Because the other bereavements were nothing. Wimpy, sissy. Were we going to compare Tom with the loss of a grandmother? We, the seriously grieving ones. Like you say the seriously mad, the seriously premature, the seriously burnt. A pedigree dog show. With scorecards. Who's suffering the most? Sure, it happened to other people, but me, it had never happened to me before. It was the first time that I'd lost a son. No, this group just didn't work for me. The lady with the hat, a wide-eyed couple who'd lost a baby to cot death, and me. I was the one who suffered the most. She'd had fifteen years, the woman in the hat.
Fifteen
years. Shit, I'm crying as I write this. Vince is seventeen, I know what that means. A whole life. I had four-and-a-half years with Tom, one thousand seven hundred days to get to know him and to live a life with him. And that couple, who were they grieving for? A three-day-old baby. A future, OK, but not mine, not a four-and-a-half year future. I know for whom I grieve, what splendour, what wonder.
I was the first and the only one. I wasn't ready for groups. Or, for Australia, really.
My second group, in Canberra, was for grieving parents. Exclusively. I drove for four hours, from the Blue Mountains and back, to take part in the meetings. I remember an old lady called Nathalie. She was Russian. There's no right age, she said, to see your children die. We could talk about this stuff together, give ourselves up to the kinds of calculations that were unspeakable elsewhere, measure ourselves against this: the difference between losing a baby and losing a sixty-five-year-old son. Between losing an only child and a child with siblings. Between losing a child through accident or illness or assassination. Delving into the uniqueness of all these sorrows.
And the scandal of the passage of time. That often came up. The grieving song.
Time changes nothing, time doesn't heal the wounds
. I didn't know what time had done to me. But I talked about it anyway. Maybe a certain distance between bouts of sobbing. The pain just as intense, but maybe a little less
frequent
. A kind of pacing, a slowing of the contractions, of the pulse, of the panic.
Time consoles nothing
. There were the hard and fast mourners, the inconsolable ones, and then there were the others, who wanted to move on, who were cop-outs, and cowards. But most of all we talked for the sake of talking. To keep each other company. To allow ourselves the chance to say the big sentences, those not for others' ears. The others, the ones who haven't lost anybody. Or not yet, or not a child. As if there are two species of humans: the innocents, and us. Those who only have one head, only one hat on their only head. And us. We chatted amongst ourselves, we helped each other and we hated each other, we allowed ourselves to mumble, soaked in snot and tears, alone, but part of the group. A chain gang, working ourselves to the bone, before taking off together.
I was among others. I was welcome in the club.
Because there's one thing that you learn quicklyâoutside, in the street, in shops, at schoolâit's never to cry in public. It's easy to spot the ones who don't know that death exists. And also to spot the ones who are phobic about death, who can't stand, for every reason in the world, when you hold it up in front of them. You learn to carry your grief discreetly. To pace yourself, to avoid the precipices, not to put yourself in a situation where you end up sobbing. Or to shut yourself away at home.
These support groups were my day out, my big day out. I got dressed up, I made an effort to be elegant, I now understood the woman in the hat. Everybody talked about how distant those close to them had become. But I didn't have any friends anyway, not in Australia. I was distant anyway. All of our moving house had discouraged the best of intentions, and my silence on the phone only increased our isolation. In those groups, they quickly found me very French. The clothes, the accent, and the quirkiness, the quirkiness that we all have, found their adjective. French. They said,
When it all overflows inside you, you have to cry
. So then I saw the Seine in flood. I expressed myself as best I could, with my accent from nowhere. With this strange language that constructed itself within me, stratum by stratumâall the dialects, from London, the west coast of Canada, Stuart, Tom and Vinceâupon the mother-rock of my French. And over all that, a slab of silence. Sometimes I got excited, I became talkative. Often, they didn't understand what I meant, and neither did I, not really. So I laughed. We were used to it, we were all like that.
Still today, I tell myself that he's somewhere. I can't give up. If I stop looking after him, what will become of him? He'll disappear altogether. He's dead, I know that, but he's not dead to me. The grief inspectors would say that my
work
is not over yet. How do they expect it to be over? He's so little. He must have slid between two layers of time. I know that physics can't do anything for the dead. But the contours of space, and those of the mindâ¦We've got no idea.
I understand that we love a city, like a body, like a creature. I love Vancouver. It's the city of the living. When you die, you leave something of yourself in Vancouver that glistens in the buildings and in the forests and in the sea. And then you go to Australia. The dead go to Australia. In one go, somewhere above the Pacific, the biggest ocean in the world, somehow between one shore and another, we are living and then we are dead. In Australia, you live between sea and desert, along a thin coastal strip. Vancouver and Australia, the two border outposts. Tom knows this as well as I do. I love Sydney. But I love it upside down, like the last city. The city where I became dead, before the limbo of the Blue Mountains.
Places we're not acquainted with. The folds, the insertions, the hems of time and space, sewn in layers one over the other. We've got no idea. The flowers dried between two pages, the postcards from before the birth, or the letters that come to life again, swelled with desire, words reread over timeâ¦Tom is somewhere in there, in the vicinity. In that Australia there.
We hadn't wanted to bury Tom because we didn't want to be shackled to a country, to its land. Yet, Tom's death made Australians of us. I'd thought that, without a grave, I'd avoid turning into a black widow, riveted to the cemetery with my devotions, my polishing cloth, and those flowers, those overalls, those watering cans, that make you look like a cemetery gardener. It was a mistake. I was missing a place where I could speak to Tom. I spoke to him everywhere, he spilled over, Australia was our speaking place, our visiting room, the sky, the sea, the desert of Australia.
Stuart's been telling me about the days when he took the car and drove aimlessly. Getting stuck on purpose in traffic jams in Sydney, or in the queue for the ferries that cross the harbour. In the car he was nowhere, the pain slipped away, he no longer thought. As if he somehow got a head start on his pain, leaving it, not where it was, but slightly behind him, puzzled, lost, like someone who follows youâ
yeah, who follows you to do you in
, says Stuart. He crossed the huge harbour, found himself on the other side, in a hilly suburb, sparse, already arid. Radio full-bore, in a bubble of air-conditioning, heading straight for the bush, heading nowhere, through a widescreen landscape. On automatic pilot, towards the empty horizon.
The crematorium was there, where the bush began. He had no memory of the route we took that first time, no image of it; but he knew the way, like a horse. He drove, without thinking. He parked out the front, idling. With the impression that he wasn't the only one waiting there in a car. Amongst the prowlers, those that don't have a grave.
His mind empty, his hands on the steering wheel, amidst the noise of the engine. My husband. Stuart. Tom's father. He turned the air-conditioning off, he opened the window, and finally, he turned the engine off. He breathed the distant air of the Sydney suburbs. It was as if the air was thin, the molecules expandedâ¦Already the air of the desert, full of little thirsty she-oaks, and saltbush, and all sorts of plants he couldn't name. Tom was there. Tom grew there. With difficulty, thirstily. In these plants so removed from our milky childhoods, from our buttercups, from our daisies, from our fat clover. Wind. Ashes. The great bushfires of 1994 had blackened the trunks and fertilised the sand, and Stuart had dreams of cycles, homecomings, regenerations. Tom's landscape.
Fire at the doors of the city. Burning eyes and throat. Storms, but no downpour. It was around the beginning of the new millennium, when Australia teetered on climatic disaster, months and years without rain.
Disaster made sense to Stuart. A climate of dust, an air of catastrophe. A world on fire. There was a logic to disaster. And Stuart was there, sitting at the edge of the world, on the brink.
One day, out driving, he stopped off at Virgin Mega Store, and bought the CD that was playing on the radio. An Australian singer whose name everyone else has forgotten but that stayed with us. Music made to order, easily digestible, a nice voice that doesn't bring time to a standstill, that doesn't cut through the void. A CD to stop you from thinking. A CD that made impossible transitions possible: between the bush and Victoria Road, between him, Stuart, and home, between the building sites and Tom's death. Stuart says that our move began with music. Our move to the Blue Mountains. It enabled us to leave Sydney. He started buying lots of CDs at a time when everybody else got music off the internet. Time passed. He brought them home, the CDs kicked around with the rest of the mess, he put them on as soon as he got in; and not long after, Stuart tells me, when he got home from work, there'd already be music on. He tells me: I opened the door and there was music.
I don't remember. One day, for the first time since Tom's death, I must have done this, made this gesture, put a CD in the player. There is very little before and after for me during this period. Between, say, getting back from Tasmania and leaving for the Blue Mountains. It seems to me it was a time when I managed more or less to stick to my objectives: to take Vince to school and Stella to childcare, bathe them, put their pyjamas on, wait for Stuart. And then there was a day when I put on some music.
Love or break-up, grief or reconciliation. No songs talk about children dying, but they all talk about it in some way, the pleas, the departures, the desertions, the fear.
In the old days, Stuart danced with the three children. Stella in his arms, Vince and Tom each hanging off a leg. He spun around and wiggled his hips, a human greasy pole. Me, too. We all danced. Pregnant with Stella, my hands were free, one for Vince, one for Tom. And I spun too, a whirligig. Tom said âore', hesitating between
more
and
encore
, but what he wanted was this: that it never end.
Stuart was looking for something. He doesn't know what. A sentence. A thinking rhythm, a rhythm for thought. To enable him to move. To work. For the body to follow. To go from one place to another. To function. To breathe. In the car, song by song, he began to listen to music again, to his old CDs, to music from the old days. Stuart, who'd always listened to music from all eras and of all sorts, began to explore a delicate apparatus. He was looking for abstract music. He didn't want empty music anymore, but neither did he want music that told stories. Too sad or too sentimental, he'd start thinking again. A particular memory connected to the music, and to the tone of the music, added up to a double torment. He'd be totally caught up in the music, terrorised, or in tears. And as he lived with a woman who was a walking
aria
, opera was out of the question. He was after music that was abstract but that would seek things out for him. Do his desiring for him. Then one day, he found Coltrane. One phrase from Coltrane, a thinking breath, a thinking rhythm, and the body begins to move.
Coltrane wasn't on about Tom. He wasn't on about anything. But he was looking for something. What? Like Stuart. Coltrane's last CDs, especially the concert in Seattleâ today we would be incapable of listening to them again. But he opens up our grief, and Stuart and I can talk about this, about Coltrane. About the intelligence of grief.
Stuart was offered a job in Canberra. He was the one who talked about the Blue Mountains. A house in the forest, somewhere round there. Repacking the boxes.
The books were easy to pack: I realised that I hadn't opened them since Tom's death. The last one I'd read was easy to recognise: a Lonely Planet guide to Australia, as worn as a prayer book. There'd been no more reading. All that was needed was to remove them shelf by shelf, their order was still intact. So much order amidst the chaos. Their alphabetical ordering had not prevented Tom's death. This was what went through my mind as I rewound the thread of those untouched books, each as ineffectual as the other. Every one innocent, every one ignorant: what did I care about those love affairs, those misadventures, those stories? What did Stendhal know about the death of children? And Virginia Woolf with her chic, pathetic suicide. The luxury of Proust writing in his bed! I threw the books into the boxes.
During this same period I had my last sessions with the Sydney support group. I remember suddenly becoming interested in the
stress scale
, like you become fixated on a mathematical puzzle. Losing someone close to you was at the top of the scale with 100 points. But all that was needed was to give, say, 150 for the loss of a child, for the scale to finally become a valid tool. My own invention, the 150-point scale. The measure of that which can't be measured.
The support group's psychologist suggested that we do a skill exchange. He told us that it would be good for us, to talk about
something else
. We all had skills. Mourning shouldn't make us forget that. We needed to draw on these skills so as not to become purely specialists in mourning. He said that all human beings have scope for freedom.
I wondered what skills I had. A widower got things started with a slide show that he'd put together himself, on climate change in New South Wales. It showed how thin the growth rings in trees had become over the last few years, and explained about hydric stress. I also remember a machinery driver from Perth, who did a presentation about his work, and the history of Poclain hydraulic diggersâa French company, he said smiling at meâand it's true, it did take my mind off things the whole time he was speaking.