Learning

For the last five months I have been a Team Manager, helping the Coach of the Auskick team my two sons belong to. I have witnessed and admired this man’s patience while training ten rather rowdy and often undisciplined boys. I wish I had just a mere 1% of the patience he has shown. I think all the players have learnt a lot from him.

A few months ago I began teaching Clea’s brothers to use a fork and a knife to cut their steak. Like most boys, they enjoy eating meat. It felt good to witness their first attempts to use a knife; you could sense in them some sort of achievement, their realisation that they could now divide a largish chunk of beef into smaller, more manageable pieces.

That sense of achievement is in other words the awareness of learning, and I’m sure every parent will agree that it’s a joyful, fantastic feeling, being there to witness it. It is something to relish; it becomes a memory to cherish, too.

There will be many other skills and aptitudes these young men will need to learn before they can fend for themselves. And it will be many years before their parents can feel confident enough that they can go and live their own lives. And even then… who knows what the future may bring.

This brings me to the realisation that we all need to learn all the time. If we don’t, we become stagnant, stationary, helplessly fixed on what we already know.

I am learning, too. For two years and eleven months now I have been learning to live without my daughter Clea. I’m still learning, day after day. I often feel I will never stop learning, because this is a never-ending process. As I wake up every morning, as I (sometimes reluctantly) immerse myself into a state of consciousness, a bitter realisation dawns on me: yet another day of this learning has begun.

What is it like, you may ask yourself. Well, some days you feel you have the energy and the will to learn; other days, you feel you don’t have any energy at all, let alone the will, so you could easily give everything up, because you feel trapped in a place and time where you don’t really want to be. You would want this loathsome reality to shatter, so you could start anew.

It is a fraught process. I guess it cannot be easy for most people to understand what I mean — unless they are in an analogous position. And I do not mean the loss of a parent: I lost my father to heart disease when I was 25; he was 58. It is not comparable. The loss of a loved one is always a terrible experience, but I believe losing your child takes you to a different dimension. It is a dimension most people would not even wish to contemplate in their own lives. That is, of course, quite understandable.

I am learning to live a life I did not choose to live. I see it is as a burden I have to carry; I have accepted the fact that I have to learn, one day at a time.

Yes: I am learning to live without my daughter. I do know I can be a difficult person to be with, to talk to, even to look in the eye. This is not what I thought I’d be doing in 2012; this was not the life I had planned to live when I would turn 48. Learning is what I’m most likely to be doing in 2013, 2014, 2015, etc.

I’m making the effort to learn something that probably I will never learn completely. It’s quite difficult; still, I’m trying to be patient with my own learning self. After all, what other choice do I have?

The Little Artist

Clea Salavert, Mother and Daughter Sitting on a Rock (scanned copy of lost original, circa 2006)

It is just a drawing by a three-year old. There is nothing special about it, except that when I first saw it and I asked Clea what it was, the explanation she gave made a lot of sense to me. Once we grow older, we cannot see the world through the eyes of child anymore, so when — or if — we come across a representation of the world as a child sees it, and we are somehow able to trace the interpretation they have made of the world around them, I feel it is a nice surprise.

Of course, at the time I never thought I would end up treasuring this picture the way I do now. It somehow became stuck to the fridge door and stayed there for many years. It is still there, reminding us daily of the little artist she could have been when we fetch the milk for breakfast. The original, of course, was destroyed: it ended up in the recycling bin, like all the many other drawings Clea would make in her early years. I guess I should be glad that one day I took it to work and scanned it. I used Photoshop to add the title Clea had given it, and her name.

It was really meant to be kind of a joke: I would hang her masterpiece on the wall and admire it with a feigned critical eye, making teasing comments such as ‘the evident masterful combination of light, shade and colour’, or ‘the expert control of the line where the absence of light would make it invisible’; nonsense of that kind she giggled to. Now, I cannot remember exactly when she made it, but you might wish to consider that this is one of the few ways of escape we, the grieving parents, have at our disposal: to fictionalise their past, since we have not been given the chance to create a record of their future.

Clea enjoyed all make-believe games. She loved impersonations, and in her rather original games she loved to pretend she was someone else. I wish I were someone else, too, so I could fictionalise a present and a future that did not include her absence as the overwhelming feature.

Sell Your Story!

Quite a few months ago I took part in a Saturday day-long course designed to provide some guidance, encouragement and ideas to people of NESB [Non-English Speaking Background] who seek to publish their literature.  Considering it a posteriori, attending may have been a lapse on my part; perhaps I’m still not prepared for attending such events. However, I cannot deny I have always loved literature; after all, I do like writing; I have created a few things I think I can be proud of.

There’s Lalomanu, of course, but also the Four Sonnets and a few other poems in English (Words for a Dead Daughter, or Whisper Her Name in the Wind, or even these poems, which I wrote before September 2009); I have also written some poetry in Catalan (Una mena de rutina or El teu arbret), and there is a couple of short stories I have published in Spanish (Duende and Olor a muerte).

There was some commotion in the room when I was asked about my story. Everyone was shocked (understandably, I suppose); they were appalled and of course saddened by Clea’s death, by what happened to us in Samoa. The facilitator, after the initial shock, appeared to become quite positive, almost enthusiastic, about the story. The idea was, basically, that I had a book to sell if I was prepared to sell my story.

My response was (and still is) that I do not want to ‘sell my story’. No, I do not want to sell my pain. I am well aware there is a market (one of those words whose meaning I choose to despise). The facilitator then asked why I had come to the course. ‘What are you doing here?’. Indeed: what on earth was I doing there?

Yet I did not really feel like replying. The question was, I felt, a little intrusive. The thing is: I like writing, I like literature. That should be a good enough reason to attend a one-day course for aspiring NESB writers.

I know there are people who have sold their stories of survival in catastrophes. I know there is a market for grief literature. But I have never bought a book of that kind. The closest I have been to something of the kind is probably Anh Do’s The Happiest Refugee (NB: the review is in Spanish), which I found had more things I disliked than I liked.

In fact, I'd say I have already written the story: it is called Lalomanu, because that was the name of the place where it happened. It is the Samoan placename that appears in Clea's death certificates (yes, you get two when the deceased has dual nationality). I have told my story, our story, but not the way the market wants it.

As far I'm concerned, the market can get stuffed.

Mirages

Photo by Tom Ruen. Lake Superior, Minnesota

I may have said elsewhere that Clea and her two siblings should really be considered triplets. They are so, to the extent that they were all conceived in vitro on the very same day. Clea was born alone in 2003; about eighteen months later her twin brothers were born at the same hospital where she had been born: the public ward of the Calvary Hospital.

One of the things this means is that they obviously share a lot of characteristics, despite being eighteen months apart and her being the sole female. More than two years after she was gone forever from our lives, I have often been able (but always all too briefly) to see Clea, and I do not mean in my dreams (in which I still see her and feel her, only to wake up feeling destroyed – but that’s another story, if you’ll excuse the cliché). What I mean by this is that I have often seen her mannerisms in her brothers’ mannerisms; I have often seen her smile in her brother’s smiles; I have often seen some facial expressions that were her own, beyond any doubt, in her brothers’ facial expressions.

For the father of a dead child, this is both beautiful and terrible. Whenever this happens, I feel on the one hand that I am able to get an almost true glimpse of my daughter. It is as if she became suddenly alive right in front of my eyes. I feel a strange sense of elation mixed with the most profound sadness. It is a bittersweet feeling; it is of course disconcerting; it is also upsetting.

A few days after 29 September 2009 I received an email that upset me very deeply; it came from a relative I had not seen or heard from for over 20 years. In his message, the researcher and physiologist (by profession) sent his condolences (a sorry typo included! Pardon the pun) and more or less advised us not to worry, because we “would see her again”.

Coming from a scientist, the blatantly religious notion almost infuriated me. Because even if it were true (human resurrection is, to the best of our knowledge, impossible; and as I have said elsewhere, I don’t believe there is an afterlife), it would never make up for the suffering, for this never-ending pain, for the unbearable loss.

I look a lot like my late father, I have been told many times. Photographs are really the best evidence of this, I guess. For many years after my father suddenly died of a heart attack in his sleep on the morning of 20 August 1989, I would often find my mum staring at me, seeing (I suppose) the man she had shared her life with in me.

Yes, I do see Clea in all the photographs we have; I see Clea in her siblings (her twins!); I see Clea in my dreams. Yet I know Clea is buried in the Gungahlin Cemetery. My sightings (so to speak) are mere visions, just that, mirages; and like all mirages, they vanish into thin air and leave you empty, broken, crying.

The Invaluable Gift of Poetry

Last Sunday I received an email from someone I have never met. The email had a Word attachment. The file name just read: Ode. I opened it.

It was a poem.

Ode to a little girl lost at sea

The wintry wind blusters

Through pine boughs

Whistling through ashen eucalypt

Across rosy-hued skies

It gives no solace

This pomegranate sunset

For my mind is awash

With your papa’s words for you

Words enmeshed in love

Born of terrible grief

His rhymes of anguish

They anchor me

Last night I dreamt

Of a colossal wave

A lucent barrier

In terror I ran as you did

But it overtook me too

I think

The core of the force

It was a blur

As visions go

I couldn’t tell

But I heard the cries

Was it that tsunami?

Was it a wall of Living Sorrow?

I couldn’t tell

I woke up and wept

Grabben Gullen, July 2012

The author’s name is Samantha Sirimanne, but I have never met her in person. Sam (I think she prefers it if I refer to her that way) was one of the many contributors to the first issue of Hypallage, a little dream or project I have helped create for the Multicultural Writers Association of Australia. We had corresponded by email and shared a few of our poems. I passed on the link to the online version of Lalomanu, which can be downloaded as a PDF from ISUU.

You can read another two poems by Sam (‘Migration’ and ‘Differing Opinions’) here.

Sam began her email with an (unnecessary) apology; then she wrote:

I had randomly read the poems before but wanted to be able to read all in one go before writing to you.

Your poems are so hauntingly poignant. They moved me very much - despite the heartbreaking subject, there's a quietude & elegance in your writing which is really beautiful. Thanks so much for sharing it with others. Though you don't know me - through your writing, I feel your family's pain.

Attached is a bit of free verse for Clea … jotted down after reading Lalomanu. As a poem, I reckon it's nothing much in artistry but more just my thoughts...

In a later email, Sam acknowledged:

Verse very rarely moves me to tears – I can’t recall the last time before I read your poetry. So, it’s a testament to the huge power of your writing that made me feel your burden.

I wish I could thank Sam appropriately; not because of the praise she pours on my book, but because of the tribute she pays to Clea in a very graceful manner. Any expression of gratitude for such a wonderful response will always be insufficient. Because it was unexpected, it meant so much more. Sam has made a beautiful, sensitive and meaningful tribute to Clea and to the cry of pain I wrote after losing her in such traumatic circumstances. Sam is a perfect stranger, but she is a brave human being, brimming with the kind of human energy other people are either unwilling or incapable of finding within themselves.

Lalomanu travelled a long way. It was posted (at some considerable expense, although that was the least of my concerns at the time) to many people in many different places all over the world.

In some cases, Lalomanu did not seem to even deserve an acknowledgement; silence was the preferred response from some people I used to think of as close and caring. Silence can be deafening, though.

Moltes gràcies, Sam.