Methinks...

Since beauty is transient...

...maybe enjoy it while you can?

Pre-posthumous note to my kids

Dear Zoe, Julian and Chris:

I guess the 10th anniversary of Dad’s death got me thinking about finality. Then this morning on page 32 of the Sydney Morning Herald I read a frightening article about the spiralling cost of funerals and the whole death business (and it is very big business!). So just for the hell of it, I checked online and was pleased to see that perfectly adequate cardboard coffins are now available at very reasonable prices. 

Zoe and Julian, you may remember we asked about that option at the Tewantin funeral home we chose to organise Dad's cremation. The woman who dealt with us there (Remember how she strove to be friendly but elegant at the same time? And how surprised she seemed that we kept sharing little laughs at bits of the interview that we found amusing - or figured Dad would find funny?) - she told us that a cardboard casket would be hideously more expensive than the options she had available! Good to know that things have improved since then. 

Zoe, then I thought about all the wonderful ways you could decorate either of the above using your expertise on the Cricut printer: flowers, native plants, messages from everyone etc. etc. (I can see a real market there for you in the future, dear, if you decide to ditch the AsPro job*.) Not to mention Brandon's skill in 3D printing. Endless possibilities there for enhancements. And I’m sure Nancy would contribute a garland of her fabulous paper beads to jazz things up (assuming she lasts longer than me and hasn’t gone la-la by then!) 

I can't imagine a more appropriate image to grace the cover of my box than the drawing Charlie made of me 4 or 5 years ago.

Just keep all of this in mind because I’d be extremely disappointed if you guys went out and spent thousands of your inheritance on my funeral. (That's assuming there is anything left by the time I shuffle off!) I would much prefer you spent it on a big party to get together all who wanted to help decorate my box – while I waited in the fridge somewhere to be laid inside for the fireworks (maybe wrapped up in the patchwork quilt of my mother’s, which I now use as a bedspread! Just a suggestion!)  

That SMH article says you mightn’t even have to use a funeral parlor! Some states allow you to keep the body at home for up to 5 days! I don’t suppose I’d fit into your downstairs fridge, but if I did the smell couldn’t be much worse than the fishing bait Brandon keeps in there. 

Oh, and you’re also allowed to transport a body around yourself if you so desire – though maybe you'll have a new car by then and that wouldn’t appeal. I could suggest the Cruiser has carried worse loads. But OK. I'll agree you should fork out for commercial refrigeration and a hearse. 

Your loving Mama,
Chartreuse

PS:  Just don’t think I won’t be watching. If you waste my money on funeral frills, be prepared for payback!

* Just to explain: My super-achieving daughter was made Associate Professor recently - I guess they figured what little free time she had available in her hectic life really ought not to go unused!

Granma, Charlie and Sam at Dad's
'funeral' breakfast on the Noosa River.

Requiem

Roland Allen Harvey

1929 - 2013
"Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will."
(from 'Requiem' by R.L.Stevenson)

On a Monday morning 10 years ago today, in a quiet light-filled room in Noosa Hospital my dear husband took his last breath. It was just a gentle inhaling, nothing dramatic, made easier, I suppose, by the morphine meant (officially) to minimise his pain. He simply inhaled. And then he didn't exhale. That was all.

I looked up through the window to see, beyond a covered walkway, a pretty little grove of young ti-trees in an internal garden of the hospital. I'd sat there many times on previous hospitalisations that had ended less sadly. Just at that moment, two of our children came down that walkway. They'd driven up from the city as soon as I'd rung, coming to say their goodbyes. I like to think he waited as long as he could, and let go only once the kids were near enough to give me some comfort. 

We all sat with him for quite a while. Some Mozart played softly - his favourite composer. I don't remember any of us crying too much. By then it was as much relief as loss. It had been a long, slow road - but an inevitable outcome with dementia. And really, we'd been luckier than many. He always knew us, lived at home till his last few days and could call on plenty of memories even as it became more and more difficult to express them.

Allen had squeezed into his 83 years several lives - including three families he'd created with three different women, all of us eventually becoming and remaining friends. In fact, I don't know anyone who had an unkind word to say about him. And no one whom he disliked enough to do more than make the subject of an amusing story. He had three young adult sons when I met him. But less than a year later, one of them died in a tragic accident. On the day of that funeral, we made a commitment to live the rest of our lives together. Life's too short to hold back, we decided. 

By the time I met him, Allen had made a living for more than 30 years as a stage manager and then theatre director, working and touring Australia and New Zealand at a time when a life in theatre was an even more precarious profession than it is now. But he redefined himself to follow me around wherever I might work - first becoming an ABC scriptwriter and all-round theatre jobber (actor, director, playwright, theatre manager) in Tasmania, then moving into arts management with the Australian National Choral Association and other groups in Queensland. Coming with me to London on a Fellowship year in the 1990s was an easier assignment - even if the Welsh Choir he accompanied on a European tour (a group destined to travel to Australia the following year) caused a bit of a stir and no end of paperwork when one of the elderly choristers expired while crossing the Channel. 

When I started doing overseas consultancy work on development projects, Allen confidently ran our various households, not only in Queensland but also in the Philippines and Laos for several years each and sometimes from hotel rooms for months at a time. His letters to friends and the stories he wrote about some of his own experiences in these places never failed to amuse - for example, one about a colonoscopy he had in a Manila hospital while lying on a guerney whose wheels kept failing to lock in place. He also had two hospitalisations in Thailand while we lived in Laos, quite enjoying being fussed over by caring nurses and always coming away with great stories. 

He would accompany me on visits to remote areas in these countries - saying he felt like Prince Philip walking behind the Queen (and sometimes making the kind of indelicate observations that Philip was known for). He once agreed somewhat reluctantly to go along to a cock fight in one place we were visiting because he didn't like to upset my driver who felt that that Allen deserved a break from following me around to meetings. He sometimes took on voluntary work while overseas - helping students at an international school to make a film, or visiting potential suppliers of learning materials to help me evaluate their products and manufacturing processes. All that practical stage management experience came in handy when assessing the quality of different plywoods, for example, to make 2000 boxes that could safely take classroom materials out to remote school sites! 

On our return to Australia after one of my assignments, we visited a specialist, thinking Allen may have had a small stroke. But brain scans resulted in a different diagnosis: Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), a relatively rare form of dementia. One of Allen's first reactions after some of PPA's early effects were explained to us was to turn to me with a mischievous look I knew too well. "See, it wasn't my fault that I stuffed up the chequebook account, forgot to pay the electricity bill and can't tell left from right!" Our peripatetic lifestyle was now over. We would have to learn to live with dementia. 

And I think we did it very well in the years we had left. How we dealt with it, how it dealt with us and what I learned through it all - that's what I set out to share when I began this blog in August 2009. In 2010, Allen was even a guest presenter at the National Conference of the Australian Aphasia Association in Sydney. His progressive form of this brain disorder was not well known even to most of the speech and occupational therapists who made up most of the audience. By then he could barely string words together coherently in casual speech, but he could still write himself a script and read from it almost perfectly - due in part to different areas of his brain being differently affected, but also to all those years of theatre experience! My only task as his assistant was to show the slides that he'd selected to accompany his story (My Life in the Theatre...and Afterwards).

Learning to live meaningfully without Allen has been much harder for me than being his caregiver was in his final years. But even though he's not here to share the rest of my life, I'll be better able to deal with whatever life throws at me because of what I learned from how he lived his. 

Red-rimmed trainers

I wrote this piece not long after my husband died.
Hard to believe, tomorrow it will be 10 years.

I walk in your shoes
The red-rimmed trainers we bought for rehab.
Your physio noticed and smiled.
Your doctor too.
Not the shoes you’d expect an 80-year-old to choose.
And maybe you didn’t.
But comfort comes before style
When a body’s been through hell.

Four years on they’re still like new
You were always easy on clothes, shoes
And people. You wore them all lightly,
Your presence never heavy.
I loved his feet, your ex once said,
The most beautiful feet of any man I knew.
The toes curled up in conversations
Of which there once were so many.

The children came and helped clean out
The cupboards just days afterwards.
Perhaps too soon, but later it would
Have been too hard to discard
All the folds of a long and lazy ending.
A grandson adopted your wardrobe
And when I hug his six-foot frame
I have your shirt in my arms again.

It takes my breath away to see you
Standing there in him
As if you don’t want to leave us
Any more than we wanted you to go.

But you did want to go.
Die, die, the only words
You could sometimes find
And then, soon after, sorry, sorry.
Still trying with what little you had left
Not to give pain, or make a fuss.
So we let you go and a whiff of smoke
Rose up into the blue Noosa sky

And now I wear your shoes
Our feet, like our minds, the same size.
A joke,when different coloured slip-ons
Were how we knew whose feet wore what.
Now only my feet are left
To slip on the red-rimmed trainers.
And I’m walking again with you
My body in step with yours forever.

The First 20 or so Things That I Love as They Occur to Me in the Moment

A blog-friend I recently rediscovered after my 10-year absence from posting gave me the idea for this post. I'd say he's about my age, and his occasional posts on this same theme always begin: "Peggy, my wife of 51-years" - or whatever the current tally of years might be.

 

I wish I could do likewise, and then my list would begin: "Allen, my partner-then-husband of 45 years". Alas, it will soon be 10 years since Allen died, so our partnership only made it to 35 years. Even so, he deserves a mention here, because no list of Things I Love is complete without at least a glance back at Things I Have Loved.

But as they occur to me in the moment, the First 20 Things That I Love (now):

1. Living in Australia, not the USA, and feeling in my bones that I'm more Australian than not.
2. Being free to live each day as I please and being able to do (or not do) whatever I feel like doing on most days.
3. Having my daughter and her family near enough to visit regularly and feeling I'm always welcome when I do visit.
4. Daily texts or phone calls with my sister who's on the same wavelength about so many things and knowing we can share our woes as well as joys without being judged.
5. 
   The blousy white hydrangea that's flowering right now in my garden, reminding me that Spring has arrived and there'll be weeks of blue hydrangeas to follow.
   
6. The little brown honeyeaters and double-barred finches I can see from my desk, as they take turns to bathe in the bird bath.
7. Rays of afternoon sunshine lighting up the top of the hedge along one side of my yard.
8. Being fit enough to maintain my house and garden to a satisfactory standard and, when necessary, being able to afford the services and products I need to keep things ticking over.
9. Cooking interesting food - and then eating it - sometimes with friends to share it with.
10. Reading good books - especially newly published ones - and sharing this pleasure with....
11. ...the lovely people in my book club - their kindness, generosity, intelligence and the fact that none of them are right-wingers or nutbags!
12. 
    A nicely cleaned house after I've finished a really good round of housework.
13. The wonderful opportunities I've had to do interesting development work in several countries.
14. Writing a few good sentences now and then - and sometimes sharing a piece of writing here or elsewhere.
15. Visits by family members and old friends - though I only wish more of them were closer and could visit more often.
16. 
    All my gardening activities - turning over the vegie patch, planting, composting, pruning, harvesting, repotting, pulling on my Redback boots and just getting dirty and sweaty.
    
17. Knowing I don't have to worry about possible future medical bills or access to medical care because I have access to government-subsidised medical and pharmaceutical services as well as affordable private insurance for extras.
18. Being cancer-free 23 years after breast cancer. 
19. Having nice neighbours who agree we will look out for each other but without being too nosy.
20. Having a green outlook over the back fence, with beautiful trees, bushes and an adjacent wetland that I don't have to maintain.

Postscript: I can't end this list without mentioning my dearest A.B-M. (You know who you are!)

Queen of the night

My cactus orchid (Epiphyllum oxypetalum) seems to be happy in this warm, north-facing spot. It's well protected from midday sun by a pergola that's currently overloaded with the fading purple flowers of a sandpaper vine (Petrea volubilis). But though it's hung here through several seasons, until last night I'd never actually seen the cactus orchid's flowers open. I've only seen the long ivory-coloured buds turn to dead flowers (see the top ones) and later bulb-like fruits emerge (green at first, turning to red later). 

The reason why, of course, is because the flowers open at night - Queen of the Night is another name for the plant. So if I wanted to see this plant's night-blooming flowers, I'd have to get out there in the dark. And sure enough, last night over the course of just a few hours from sundown to bedtime, the funnel-shaped flowers emerged and fully extended their petals and other parts toward the moon. 

Alas, the sweet smell and glowing ivory colour is probably all in vain. Whatever insect, bat or other creature it would have appealed to in its Central American homeland isn't hanging around here in south-east Queensland. I don't know how long it stayed open, but by morning the flowers had closed. At least I got to enjoy them for once.