nurtured. Together with nowhere else to be.
Memory days, are different to anniversaries and birthdays, or special occasions. Days when you perhaps have anticipated the remembering of someone who’s no longer here but you can just feel them present. They are days I feel more alone – if it’s possible to be more alone than everyday regular alone. Importantly I feel wistful more than bereft, and that’s comforting to recall.
He is quietly remembered and I am grieving differently. I like to remember him well.
If you’ve ever held ideas about the sort of people who die by suicide, the death of Elspeth Thompson might dispel some stereotypes. She’s described as a successful and dynamic woman, she was a gardening writer and a mother, who is said to have cultivated blooms in the most unlikely places. The coroner has just found that her death was suicide.
Elspeth Thompson left a note: “I’ve fed the dogs and put the heating on so that you won’t be cold. I’m sorry. So very sorry. But I’ve gone to the lake with a bottle and pills. I love you. I love Mary.”
Frank Wilson, Elspeth Thompson’s husband, writes about coming to terms with her death accepting the incomprehensible and “the unbearable burden of loss“.
Depression doesn’t play favourites.
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.”
Vasek, L 2010, ‘The Secret History of Me’,The Weekend Australian Magazine, June 26 -27, p.18.
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).
There was one played at Mottsu’s funeral that was a song for me. You Got It by Roy Orbison
I loved that song, particularly the chorus.
Anything you want, you got it.
Anything you need, you got it.
Anything at all, you got it.
I used to be happy if Mottsu was happy, who wouldn’t have been?
There were other lines that echoed my feelings:
I pray that you are here to stay
and
I live my life to be with you
I also live my life without you now
This threnody is upbeat and not at all dirge like, and it was played at his funeral. It’s not part of my soundtrack now, but a special memory.
I’m looking for my karaoke song now. The one I can stand up on my own and sing badly while grinning…
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
Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelu…”
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.
Eight months after Mottsu died, as Christmas approached I had some cards made. On the front was a photo taken in the 60s, Mottsu on the knee of Father Christmas. As a labour of love or an act of contrition I mailed out 150 little cards with a personal note written in each.
Inside was a quote by Virginia Woolf:
“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title”
That quote was especially poignant to me in the light of suicide, it helped reassure me about my not understanding of what happened.
Bud Tingwell in the opening chapter of his biography, written by Peter Wilmoth, hoped that he would be forgiven for not acknowledging all the kind cards that were sent after the death of his wife. He just wasn’t up to it, at the time. I wonder now if it was the opening chapter, that’s how I remember what he said, a loud and lingering regret.
I was driven by what had haunted Bud and I was determined not to harbour similar regrets. I had enough regrets to live with, not sending thank yous didn’t have to be one of them.
There are two schools of thought, Miss Manners thinks sending notes is the decent thing to do. and one that says Miss Manners is WRONG about thank you notes for condolence cards. It’s up to you.
I listened to a war correspondent talking today about war and the effects on soldiers. He said that war, like grief, was something we don’t ever recover from. He meant that when you go through war (or grief) you never get back to where (or particularly who) you were. Grief, he did say grief I caught it as a quick mention and it started me thinking.
It’s interesting because I do think there is something a little wrong (or at best not quite right) with the idea of fixed or better. There is not enough room for being different. As a society we are fixated on being fixed, I mean as in getting back to where you were, as much as possible returning to who you were before the traumatic war/grief event. I think there is too much emphasis on being fixed and not enough on allowing ourselves to adopt an identity that integrates and accepts our experiences.
Recovery, from grief at least, is over rated. Maybe it is the same with bouts of depression..
Rainy days evoke memories of Mottsu, maybe because I love how the rain falls and quietens a day. Everything shushhed, like the sound of car tyres on the wet road. I think those are days when you huddle in closer with someone, share an umbrella, shelter together. Rainy days and Mottsu and I would slip into a cinema for the afternoon. Rainy weekend evenings we’d cook, bake, roast, time in the kitchen warm and safe, nurtured. Together with nowhere else to be. 
