Ineka

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I have always been captivated by books and reading. It would tug on me – an exquisite pull moving me away from wherever I was, which was for the most part, a place where I did not want to be.

Two books that have lingered are ones that Ineka recommended to me – Colin Theile’s ‘The Undercover Secret’ and Louise Fitzhugh’s classic ‘Harriet the Spy’. Reading was better than prescription medicine; better than physio, anti-biotics, being tipped on a bed until you were all but hanging like a bat with your feet hooked under the mattress so as not to smash your skull on the headboard.

I became Harriet.

So much so, I created my own spy route. I found myself a reporter style notebook and a magnifying glass, wore a long olive green vinyl coat and a Fedora tipped on its side. With my long coat, my awkwardly tipped hat and my notebook, I’d dawdle around the neighbourhood, writing down what I saw.

And yes, everything was suspicious.

Reviving thoughts of Ineka is something I do well because we spent so much time in hospital together. After the lights had been switched off, almost savagely and not leaving any of us with a chance to settle after what could have been a traumatic day or night of missed cannulations, being held down on that plank of a table in the treatment room or a run in with feral Meryl, the matron. Or if a friend had died behind closed curtains while relatives were ushered in and out in their disoriented grief. A grief they had nowhere to place.

Long after we had been told to scramble into our beds, Ineka would bide her time until all the beds in E cube were silent. Then she would wait to hear the gaggle of nurses up the other end of Turner Ward, gossiping and writing in charts at the front desk.

You wouldn’t hear her because there was nothing of her. You would always hear the breath rattling in her chest. Sleep has never come to me easily and so I would see Ine. She read by the window, her only light being thrown down by the moon and the lights in the park outside. Everyone would be asleep and I would watch Ine read.

I wouldn’t have been older than seven or eight, yet I still hold her silhouette in my mind – a little girl with a curved back, cradling the spine of a book in her hands, her massively clubbed fingers like matchsticks shaking from Ventolin, trying to stifle her coughing so she could just keep reading. Ineka’s coughing fits were more like marathons, and were never easy to listen to or watch. She would turn equal shades of red and blue and there were times we thought she was going to breathe her last crackling breath. Many times I watched as she bled from her mouth.

But in that muted light, the shape of her face, that curve in her back bones, her thick dark blonde bob – her purpose authentic. Ine knew she didn’t have long on this earth. As did we all – patients and nurses and doctors. I like to believe that Ine sees me write, and that she would want to read my work if she were still of this earth. That she does read my work. Even as a little girl, I remember saying that it was like she was dying all her life. And it’s here where it hurts to be alive.

So why couldn’t they just let her read?

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The man who stole my heart

I’ve met, loved and lost some incredibly beautiful people in my life; something that goes with the territory of having a terminal illness. But that’s the map of life. You love and you lose. You fall down and you get up again.

Not long ago, I met a friend’s father who at nearly 87, still lives in his family home on a property in Northern New South Wales. Gordon Greber is a grand and proud man, both in grace and stature. A man who knows the land like the back of his giant hands, mapped with impenetrable skin stained from his days and years of unforgiving – and often thankless  – work.

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They don’t build men like this anymore. Not that I’ve seen, anyway. Gordon didn’t have the luxury of tractors or motorbikes to get his work done. In fact, he’s spent his life eschewing any luxuries at all. He is a grand man who welcomes the simple things, like a good brew of tea. Everything - everything - was done by hand when he was a boy and a young man. Cutting timber (one of his giant saws hangs above the entrance of his kitchen), slashing cane and using his shoulders to carry it to where it needed to be, and other back breaking work is merely a sliver of Gordon’s story. More can be found in the link at the very top of this post at my dear friend Nicole Cody’s blog. It describes a little of Gordon’s life, as well as the day we met where we had a near two hour chat – a day where a grand man stole my heart.

As soon as Nic and I returned to her place, I sat down, opened up my novel which is set in outback Queensland in 1973, and created a character called Gordon Greber – a Herculean man who builds a friendship with my main protagonist, Garnett Roy. This means Gordon’s stories are going to live on, as they should. Here’s a little snippet. Just keep in mind its a first draft. Please be nice …

Garnett pulled his bowie knife out of his pocket.

‘How about it?’

‘Nice toothpick,’ said Gordon.

Garnett put the knife back in his pocket.

‘Well, what we need here are two men and one bloody big saw.’

The breeze turned and Garnett’s nose went up into the air.

‘You smell that?’

Gordon walked over from his truck, ‘Yeah – that’s no good.’

‘Something’s dead. Fuckin’ stinks. I’ll go and check it out,’ and without prompting, Gordon – a hulking lump of a man with hands as big as dinner plates – followed.

‘Jesus!’

The air that ferried the stench up into Garnett and Gordon’s heads was foul. Their nostrils flared like angry horses.

‘I gotta find what that is. Can’t have you working in this shit.’

‘It ain’t shit, sure as shit. Something’s dead.’

Loretta came running out onto the back verandah with Tibby, who had a peg on her nose.

‘What is that?’ her hand covering her nose.

‘Yeah, yeah – we know. I’m gonna find what the hell it is. Something’s dead.’

‘Yuck!’ shouted Tibby.

‘Don’t you worry, girlie – we’ll find it and bury it and your nose’ll be as good as new.’

‘Tanks Gordon,’ said Tibby. ‘I reckon Dad could smell it in heaven, Mum.’

‘You don’t get stuff like this in heaven, love,’ said Gordon.

‘Then why do people say it ‘stinks to high heaven’’?

‘Because if heaven got it, then it must be real bad.’

‘This peg’s making my nose sore,’ said Tibby, sounding like she was talking underwater.

‘Go and rub some lavender oil under your schnoz. That’ll make it better,’ said Gordon.

‘Let us know what it is!’ shouted Tibby to the men who were on their way down to the dam.

‘We’re on it, girlie!’ yelled back Gordon.

The two men made their way down the hill, dry earth crunching under their boots, the stench growing ever fouler. When they reached the dam, before Garnett could even see it, Gordon said, ‘well it’s nothin’ but a waterlogged pig.’

‘I can see the maggots moving from here,’ said Garnett, taking his hat off. ‘Shit.’

‘Worse than.’

‘I gotta get that outta there. Sure as shit can’t sink it.’

‘Nah – it’d poison the water. I’ll give you a hand.’

‘Beauty. I’ll load up the truck with ropes. If you can reverse down, I’ll wade out to get it.

‘You lucky bugger,’ said Gordon and they both walked back up the hill.

Tibby was still out on the verandah with a peg on her nose.

She looked to Garnett and asked, ‘What is it?’

‘Dead pig – been there for a couple of days. We’re gonna get rid of it.’

‘Can I watch? Please?’

‘Only if your Mum’s ok with it. S’pretty foul, matey.’

‘I wanna see it.’

‘Want to see what? said Loretta, walking down the stairs.

‘The dead pig!’

‘You really want to see that?’

Tibby nodded and the peg fell off her nose. She drew in a big breath with her mouth, picked the peg up and stuck it back on her face.

‘As long as I have this, she said, pointing to her nose, ‘I’ll be fine. I just wanna see it.’

‘Well, it’s your lucky day – off you go,’ said Loretta. ‘Just don’t get in the way, ok?’

Tibby ran down the stairs and sidled up next to Garnett. ‘Whaddya do with it?’

‘Go in and get it.’

‘Oh, gross! I’m gonna get the polaroid – don’t start without me.’

‘Young minds,’ said Gordon.

‘Still with a bloody peg on her nose. Dunno how she’s gonna take photos, but I’m sure she’ll work it out. Smart kid, you know.’

‘I knew Jack, so yeah, I know.’

With that, Garnett swallowed hard.

‘I’ll head up to the shed and get the ropes and a tarp. Won’t be long.’

‘Mate … ’

Gordon stood there abrading his crumpled brow with his . Garnett jumped in the truck and threw his hat on the passenger seat. He knew Gordon didn’t mean anything untoward. You can’t fight or shake hands with a dead man.

Garnett drove back to the house, changed into some old waders he’d found in the shed that went up to his armpits and called out to Tibby and Gordon who were already looking at her photos.

‘Right – I think I’ve got everything I need. Let make quick work of this, ok?’

Tibby squealed with excitement, ‘I can’t believe you’re actually going in there, Garnett!’

‘Oh, believe it,’ he said under his breath. ‘’Ay Gordon, I’ll back it down, mate.’

‘Ok. Nice waders, chief …’

‘That’s not even funny. I’m gonna be needing a drink after this.’

‘And a damn good soak,’ said Loretta.

‘As long as you’re not feeding me pig tonight, I’m a happy man.’

Loretta raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Who said I was cooking you dinner?’

‘Oh, come on – d’you think I’ll be in any fit state after half a bottle of rum?’

‘Go for your life,’ she said and walked back inside.

‘Have that rum nice and cold, Rets. This is gonna be thirsty work!’ shouted Gordon, winking at Tibby.

‘And stinky,’ said Tibby.

‘If I knew any better, you’d think that I was the bloody help!’ said Loretta from the verandah.

‘I’d love a cuppa, Rets,’ said Gordon, laughing.

‘Ok, let’s get this show on the road’, said Garnett.

Garnett got into the truck, the waders now up to his chin. He put the truck in reverse and moved backward down the hard slope. Gordon was behind the him, guiding the truck in, whistling when the tyres had reached just short of the edge of the water. He got out of the cabin and said to Gordon, ‘she’s all yours.’ Gordon tied the ropes to the trucks tow ball so he could haul the pig out of the water when Garnett was done.

Tibby sat on a rock with her camera perched awkwardly on her legs, up to her face.

Garnett stepped in and dumped the ropes and tarp on top of the water. Walking into the water, he floated the tarp and the ropes next to him.

‘Smile!’ shouted Tibby, so Garnett gave a little wave. He could hear the sound of the camera processing the picture. ‘This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,’ she said to herself.

Garnett was knee deep, then it stayed just under his neck. The water wasn’t as deep as he thought it would be. He grabbed the floating tarp, wrapped the ropes around his neck, thought that was a bad idea and put them back onto the surface of the water. The stench was indescribable.

‘How’re you going out there?’ yelled Gordon, but all Garnett could do was give a thumbs up or he was going to be swimming in his own vomit. Lucky he hadn’t eaten, he secreted to himself. This was disgusting, even for him. Worse than the time he shat himself when he was screwing some girl back in Ilfracombe. He’d seen and done some messed up things, but this was almost too much. But more luck – the pig was hoisted high enough in the water so Garnett could get the tarp underneath the carcass then throw the ropes over it and drag it to the edge of the dam. There would’ve been thousands maggots swarming over and under the skin of the pig, as if it had a life of its own; as though it was still breathing.

He pulled the tarp under the bloated carcass, made sure there was going to be enough room to travel up and over the hill and to somewhere far enough away. He tethered the ropes to the ends of the tarp, then up and over this foul thing that was before him. He got in front of it to make sure the ropes didn’t lift and he saw that the pressure squeezed out thousands more maggots. ‘Better him than me,’ he said to himself. He turned to Gordon and shouted’, Ok! Slow, slow, slow.’

As Gordon revved the engine of the truck and got it moving at a snails pace, the tarp dragged through the water and parts of the pig fell away. ‘Glad I wasn’t fuckin’ behind it,’ Garnett said to himself.

When it got to shore, Garnett was breathing into his armpit; wildly exhaling as though to rid himself of some demon. He hopped up into the tray and shouted, ‘keep goin’, keep goin’ – go east. East!’

‘How far?’

‘I’ll know it when I see it.’

‘How are you even alive after that?’ laughed Gordon.

‘I think I’m dyin’ right now. Jeezus!’ Garnett vomited all over the carcass as Gordon drove on. It felt good. It was like shedding another skin. Garnett could see where he wanted to go after a few minutes, and he knocked on the glass separating him and Gordon.

‘See that little hill just over the way – it’s a bull ant’s nest. That’s where we’re dumping this bastard of a thing.’

Gordon got the pig as close to the nest as possible. After flicking off the ignition, he could hear the ants fosssicking in the dirt. It was like a low rattle in the earth.

‘Ya gonna get bitten.’

‘I know that,’ said Gordon. ‘You think I’m green?’

‘Not for a moment, mate. Let’s get this over and done with.’

‘Just kiddin’ with ya. Ok, here we go.’

There seemed to be an understanding between the two men. No words were spoken – they just did what they had to do.

‘This tarp can go to god,’ thought Garnett. Neither of them made an attempt to salvage it after they’d rolled the pig onto the ants nest. It was full of holes after slugging the pig from dam to out east. Both men got bit, but neither of them felt it because the stench had punched their senses.

‘You ever done this before?’ asked Gordon.

‘Only with smaller things … dogs, foxes.’

‘Then watch this and marvel, my friend …’

Within seconds, ants had covered the pig and were feasting on the flesh and the maggots. The pig started moving and the two men backed away.

‘Holy shit.’

‘You won’t see anything like that again. This’d be the second time I’ve ever seen this happen in all my years, and I’ve been around for a while, young cobber.’

‘Holy shit.’

‘Yes.’

The sight of the ants moving under and around the pigs skin was like a silent play. Just inside of ten minutes, the pigs snout was gone, and ants with swollen bellies moved off so their hungry friends could feast.

‘You seen enough?’ asked Gordon.

‘For today. I’ve smelt enough for the rest of my life.’

‘Let’s get you back and cleaned up.’

Garnett climbed back into the tray, undid the ropes and Gordon took off, laughing as he knocked it into second gear.

*

So that’s it. Gordon Greber and Garnett Roy – mates for life whose stories will always endure. I’m looking forward to seeing Gordon in the next couple of weeks when I head back down to Northern NSW. Time for hugs, stories, paint stripping brews of tea and scones. It’s the simple things that bond us.

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Honoré de Balzac

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Balzac – a man who drank brutally heroic amounts of coffee.

‘Coffee glides into one’s stomach and sets all of one’s mental processes in motion. One’s ideas advance in column of route like battalions of the Grande Armée. Memories come up at the double, bearing the standards which will lead the troops into battle. The light cavalry deploys at the gallop. The artillery of logic thunders along with its supply wagons and shells. Brilliant notions join in the combat as sharpshooters. The characters don their costumes, the paper is covered with ink, the battle has started, and ends with an outpouring of black fluid like a real battlefield enveloped in swaths of black smoke from the expended gunpowder. Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.’

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Certainty – a Mother’s Day re-post

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Certainty is often equated with death and taxes. And bad coffee.

I can slice certainty two ways. I could say there are no certainties or guarantees when one is sick or broken, or I could say that there are many certainties and guarantees when one is sick or broken a little bent.. I’ll not take sides, so I’ll take a little from column A and a little from column B.

Living with a dis-ease can be trying. There is the certainty that you will probably die. There is also the certainty that you will live. There is a certainty that nothing is certain.

The most important certainty I had growing up was my mother. She was and still is, the spine of our family. She would look after everyone else except herself. You have to remember that my mother was not only looking after a sick child, but she was also raising another as well as shouldering the deaths of C.F kids she had grown to love as her own.

I do not know how she did what she did with such grace. She would be up in the ward when I’d clocked off at the hospital school for the morning, then she’d dash back to Jindalee to make sure she was there at 3pm on the dot to pick my sister up from school.

Then she would have had to cook dinner for my father and sister.

Then she would have helped my sister with her homework.

Then she would have cleaned up.

After that, I don’t know what my mother did. It pains me to think about my mother’s private hell with this routine of wake up, get daughter ready for school. Make school lunch and ensure daughter has everything she needs for the day. Drive daughter to school, drive home to finish chores. Drive to the hospital and trawl for a car park. Spend time with other daughter whose I.V has tissued and packed it in. Go with daughter into treatment room to be repeatedly cannulated. Talk to other mothers  - some of whose own children are dying of the same dis-ease that your daughter has. Cuddle and help feed other kids. Kiss daughter goodbye, rush back to school to pick other daughter up, prepare afternoon tea and talk about the day which may include problems or celebrations for any achievements. Cook dinner, help with homework, clean up, talk to husband.

It’s like a bad dream and it loops over and over and over where I can see my mother sitting with me in Turner Ward. I can see her coming to collect me from the hospital school early so we can sit outside in the park with our lunch; I can see her biting her nails to the quick. What I can’t see – and what she wouldn’t let me see – is what this was doing to her. How I ache.

The other certainty was my Dad. He wouldn’t stay long – maybe twenty or thirty minutes – but he came up every night. If I was off my hospital food and wanted something special for dinner, like most kids I’d ask for KFC or Macca’s, but instead of bringing me a burger, Dad would bring enough food for all of the C.F kids – burgers, chips, chicken nuggets – everything. A bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and my father was an instant hero. Not many people know that he did these things. People know him as a generous man, but Dad would be the last person to tell someone what he had done.

He probably didn’t think much of it at the time, or ever for that matter, but to us – especially me – it was everything. To the nurses, he was just a man visiting his daughter in hospital. To me, he was my Dad and that meant sustenance through love – a relationship galvanised by actions where he offered wisdom through silence, and the ‘never give in gungerdin’ attitude I still look to whenever it is time to fall apart again.

I get cut open, my family stitches me back up.

LOVE

Happiness is …

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Being cancer free!! And being able to spend a day with my beautiful Mum who ferried me around town from lung transplant clinic to oncologist and back home again – but not before we drooled over the hot boss lingered over delectable foodstuffs from one of my favourite nosheries in Brisbane – Sourced Grocer :)

We’ve been on tenterhooks for a couple of weeks about a rather brutish pain in my arm, which I first noticed in February when I was on Vipassana. I mentioned it to my chief consultant, but there were more pressing issues at hand upon my return, such as the possibility of heart problems which I’m happy to report aren’t problems, and that the mad palpitations I was having were due to a low magnesium level.

After addressing it at clinic again, my consultant was straight onto it and booked me in for a bone scan on Monday. ‘Great’, I thought – ‘we’re going to get this sorted’, except that it wasn’t great because the form looked like this …

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Because I’m a bit of a cancer collector magnet, the possibility of the pain being bone cancer had been firing around my head for weeks. The pain is deep in the bone and it aches and throbs. At night, I struggle to reach into sleep because I just can’t get comfortable. On Sunday, I found myself in racking pain so my parents rushed me to the hospital in search of answers and pain relief. The answers would have to wait until I’d had the bone scan the next day, but I was given some pretty full on pain meds. Pain meds I hesitate to use simply because the side effects often outweigh their pain relieving qualities. So, armed with prescriptions for opiates, orders for more fucking rest and a heat pack that an angel of a nurse gave me in emergency, my folks* drove me back to my place where – to my delight – fireworks had been arranged for my arrival. How serendipitous!

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After a slightly more comfortable night ie. not groaning in pain like a broken-legged dog, I was so drugged up on Monday that the entire day is a blur. I remember going to nuclear medicine and having some radioactive agent injected into me, and then having the scan. I also remember smiling because the machine was going to take my picture :)

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The pain has been at its consistent worst, but today heralded the best news any of us could have hoped or asked for: my bone scan was clear. There is no cancer; just beautiful stretches of white lines on black film. For my family and my friends (and my supporters – thank you!), this was the news we’d been so desperate to hear. I’d dodged another bullet, which called for celebration before I had another appointment with my oncologist (good news there, too), and so Mum and I headed straight to Sourced and asked a lovely young girl to capture our moment of joy and relief.

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And then we did the simplest of things – we literally broke bread and tried to lock ourselves in the cheese room. Simple abundance. Tonight though, as I sit here looking across the landscape of the city at the new lights peppering the skyline, I think about the people who didn’t get great news today, and sit in a place of loving kindness and compassion with them and their loved ones ♥

*where do I even begin to explain how amazing my folks are? I really would be writing forever …  ♥

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Cauldrons and Cupcakes and my soul sista Nic ♥

Both Nic and I were well enough (for a short time, anyway) to share breakfast together on Sunday morning. The photo below sums up our friendship so damn perfectly, I could cry. And that’s just it – we laugh and we cry, and everything in between. I am truly blessed to have Nic in my life.

Nic writes possibly the best blog in the world, so go and check it out :) We’re both having tests today that could be life altering, so all of my love is with her and me and all the souls who are always fighting for their health [insert masses of love hearts here - like a *gazillion*]

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Peace first

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Whenever I have a strong reaction to an event, I always question myself. Most of my regular readers will know that I don’t delve into current affairs very often, if at all. I stopped watching the news about seven months ago on the advice of one of my best friends and it freed my mind and freed up time. Instead of my 6pm ritual of turning on the television, I began reading, writing, dancing, listening to music or having a cuppa or a cider on my balcony. You’ll also know that I’m a lover and a fighter in equal parts. A lover of peace, kindness and compassion and a fighter when it comes to my dis-ease and if someone I love is being hurt.

But with the wrecking ball of a situation in Boston after the marathon bombing and the shooting of a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I’ve had a rising bubbling in my belly. Then this morning when I was checking in with what was going on in the world, I saw this photo which made me feel uncomfortable.

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I can only comprehend the relief people felt when the perpetrators were respectively killed and caught, but to celebrate in this way by high-fiving and fist-pumping just doesn’t bode well with me. Relief and celebration are two very different things, as William Campbell, whose sister Krystle was killed while waiting for a friend to cross to the finish line. He told the Boston Globe: ‘I’m happy that nobody else is going to get hurt by these guys, but it’s not going to bring her back.’

My imagination cannot and does not afford me how the families of the killed and maimed must feel. Their hurt, anger and horror are nearly impossible to reconcile, but celebrating the death of another human being – as inhuman as they may be, and as inhumane as the acts they carried out – a celebration doesn’t gel with me. I understand how the concept works for others, but the byline of ‘We got them’ didn’t have me in a state of rejoice. It was more of an abatement of pressure that no one else was going to be hurt. But it also made me question.

Why did these two brothers do what they did? What drove them to kill and wound as many people as they could with their crudely made bombs? One brother was a medical student, learning how to extend life, not take. Perhaps we will never know, despite the current and future media speculation this case will attract. It is easy to not treat these people as humans.

Seeing the the photo of celebrating crowds, my stomach turned. I called upon my compassion for both the dead and the survivors, including the two brothers who have caused interminable pain and suffering for thousands of people for generations to come. But what of their families? There has to be compassion on both sides if we are to march through the grief and emerge on the other side, stronger and united in our stand and passion for peace. May the river of compassion always run through you. Then again, sometimes compassion is not enough.

In case there is any confusion, in no way, shape or form am I playing down what dreadful acts were carried out in Boston last week, nor am I saying it’s ‘ok’. It’s not. Innocent people were murdered and seriously wounded.

All I’m trying to do is sit in a state of compassion, which is not always easily done in situations like these. But I am trying, and I believe that counts for something. I’m inviting a ‘call to compassion’ instead of a ‘call to arms’. Your thoughts, please ♥