Sounds

Since I quit my full-time job (for reasons I shall not discuss here) and decided to work from home, I have been spending a lot more time on my own, but have also been able to observe what the two children, two boys, I have left, do. What I find interesting is the extremely different sounds I now find myself listening to. These are very different sounds from those we were all able to hear in this same house about three to four years ago, when we first moved to this northern suburb of the ACT.

And I don’t mean their voices. The difference is that boys enjoy playing war games: my twin boys like playing war games, too. Mind you, I hate the idea of war. So I secretly despaired when they were given toy guns for their 8^th birthday. Yet the twins are also imaginative (that’s a positive, yes?), so they are capable of making up soldiers, devising state-of-the-art weaponry and even building spaceships with their Lego blocks.

The sounds I can these days hear resemble those of fights, or of action movies as they see them on TV: powerful laser beam discharges, machine gun bursts, brutal car or plane crashes, or who knows exactly what it is that ignites their imagination. It is fantastic that they’re so imaginative, but the sounds they make while playing are of violence, of wanton destruction.

Now, don’t get me wrong: as a child I was exactly like that. I will not lay any claims to any sort of purity or a higher moral ground in that regard. To give an example of what I mean: even when we did not have any toy guns at home, my brother and I would construct guns with wooden pegs. We could shoot peg pieces at each other and drove our poor mum insane whenever she needed to hang out the clothes. So I still see there is fun in playing war games.

The boys’ 8^th birthday party was held at a place called Zone 3, where we made up two teams of 7 and then entered a dimly-lit maze toting laser guns that we had to use to annihilate the other team and score as many points as possible. I came second last, I think. I had never played this sort of game before, and frankly, it felt almost like fun for a while. What I did enjoy was to see their big excitement whenever they shot me; that I liked quite a lot more than the game itself.

Yet I will sit in my study of an afternoon and recall the times when there were gentler sounds, and the games played were of a different kind. They were games about putting up and opening a shop, for instance – and then I would get called to urgently go and ‘do my shopping’ there; I would be given some ‘money’ to spend, and it was fun to engage in discussions about the quality of their products! Or also other times when their whole afternoon would be spent on organising a fashion parade, and those two little boys obediently followed the parade manager’s highly creative instructions, sometimes in a rather shrill tone when her instructions were not duly observed.

Those gentle sounds children make when playing at home make the home, too. They are part of the familiar setting we get used to living in. The gentle flow of sounds we used to have here was suddenly snapped; it will never return. It's a good thing, though, that these warlike boys are also learning to play the piano.

Flowers

Every Sunday – except when we are away – we take flowers to our daughter Clea’s grave in the Gungahlin Cemetery. It is an emotional drive. Yes, taking flowers to the dead is a ritual, and most people will do it maybe once, twice, perhaps three or four times a year. In most cases, their dead were their grandparents, their parents, or perhaps even siblings or the spouse. But burying your own child is not as frequent an occurrence in the 21^st century as it used to be in earlier times.

Most graves at the Gungahlin Cemetery have been adorned with plastic flowers. Personally, I must confess that I hate plastic flowers: they may be colourful and of course they are long-lasting, yet they are so fake. As we approach the winter solstice, it is becoming increasingly difficult to pick fresh flowers from our own garden; to make things worse, our very kind, ever so generous neighbours’ rosebushes have already been ravaged by the intense frosts that are frequent in Canberra this time of year.

So we’ve been stopping by the lavatories at the cemetery, and have picked an occasional couple of roses; highly illegal behaviour, I know. There by the public lavatories the cemetery rosebushes seem to be more sheltered, and some buds still manage to thrive despite the cold and the frost.

Occasionally we may buy a bunch of flowers from the florist’s or the supermarket, but it just never feels the same. I’d just like to be able to grow flowers all year round, my own flowers, so we can take them to my daughter’s grave. It is more personal if you take your own flowers, blooms you have planted and cared for, an offering you can feel part of and proud of.

More than a year ago Amaroo School, Clea’s school, planted a beautiful Australian native, a Callistemon, otherwise known as bottlebrush. Next to it a small plaque was fixed to honour and remember Clea. Amaroo School is a relatively new school (its first section was officially opened on 19 May 2004); Clea was the first Amaroo School student to die while enrolled there. Let’s hope she will also be the last, because no parent deserves to go through such an indescribable loss.

The Callistemon (shown above in a picture taken in November 2011) has now grown and its beautiful green, greyish and red hues tinge its surroundings with a little cheerfulness. I think Clea would have been secretly chuffed that such a beautiful plant was dedicated to her, as she loved the colour red, particularly when she was colouring the many loving hearts she would draw to accompany almost anything she wrote or painted.

I will continue to grow as many flowers as possible until I die. Many different flowers, in many different colours, of many different kinds. We now have roses, daffodils, various daisies and golden marigolds in summertime, as well as many others. But I’m particularly pleased with my carnations.

I first planted them in pots, and moved them a year later to a nice spot in the backyard, where they went kind of feral after the generous spring rains of 2011. I took some photographs. This is what they looked like.

Writing grief: one disappointing experience

In early 2011 I enrolled in a Postgraduate Certificate in Writing via distance education. In theory, I should have completed it by now: they were only four units and, frankly, its contents did not appear to be either too time-consuming or highly intellectually-challenging.

The first unit I attempted was called ‘Critical Friends: The Real and Virtual Support of Writers’. It was described as an exploration of “how 'critical friends' can enrich others' writing skills and their own insights into the processes of writing”. On paper, the description was quite appealing, and I was looking forward to engaging in some robust reflection on writing and critical thinking.

In any case, I was working fulltime and had as well numerous translations to do throughout the term. Needless to say, I was unable to put in the necessary effort to achieve something. It was never my intention to seek a High Distinction grade, yet I did manage to read most of the lectures and tutorial materials thoroughly, and I even found other writings, which I found to be actually more engaging that those suggested by the course convenors.

We were asked to write something short and submit it to a ‘critical friend’ for feedback, and then write a reflection on what ways this feedback had led us to rethink and/or rewrite the piece. I wrote a short story called ‘By the sea’, which you can read in Hypallage, the magazine of the MWAA. In turn, we would also provide feedback for our critical friend’s writing. It should have been quite straightforward, really. But nothing is these days. [Note: Perhaps it might be a good idea to read the story before you keep reading below, but I leave that to you.]

Then I received my assessment report. Rather than focusing on my writing, the assessor chose to provide some free, unrequested psychological advice: “Your critical reflection is a thorough consideration of [Name suppressed]’s report, good work. You re-think your text with reference to the critical friendship experience. [New paragraph] I am very sorry to hear about the tragic loss of your young daughter, Jorge, and that this story is about those circumstances. It is extremely difficult to write about such a traumatic and recent event, Jorge, and I want you to bear this in mind. You may need to let a lot more time pass. The loss of your daughter will always suffuse your writing because she will always be a part of you and perhaps these events need less direct attention and a more indirect approach”.

I was puzzled, I felt perplexed. “Extremely difficult?” What would they know? They may think, “wow, it must be extremely difficult to write about this subject”. But it never occurred to them that the fact is, it is also very necessary. Actually, it is essential for anyone traumatised by loss and a catastrophe to be given the chance to tell their story.

I was of course baffled that someone who did not know me at all seemed to be advising me not to write my story. I did lodge a complaint. It was dealt with as best as could be in the circumstances. End of the story.

In the last eighteen months I have developed an interest in the interactions of grief and writing. I have done very little research as yet, but I can assure you that there is a lot of interest out there. The works by Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates and Maggie MacKellar, for example, have raised a great deal of attention among scholars in general.

I have now and then thought about my ‘extremely’ disappointing experience. I have come to realise that what truly hurt was that the assessor resorted to clichés and hackneyed phrases: I have underlined the sentence where the real problem was. I now believe that was what led me to take the immediate decision to discontinue my studies. 

Mute Friends

People often ask me how my two boys are, how they are doing, whether they show any signs of trauma. The truth is, they are very normal children: they like playing football, they love their Auskick, they play games on their Nintendo and on the PC. At school they are inconspicuous, just another two boys who mingle with their classmates and make the most of their day. No one knows that the only difference is their tendency to create mini ‘tsunamis’ in the bathtub, where their ship is wiped out and many pirates fall into the water and drown. I doubt many children will do that at bath time.

So I’ll say they are well and they show no signs of trauma. Yet the truth is it could be very different. After all, they survived a catastrophic event in which they lost their sister. Two minutes earlier they had all been walking together on a paradisiacal beach. Then a mountain of water came and it swallowed the five of us and everything else, and they never saw their sister again.

They also lost what they had taken to the beach. They were just toys, you might argue, and they might be replaceable; still, they were part of their daily lives. They shared their beds and their dreams, they were the tireless companions of their childhood games. It is impossible for us adults to have a proper insight into what children feel when they suddenly lose their favourite toy, the one that keeps them safe in bed at night.

Clea lost Chuchi, the fluffy puppy that was the silent witness to her endless discussions with her dolls. This was Chuchi, whose name had obvious Spanish connections (‘chucho’ is a colloquial term for dog in Spanish).

O. lost Blah-blahs, a bizarre-looking pinkish rabbit who used to have a sound recorder inside, so when you squeezed him and talked, Blah-blahs would repeat what you said. Blah-blahs came from Spain, but the recorder was soon destroyed. Though mute since then, Blah-blahs kept O. company and was always happy to be thrown into the air and fall wherever; he never complained, so he was the ideal playmate. I was unable to find a picture of Blah-blahs, but we all remember him (or her?) fondly.

J. lost Tigger, that eccentric jumping tiger in the Winnie the Pooh story. Tigger was a very tiny toy but would go with J. wherever they went.

Chuchi, Blah-blahs and Tigger: all three of them accompanied our three children wherever they went if they were to sleep the night away from home, and would always keep them company. They were loyal. Admittedly, they were mute and never said anything much; unlike persons, however, they did not have the means to express themselves. It was not their choice to remain silent.

They don’t get talked about much these days, but they must be missed.

I miss them, too.