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.
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.
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.
There is a building in my street that used to be painted blue, not any shade of blue but the most wonderful shade of blue. I constantly admired it. I recall I admired it to a point of being annoying.
I would skip down the street with Mottsu (and I not he) gasping in with excitement about discovery of the most marvellously coloured wall. Blue.
In appreciating that wall I would be flooded with appreciation for the life we shared.
“How lucky we are” I said.
“Can you even imagine the odds of us finding each other?” I said, “ …luck of the draw, a fluke of chance to be born here, to live with such privilege…”
“I feel so blessed, so lucky…” I said.
“We share such a beautiful life” I said.
“I love our life” I said.
Notice one person was doing all of the talking.
One of us was admiring our beautiful life and one was listening and nodding. One of us would wax lyrical about the wall of perfect blue. Who was I trying to convince?
He must have nodded, I can’t recall with certainty now. His response wasn’t enthusiastic, nor mean, merely weary of natter. Blue was something different for Mottsu than for me.
The building has been renovated and painted grey. It’s a similar shade but I miss the blue. My blue was different to his blue.
I like to remember this story. I feel silly about how often, and enthusiastically, I tried to convince him of our good fortune without ever noticing that he wasn’t quite with me.
I remind myself how difficult it was at times to live with someone who suffered depressive bouts, which isn’t to say it wasn’t difficult for Mottsu…
Different blue.
This blog is mostly about the loss of Mottsu, the circumstances his depression and suicide, my struggle to come to terms with the trauma of that loss, my complicated grieving. It is hard to live with a person suffering depression. He said he couldn’t feel anything, that wasn’t always how it was. Way back, as early as our shared history stretches, we had been out for dinner with a group of mutual friends and a couple of stragglers were sitting in my kitchen close to midnight when the floors and walls shook. Each looked only at the other, both wondering if the other had felt the tremor. The earth moved when we met.
We soon learned the Turkish consulate a few streets away had been bombed that night. So it was a bomb rather than emotion that moved us. Even so our lives were changed when we met, as a couple of me people became a we.
We were a fabulous we, particularly he:
*we went to the supermarket together after gym
*he played eye-spy while we were horse riding
*we held hands at the movies
*he was a punter
*I loved him
*sometimes I was horrible to him and other times I just didn’t think
*he was a journalist and writer, who briefly kept a journal about his depression
This is my own journal. Suicide is hard, hardest on those left behind, that’s the story of Mottsu and me.
Left behind and on my own I am keeping it together. Sometimes surprise myself and I just as often disappoint myself. I keep on talking, writing and dreaming…
My friend’s little dog died today, he was hit by a car. She said ” … it was quick though, he’s so little. it’s so quiet in the house now.” Dr Frankfurt Longbody M.D. was “the bestest ever“.
I’m sad, I’m always saddened by the death of a dog, my friend is sadder still.
This post is a tribute to the dear pets we love and can’t bear to lose. We carry a heartfelt grief when our dear dogs die, not everybody understands that your dog is not just a dog. I remember reading an article about Peter Alexander, the pyjama guy, he described his adored dachshund, Penny, as “…my heart wrapped in fur”. That’s what it is like to own a dog for some of us.
There is a lady in my street, whose heart is wrapped in fur, she has a big old Golden Retriever, Max. They walk the streets together for hours each day. They don’t go fast and they don’t go far and I never see one without the other.
In the hot spell before this one, they were out along the local shopping strip. They weren’t walking. Max and his owner Mabel were on the footpath outside the corner convenience store. Max was sprawled across the path and Mabel knelt next to him.
“Don’t die Max, don’t die.” she said over and over again. It’s a haunting memory, I knew it was important that Max not die, not on that day, not yet.
Max did make it home that day, Frankie didn’t today.
If you believe the research (and I do), money and acquiring doesn’t make us happy. What does?Gretchen Rubin spent a year researching what makes us happy, her work is published in her blog the Happiness Project, and her book of the same name. On the day after Valentine’ Day I am reflecting on her 12th commandment of her personal guide for happiness: There is only love…
I need to balance that with what the President of the Association for Psychological Science in America Professor John Cacioppo, observes in his new book, Loneliness: at any moment, one in five Americans, or 60 million people, feel so isolated they are deeply unhappy.
Maybe there is only love and at the same time it is only part of the story.
I would rather spend one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings (2001)