Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast

By admin on December 17, 2009

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Image007Impossible things.

We believed impossible things, more or less.

Mottsu used to accuse me of being a ‘glass half empty’ person, too pessimistic. I do have a pessimistic streak, I call it a realistic streak.

Four months before he died we were to bid on a country property. His dream house. Mottsu was certain it was out of reach, he convinced himself we’d not secure the property. So who was pessimistic now? I, uncharacteristically optimistically, thought we had a chance. I bought him a card (pictured) for encouragement, as a couple we’d experienced a handful of impossible things.

Ironically (as it turned out) he told me that “The drowning man doesn’t drown because he can’t swim, he drowns because he gives up.” He was excited by the theory of the drowning man, it was to be his bidding strategy. It would take a bit of steel and some bluff, but he was going to let any drowning-bidding man go under, the other bidders would see his determination and he had no intention of throwing them a life-ring.

It would mean bidding strongly, so that others would not glimpse our limited budget. Any competing bidder was to be fooled into giving up, and drowning.

Even armed with the drowning man strategy, we were pessimistic about our chances at auction, hence the careful planning of tactics. Everything about the property was perfect except the price. It was seven acres of land and a renovated farmhouse with wide shady verandahs. It had been renovated before the owners moved to Europe. The house was big and airy with magnificent country views from every room of rolling pastures carpeted in green. The real estate agents brochure boasted sea glimpses and, while we strained to take in a water view, the air was fresh and tinged with salt. The sea was nearby, if not quite visible.

We’d been looking in the area for some months for a property that would be the haven for our planned tree-change. We hoped to move away from the city and needed a home from which to start new careers outside of the corporate world. Musing on the possibilities of this venture we felt bold and a little uncertain too. This property stood out from the rest, as soon as Mottsu saw the house he knew it was the one from which to start his new life.

He approached the agent to ask how much was required to buy it before auction, without competition. The price quoted was beyond our means, so we had to hope that things went well for us at auction, and the price was lowered. Imagining a lot of competition for the property Mottsu was despondent. Owning this house seemed impossible.

We kept dreaming and scheming (we dreamt and schemnt). Mottsu picked out the room where his desk would sit, in front of a window with a view of the paddocks we hoped to own. This was where he would sit and write modern classics while looking out on his retired race horse, who would be enjoying more green grass than one horse could eat in retirement. This house, this window, this view, this was the dream, it had to be this one. He did calculations on paper, in an OCD sort of way, columns of numbers reviewed and reworked again and again, every possible variation and what-if considered.

On auction day, we did it. He did it, bid well and bought the dream we thought impossible. Impossible but not impossible enough, after property settlement we spent only two weekends there.

From elation to despair, is a short journey. There was no life line, no impossible belief, the drowning man gave up and Alice didn’t laugh…

Posted in Tagged , Leave a Comment

Bad feng-shui troubled me

By admin on December 13, 2009

Occasionally oppositional forces whelm up, most often attacking from within rather than an attack from outside sources, more easily defended against.

When Mottsu died so suddenly I did feel some blame, just for having been there and not having fully anticipated his direction. I did regret not having done more, and I also regretted some of the things I did. The blaming is not right or wrong; perhaps it is almost inevitable in the situation. Death by suicide has some far reaching impacts, I did gasp and figuratively stagger – no I literally staggered. In staggering I flailed and reached out into darkness grasping for explanation.

004For a while I was guilt ridden by the bleak book recommendation and the vindictive pillow snatch, and while I am mired in regret, there was also the bathroom towel colour and the spiky plant.

I live in a house in a fabulous location; I have never really liked it. It is not that I don’t like it, it is just a house. Mottsu on the other hand loved this house, from the first minute we inspected it. We’d been looking for months this one he was immediately taken by. I didn’t see the attraction at first, I had to be shown its features, through his eyes. We bid at auction and procured our house.

I engaged a feng-shui consultant. Mottsu thought I was nutty but indulged me. It was an interesting exercise, she used our birth years and the age of the house to determine the directions of various influences and how to support good influences. She might have called them dragons, are there lucky dragons?

The feng-shui consultant determined that the house was perfect for Mottsu, my consolation was that the bed faced a good direction for me. There were some adjustments to be made. I placed a little mirror behind the toilet, added little coins to some rooms and encouraged more harmonious feng-shui. The consultant recommended I change the plant that sat in the light well in front of Mottsu’s desk. It had spiky leaves, bad for the energy which is better in smooth waves and not broken by spikes.

001The violet towels in the bathroom had to be replaced with green. Violet is a metal colour and green a wood colour. The bathroom would have been much more harmonious with green towels. I looked for new towels and couldn’t find a shade of green I thought was attractive. Too fussy.

The spiky plant and the wrong colour towels, I have too often regretted my inattention to fixing those simple-to-change-things.

The pillow, the book, the plant, the colour of the towels, all of those things contributed to his demise, there isn’t a straight linear relationship between cause and effect, little things just add up. Given a chance to keep Mottsu here, they are all things I would change.

Those are some of the elements I grasped for explanation, while seeking meaning for the meaningless. It is not funny how when I thought I was recovering, things could grab my conscience and pull down…

Posted in Tagged , Leave a Comment

Listening to the fridge

By admin on November 30, 2009

I’ve been distracted from the ’stages’ and before moving on to stage 3, I want to share a little about the experience of being left behind by someone who dies by suicide. What is was like in the numb of back then.

The aftermath of Mottsu’s death was traumatic. There was shock and loss, and trying to tell his friends (our friends), colleagues, and family, his parents who lived overseas. There were too many people to tell. First round I rang, then calls came. I recounted what I knew over and over and I didn’t know much. It was a relentlessly demanding period. He was missing for four days before his body was found. It was a ghastly surreal period, trying to find him without knowing where to search, the tears, the police, the coroner, the funeral director… tears.

Then everything went quiet, I found myself alone. It was nowhere near Christmas and I kept thinking “…and all through the house. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…” Hushed, I wrote the following few paragraphs while trying to absorb the force of the blow.

My life has slowed and I’m surrounded by what we had but not feeling a part of it. The funeral is done, the people are gone and the phone has stopped ringing. The remnants of our life together, furnishings and belongings, are inert and silent. The house is large and empty. Unnaturally still and quiet.

002 sit on the couch and breathe, not conscious of breathing. There are no eddies created by breathing in and out, the stillness is heavy, movement impossible. I just sit with the unnatural quiet in the eye of the storm trying to summon the resolve to move. Feeling like (I imagine) a quadriplegic person might feel, I grimace inwardly unable to summon a wiggle from a toe or a finger.

I have nothing to do and nowhere to go so I sit. I heard it’s possible to die of a broken heart. I know anecdotally of husbands and wives who follow each other to the grave, one unable to continue without the other. I wish it were possible to be absolved of the responsibility of going on. I could sit here and not move until even breathing stilled. Vanish, leaving just a crease on the couch to show where I sat. I could dissolve into the quietness and just not be anymore, without breaking the silence.

I can’t will it to happen and I continue to sit on the couch.

Going on will be hard but is indisputably my only option. Wishing myself away won’t provide an escape from reality. Still, sitting is as much as I can do. I shut my eyes to experience the quiet and open them. Again I close my eyes, there’s little difference no real change in state. Experimenting with my surrounds, I note that nothing else moves or changes. My eyelids open and close soundlessly while my limbs are heavy and unmoving. My mind is rendered useless and unable to anticipate time beyond the nest blink. There’s nothing that must be done, if I were to rise to my feet I wouldn’t know in which direction to step. The lethargy is like a dream that can be woken from.

Time is frozen too, it must be passing but there’s nothing to mark it. No ticking of a clock, no changing of the light through the glass. Eyes open or shut it’s the same day and maybe even the same minute. The world must be turning and it will continue to do so. It hardly seems to matter if I sit here as everything else will continue to go on. It feels like I’d not be missed in the world.

The refrigerator shudders and something inside it clunks, then there’s a ripping noise like an ice floe breaking from a glacier. It starts to hum and hiccough with mechanical tics. I sit, sphinx like listening to the fridge. I feel stuck, in a place akin to a tundra wasteland, unable to make the transition into starting a new life and unable reclaim the one I had.

It occurs to me that I am listening to the fridge. It seems a vaccuos thing to do, and a little funny and pathetic in a helpless sort of way. I don’t smile outwardly and continue to sit. There isn’t anything that has to be done. There isn’t anything I want to do and no one to do anything for.

The telephone slumbers, and a helicopter flies low overhead, its steady whirring blocking out the noise of the fridge. The spell is broken and time starts to tick again. I reconnect to reality and start to weep, for myself, for the inescapable horrors that exist in the world, for the uncertain future I face, for all that can’t just be willed away, and for the grumbling of my empty fridge.

Posted in Tagged , Leave a Comment

Blind lexicographers

By admin on November 29, 2009

“I don’t know what to say….”

Countless people said, “I don’t know what to say….” (Idkwts)

I know you dkwts
I don’t know either. What is there to say?

Idkwts is an acknowledgment that there must be something to say to someone to someone who is mourning someone.

If only there were something more to say, I don’t think there is or if there is Idkwii (I don’t know what it is).

We were all blind lexicographers (a brilliant term I’ve shamelessly appropriated from a comment to an earlier post). I am so grateful to those who acknowledged my experience, I felt seen by the blind lexicographers who said “Idkwts…” I hope I replied with, at least, an appreciative mumble.

It was the mute lexicographers I struggled with, those who didn’t kwts and said nothing.
That hurt.

Posted in Tagged , Leave a Comment

I spy with my little eye

By admin on October 2, 2009

I remember our first date. Date? It was more like a “Why don’t you come horse riding with us?”

Mottsu was a friend of my house-mate and “us” was a group of his friends and house mates. The invitation was to join them on a bush ride 5 or 6 hours on a horse. Horse riding sounds easy enough, you sit on top and the one under the saddle does all the work.

An all day horse ride sounds deceptively easy, it is body bruising work. Unfamiliar with the inevitable muscular outrage I readily agreed to go.

It was a fabulous day, a memorable first date, I paid for it later with all over body distress and that’s not my lasting memory. I vaguely recall the physical torment.

There was some natural awkwardness during the long day, it was difficult to converse with ease, from horse back to horse back. Sometime mid-afternoon I felt a particular silence was a tad pro-longed and I scanned my head for things to say when Mottsu, a laconic easy rider, started with “I spy with my little eye…”. We slipped into an unanticipated game of I spy.

WTF? I spy? It wasn’t exactly conversation.

Far out, I spy.

I was delighted by his unconventional wit and style. Unpretentious, the perfect foil for my own uptight sensibilities. I was hooked with a game of eye-spy.

There all sorts of things you love about someone, all sorts of reasons.
Right there, ‘I spy’, is why I loved that man

Posted in Tagged Leave a Comment