Joani’s story

I have avoided so many disasters over the last sixty something years. The terrible things, that nearly, almost or could have happened, didn’t.

Nervous relief punctuated my life like a constantly recurring rainbow. I lived in smug appreciation for the slipping away from imminent demise. Always the lucky escape, gurgling “Ah ha! got out of that one”. Phew.

The concept “we made it!” had riven deep gullies in my mind’s thought patterns. We always managed to get through. I mean life is not that tricky really, is it. Is it?

As a kid, life was not super easy, but I knew I was lucky. I could have been born in a third world country. But no. I had three meals a day and even my own bed and a pillow, that I loved like a mother.

I went to the Catholic School, St Raphael’s, only four doors up and the nuns made sure we knew about the poor. I remember appreciating that we didn’t have to sleep on the ground like I saw in pictures of other countries.

My early nightmares included being stung by insects as I slept, or bitten by mice crawling on me. I also had serious nightmares about being murdered by the dentist, (after stealing lollies from him in the National Park, you know dreams…) falling from high places, (the brick pit where they took us on a school excursion), and most often tidal waves, now known as tsunamis, but we didn’t have that word for them back then.

Sometimes, in the dream I would be dwarfed and drowned by the waves and at other times I capably surfed them out. Sometimes alone, sometimes with family. Some waves were crystal blue and clear, others very mucky and rough. Every tidal wave dream was different but if I knew I could surf it then I could, and as soon as I started to doubt myself, I lost all power and the mighty wave devoured me and whoever I was with.

As a child, I was ridiculously hungry all the time, but food could not satiate. I would often wake before anyone else and sit on the floor eating sugar out of the bowl until I felt sick and then go back to bed, waking later.

A child’s birthday party meant you ate till you vomited. Food was ghis child’s life joy and to be sought after relentlessly. Good food brought relief and happiness. There was no other comfort that I really remember. For a family with eight children, we played a bit, a lot, and some of my best memories were as a child in that family. Brilliant, close, cleverly dry humour that kept us glued. I never doubted where I belonged. Child number four of the Jay family.

My older sister was removed from the family for a time due to a ‘failure to thrive.’ They found out she was Coeliac, and in 1959, the year I was born were just understanding how to diagnose this disease. Later, when I experienced the same symptoms, it was assumed I was a Coeliac too so I was put on a strict diet without being tested. Sugar was allowed. I gorged it. Not cake. Not much else that I would eat. But I was told I would grow out of it. Like so many childhood dilemmas, I would wait till I would grow up and get control of my own life.

Compound shame, neither spoken or understood, epitomised my life and confirmed my perceived unworthiness.

When I was little, my father told me my hair was rat’s tails and I took that literally. After all, it was a ‘mousey’ colour. Sisters older and younger had blond or brown hair – but mine was, well, nondescript, the sort of hair not worth mentioning. After all, it was not real hair, it was rat’s tails. Thanks Dad.

I would comb it carefully trying to figure out what I could do to fix it? I thought my true nature was revealed by rat tail hair and anyone could see it quite plainly.

I felt more akin to the Medusa who had snakes for hair than the humans than I lived with. I liked her. She was powerful. The woman who could turn men to stone with just a look. She never scared me because I felt she was me.

I still find it hard to notice I have fine hair, grey now. And I have a brilliant hair cutter. The best. He takes a long time on my ageing skull and treats my hair like it is well umm – hair. Hair that is cared about.

One day when I was maybe eight years old, I walked past Dad watching TV in the lounge room, he stood up and punched me hard, full in the stomach, knocking me down in one instant. I found myself gasping and grasping my guts to myself curled up on the linoleum floor.

As I lay unable to breathe, panicking for air, he laughed, and said I was only winded, and any idiot would know that.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my Dad and he loved us. Years later now I can understand the violence, but at that time I did not know what I had done wrong. I thought I was just wrong.

He had a “toughening us up approach”. If anyone is going to hit my kids, it is going to be me. Better to come from inside the family. Although most of it was clearly not discipline but unfiltered rage.

Although I forgive him, the hurt and loss from it perforated my being and I can never forget the events that shaped and defined my life.

I felt the humiliation as a profound truth and his contempt was unbearable. I thought he was right, as a child I was the wrong one even though it all felt incredibly unjust. I concluded that I was really not up to life. Something was wrong with me that I was not a proper person. I should be able to take a punch in the guts. At the least. Learn how to take a punch, you chicken was the internalised lesson. How are you going to get by if you can’t take a punch? It all pointed to my deficiencies. I had an overwhelming number of failures to make up for.

In order to cope I lived in a fantasy world to get through things. Make a go of it, was the sort of thing we used to say. Giving up was frowned upon so I kept going from one ill conceived idea till another. There is so much more to say about the time between childhood and parenthood but in reality there was no time between them.

I became a mum and now I had the responsibility.

The birth of Gabrielle was the best thing that ever happened to me.

There are so so many other stories of our lives to tell, but it was not until well over fifty years later that I could start the telling. It happened when my world as I knew it, ended.

I, we, avoided disaster no longer.

My adult daughter, Gaby, died and my world fell apart in every way imaginable.

So what did I do after the end of the world?

Tried to make sense of it. The big it. Got information, got help, joined with others, tried to do different courses but not much went in. I went back to work and made a bunch of big mistakes. Not the place for me any longer. I couldn’t handle anything very much. Nothing really helped. Still trying to learn how to take the punch.

I would dance a little, walk, sing a bit to push the empty days along. I don’t want to be here without her or I don’t know how to be here without her. Cried, cried, cried. Watched TV. A lot.

Better lose weight. Fuck. The sugar still has me by the short and curlies and will kill me if I don’t do something about it quickly!

Podcasts – someone must know something?

Politics – someone must do something?

So many things were wrong with what happened to her.

I should focus on other more important ones, like the living people whom I love, for example. My beautiful partner, and my mum still going strongly at 95 years old and the rest of our clan.

Also keep going for all the young people that I know. Otherwise, what a shit sandwich to offer them? Us late boomers (for me late bloomer is closer to the mark) have done enough to damage things haven’t we?

Not to blame any parent who has done themselves in, cause I know you would not have done it if you could not have done it, but I cannot knowingly add to the intergenerational/epigenetical despair running deep in our lives. First principles. Do no harm.

How did I stay alive and not be destroyed by the end of my world?

where is the podcast and political party to help with that?

I value the garden more, even though I mostly just look. I wash clothes, cook and reorganize things. I sit with pots of tea remembering her. I re-enact her walk to the bathroom or hang with the dogs in the park and feel her presence. Everyday and everywhere.

But I fear the fatal blow has been inflicted, hiding in plain sight before it asserting it’s victory. Fearful of others and fretful of events, my edges fray and life force leaks. It started slowly and then faster as I succumbed more of the futility of her death. The fatally wounded stay that way, until, you know.

I tried. We all tried. She tried with all her might. But she couldn’t make it. In her final moments, Gab could not rouse herself to live. The child had had life. No longer. Her death has nothing to do with her life. While there is life there is hope. Life and death are separate and intrinsically different processes connected by time in a way that is impossible to comprehend. Her life was still her life and her death absolute. Life force is never entropy, feelings can trick us into thinking hope is gone, long before it is.

I am bound to acknowledge my hope is not gone. I will use my time to honour our lives Together and apart. I will pay homage to life while I still can.

Be with every person as keenly as possible. Decide to belong everywhere. Value every human in the way you valued your daughter. Better still, value people in the way your daughter valued people.

The generosity of the child’s heart that lived close to the void is her shining legacy. I am the only one of us two left now. But we were good. We were really good. Tell the story. The truth. It’s a good one. Juicy. Funny. Terrible.

I decide to leap. And that is me now.