16 today

You should have been 16 today. You should have been.

I would, or I should, have given you a present today, for your 16^th birthday. A very special one. Already a young woman, or very close to being one. My little one, mi babita.

But I cannot give you your present, because you are not here.

Yet here is your present, one you would have liked to see, without any doubt. A present we can share with whoever chooses to have a look here.

A few starfish. Like the one you and I found on the southern shores of Upolu barely 48 hours before the ocean rushed in and drowned you.

That starfish was dead. These were alive and happily greeted us from the shores of a beautiful lagoon in Vanuatu. I gathered them and put them all together – like a team! So I could take the picture for you, for your birthday. Can you see them, Clea? Can you see your birthday present? Aren’t they beautiful? Beautiful, like you were, like you would have been today. 

Loveya, babita. Always.

The old house

This old building used to be my paternal grandmother’s house. Number 8, Calle Enrique Olmos, Valencia. Possibly nearing 80 years since the time it was built, it is a puzzle to me why it remains standing.

My recollections of the place are now remarkably indistinct: several flights of gloomy, stuffy stairs, an old wooden door and a small hall. Other than at Christmastime, I would rarely go there. One clear memory I do have, however, is to be standing on that balcony, calling out to my brother, or perhaps my cousins too, to come upstairs because the big Christmas lunch was going to get started.

I can hardly remember my paternal grandfather, my Iaio – he died when I was very young. But I do remember, and very well, my paternal grandmother. As a teenager I would see her often at the grocery shop she owned, the place where she worked very long hours. As she grew older and wearier, she would frequently choose to stay in the shop overnight instead of walking back to her Enrique Olmos house.

I actually think I held my first proper ‘job’ at her shop, helping restocking shelves and fridges, particularly on summer weekends, when we sold lots of bottles of beer, lemonade and Coke, as well packets of crisps, salted dried nuts and many other groceries. The pace could get frantic when we were nearing closing time, with everybody wanting to buy cold drinks and last-minute essentials. On more than one occasion we closed the shop past 2:30 pm.

Although I have no clear recollection of having done so, I must have pointed out the house to Clea during her only visit to my home town in July 2005, aged 2 and a half. Who knows if she actually understood what I was talking about when I explained it to her who Iaia Carmen had been.

To me, it is completely absurd for an old uninhabited house to endure like this for years. The home of Clea’s great-grandmother is still standing many years after her death, while my little one was buried when she was six and nine months old. For quite unexplainable reasons, I sort of resent this old house now. It should have fallen down years ago, should it not?

The vagaries of death, decay and destruction seem quite incomprehensible and whimsical. The absurdity of it all is baffling.

Presents

At Christmas time, instead of giving presents to each other, Clea’s brothers have made a valuable gift to unknown children in other parts of the world where life is nowhere near as easy as in Australia through World Vision. It is the second year in a row they have done this. At a time when the Australian Government has shamefully cut its foreign aid to the poorest countries, we continue to encourage our kids to give to others less privileged.

For quite a few years now I have made an annual donation (a modest sum) to The Smith Family to help disadvantaged Australian kids. That’s where my Christmas present goes. Yet one of the very people responsible for cutting down Australian foreign aid had the gall to ask all of us in Australia to “spend up big at Christmas”, as if by spending up big one could somehow improve the world. Definitively, stupidity knows no bounds, and seems to get voted in every few years.

There are other kinds of priceless gifts, too. Someone I have only met via the internet, someone whose literary work I enjoy and feel deep respect for, will spend the holidays in some sort of psychotherapy hostel, away from his family. He is in a bad way - has been for more than a year now (and he seems to be improving, hopefully). If I could, I’d give him the present he deserves: the chance to be with his children.

Parents who have lost a child (having to bury your child is the most unnatural event that can occur to a parent) do not look forward to this time of year. As a child, I used to like Christmas Eve, or La Nochebuena – (The Good Night) as it is known in Spanish, which is really the most important date of the Christmas period in Spain – because our family all got together, because on the table there was a fabulous feast of food and in the living room there was a lot of good cheer. After losing my daughter more than five years ago, I do not look forward to this night any longer because our family cannot be together. Clea, who so loved this time of year, will be absent. She will not awake early on Christmas Day to open her presents.

The truth is, however, that we still get presents or souvenirs for Clea whenever we travel. Small things we can leave by her grave, like the ceramic puppy and the wristlet from Turkey in the picture above. Or the silken scarf I bought for her two years ago in Penang.

The night I bought this (I think) beautiful pink scarf, I bought a very similar one for a Chinese PhD student who had presented a paper at the Translation Conference I was attending. It was difficult to explain (or for her understand, I guess) why I was asking her to accept such a small gift from me, a perfect stranger. She had been able to fulfil a dream/project my own daughter has not even been given the chance to start upon.

There is only one present I’d wish for, but no one can give it to me. No one. Ever.

Soy un aballena...

I wrote this short story more than a year after 29 September 2009. Everything in it is probably true. I wish it weren't. I have not viewed the burnt DVD for a very long time. It hurts so much...

A little house at the bottom of the sea

A few years ago, my father came home one Friday evening with a video camera packed in a bag. I always called him Papá, as he came to Australia from Spain. He had borrowed the camera from work because he needed to practise; or so he said. The next day he filmed me and my twin brothers in the backyard. I saw the movie a few times after that day. It was fun and cool to see and hear myself and my brothers singing. Then he said he would burn a CD, but I didn't see the fire. He sent it overseas, to the place where he was born, for my Spanish relatives to see.

He does not want to see it too often these days; it makes him cry.

The movie is not too long, just about seven minutes. We run around the backyard while he‘s doing his best to focus and frame us. There is a moment I just lie on the dry browned summer grass and do something silly. “What on earth are you doing?”, he asks in Spanish. "Soy un aballena", I say. (Papá laughs at my mistake in Spanish.) “I‘m a little whale, I live in my little house at the bottom of the sea”, I chant in my shrill girl Spanish voice. “Get off the ground, you’re getting your clothes dirty”, he says in the stern voice he reserves for when he does mean something.

I did get up, eventually. I was only three years old.

****

We’re finally here after spending a couple of days in Apia. The sea dazzles; at noon the heat is quite intense yet bearable, there are a few clouds around but it does not look like it will rain. We flew across the ocean for about seven hours. I said to them: “We will arrive yesterday”. They looked puzzled, of course. They thought it was a joke. I guess the mix of tenses doesn’t go down well when you’ve just managed to learn to speak, and that the language mix at home may make things particularly complicated sometimes. Yet in a manner of speaking, it is true that we have travelled into the past: We left Australia on Friday afternoon and arrived in Apia on Thursday night.

Just five nights ago we were at home, practising the numbers in Samoan: tasi, lua, tolu, fa, lima… We think it’s worth showing you make the effort when you visit another country.

We’ll be staying here for a couple of nights. In one of these fales, metres away from the water. Behind the resort is the steep hill, dense with vegetation, mysterious yet inviting. The water is so clean. There is another smaller island about half a mile away, green, majestic. For thousands and thousands of miles around us, there is nothing else but water. On the horizon, the permanently white line of the reef. Hardly any waves make it to the shore. Perfect for children who are still learning to swim. They will gain in confidence.

After lunch we take a walk along the beach. Later we all put on our swimmers, make sandcastles and splash about. Everybody is having a great time, but she seems to be enjoying Samoa more than anyone else. She looks radiant, beautiful, so full of life. Her skin has quickly tanned under the Samoan sun. It’s taken just a couple of days for her to go very brown. She has my Spanish complexion.

****

My twin brothers woke up early – they still do. No rest for the wicked. Mummy said we wouldn’t get breakfast until nine, so she gave us fruit to eat. I ate my pear on the sand, looking at the beautiful blue water. I finished it and then Papá gave us some biscuits. He said they were from Chile, from across the water, and he pointed to the west. Then suddenly the ground started shaking. It was quite strange. The fales were rattling for almost a minute. Mum and Papá looked at each other and talked briefly. They looked at the other tourists. They looked at the local people, the ones who ran the resort.

We then went for a walk along the beach, like the day before. I saw the local kids on the road, wearing their school uniforms. I asked Mummy why they were going to school. She said they weren’t on holidays. We were on holidays. We had come from Australia for a holiday. On the beach I followed Papá, I was skipping on the sand, carefully putting my footprints on his. It was fun but difficult. He has such big feet I could not stretch myself long enough.

Suddenly Papá shouted: “Corred, corred”. He sounded very serious. We ran. We crossed the road. We were barefoot but kept on running. Papá was again yelling, but this time in English: “Run! Everybody run!” His voice sounded really scared. We just ran. We ran past a house. A woman was on the ground, crying. There were a few piglets, trotting around. They seemed scared, too. I turned around. I did not understand. Why was there no sky now? What was that water coming towards us? And that roar?

I was still holding Mummy’s hand. So was my brother Om. My other brother, Jay, he was with Papá. We turned and kept running for the hill. Then the water came. The water. So much water. It was so strong I immediately lost Mummy’s hand. The water dragged me up and down, it swirled me around. I hit a tree or something else. Lots of different things hit me: bits of coral, pieces of wood, rocks, tree branches… they hit my legs and my arms, they hit my back and my head. I could not come up for air.

I stayed at the bottom, like the little whale of my silly singsong a couple of years before. I think I became a whale-loving mermaid.

But Mummy and Papá cried a lot afterwards.

Father's Day

This is me. My portrait, made by my daughter at school, for one Father’s Day many years ago. It is, more or less, true to life – no hair at the top, very dark eyes. My Father’s Day today was rather uneventful. I actually had to go to work in the morning. Like so many other so-called ‘special days’, we really had nothing to celebrate. Which is just as well.

Today I just feel like saying that I have the best daughter in the world. She is indeed the best, the nicest, the cleverest and the most beautiful daughter in this whole world, and her name is Clea Soledad. She is 6 and 9 months old.

But she is gone. Like so many other children on 29 September 2009, she was taken away from us by the ocean, while all of us were walking on a paradisiacal beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She was, she is, she will always be, the best daughter in the world.

I miss you, Babita.

Two Hearts Beating

“and once my mind is free and empty I hear the rhythmic hoot of owls. The two birds call each other and when suddenly one of them fails to respond my heart stops for a moment, waiting for the call. It soon follows and a strange pleasure begins to pulsate through my body.” (Subhash Jaireth, To Silence, p. 17)

The above caught my attention while I was reading my friend Subhash’s book. I’m not sure why exactly, but the passage brought back to me memories of the first night I was left to look after Clea on my own. She was just over seven months of age, and Mum went away for a much-deserved girls’ night on her birthday, her first night out in many years. Not that I was overwhelmed by responsibility. Far from that. I actually felt elated to be alone with my daughter.

It was, of course, a cold July night in Yass. After giving her dinner and her daily hot bath, I proceeded to hurriedly eat something. Then I sat down next to Clea. We read books and sang songs, played silly little games and had some giggles. At some point I went back to the kitchen and got myself a glass of red wine.

As the night progressed Clea became a little restless and began crying. I turned on the TV, put it on mute and picked the channel that was about to show the Bledisloe Cup match between the All Blacks and the Wallabies. I downed the rest of the wine and placed Clea on my abdomen, and a blanket on top of us both.

Heartbeats synchronised. Breathings became relaxed, restful. My mind was free and slowly drifted into sleep while the two hearts, father and daughter, beat in unison, a strange and rare joy of living synchronicity. A heart pulsating, calling on another heart, the heart of a pulsating being that is your own flesh and blood, to reply. Can anything else feel closer to the sense of a perfect union?

As weeks, months and years pass I find myself clutching at things, sounds, smells even that can prod my memory, willing myself to bring as many memories of Clea back as it is possible for me to do. G.W. McLennan’s One plus One was one of the songs Clea would sleep to during her first year’s afternoon naps. Two hearts beating, Papá y Clea, One plus One.

Swallows, show me the way: A sonnet

Swallows, show me the way

Where will you be found, since I am so lost

without you? What winds will my sails follow

across these desperate seas? Will swallows

show me the way to you? Will my soul, tossed

this and that way, find some peace and relief?

This is hellish living, of you deprived.

On a vain hope my loving feelings thrived

for so long, holding on to this belief:

Oh, yes, we will be together once more,

and we’ll hold hands, and dance; I’ll smell your hair,

and gaze at those hazel eyes I adore,

hear your voice… We’ll enjoy the love we share,

smiling, giggling, the way it was before,

where nothing matters, as we’re past all care.

(First published in Azuria#3, Summer 2013-14). Azuria is published by Geelong Writers, ISSN 2200-2367).

Your Birthday Present: A sonnet

What present would I have got you today?

A new bicycle? A gadget? How cool…

Something I’m certain you’d have loved to play

with? Perhaps something to show off at school?

We would have got you a chocolate cake,

or would have gone out to dinner – Thai, Chinese…

or a very special dish Mum could make.

You were not too tough a diner to please.

Would have loved the mangoes so juicy and ripe,

Or a cooling mid-afternoon iceblock:

raspberry, orange, or lemon and lime.

Another birthday, one more year to clock.

Yet all I can give you today: my tears.

This grief beyond words, not having you here.

¡Andando!

About a month ago I had a car accident. Another driver called Anwar Kamal S. sped through the GIVE WAY sign at a roundabout and hit my Mazda 2 sideways. Luckily, I was not hurt. The car was written off, though. The accident temporarily revived some fleeting memories of feeling (seeing) my own body pushed, pulled and dragged by a force way beyond my control more than four years ago, in very different circumstances.

Over the next few days many different thoughts crossed my mind. I thought about Jason Carney and his best friend Alina, both of whom lost their lives after being broadsided by a drunk driver twelve years ago. I never knew Jason or Alina, but I feel sorry for them, for their senseless, absurd deaths, for the unbearable pain their parents were inflicted. I also thought the same could have happened to me – except it was at a roundabout (you have slow down even if just a little!) and in my case the driver (I firmly believe) was not drunk. Muslims (the vast majority of them at least) do not drink.

As days went by, I also thought about how the little car had been an integral part of our lives, Clea’s life included. Not that I feel any special attachment for the car itself, but rather for those indelible memories I cherish more and more as I get older.

The Mazda was the car in which Clea and I drove together to Sydney Airport one unforgettable night in September 2008. It was also the car where Clea and I shared those morning conversations every parent loves to have on the way to school. I reminisced about her first year of schooling, when her brothers went with their mother to a Childcare Centre in a different part of town, while Clea would jump in the car with her school bag, so full of vitality, so keen to learn.

It was the car whose engine I often had to turn on five minutes before leaving because the frost would make it impossible to drive off to school straightaway. I thought about Clea’s reply whenever I locked the home door and said ‘¡Andando!’ (literally, ‘walking’, but it’s one very idiomatic way of saying ‘Let’s get going!’). Although she already knew what it meant, Clea invariably said: ‘Andando no, ¡en coche!’

I have also been thinking that, regrettably, somewhere, there will be parents who will return home after the summer holidays without their child. Nothing can prepare us for the loss of our child. It is utterly unthinkable to consider that our child may predecease us. Nothing can bring them back. All we can do is to face up bravely to a new day every day. And that does feel too much sometimes.

¡Andando!

Torrijas

It is her favourite breakfast. Days-old bread soaked in warm milk, lightly coated in beaten eggs, then fried in olive oil until golden and finally sprinkled with sugar (and too much sugar would never be enough, of course!). Also known as French toast, I have always called it torrijas, and I still recall my parents frying torrijas of a cold winter morning, sometimes accompanied by thick hot chocolate.

These days I simply use French sticks (which I allow to ‘age’) from the supermarket, but the best are always the ones made with Pane di Casa, thicker Italian-style loaves you can cut into any shape that takes your fancy.

We had perfected some sort of family comedy routine. When the plate was full, I would sit at the table and stare at them, at Clea and her two younger brothers, and very seriously declare my breakfast was ready, so what were they going to eat for brekkie? She would immediately reply in an indignant tone: ‘¡Son para todos!’ They’re for everyone, they’re to be shared!

I still make torrijas as often as possible. Her brothers have elsewhere declared it one of the best foods in the world. I still will sit at the table, place the big plate in front of me and announce that my breakfast is ready, and what is everyone else going to eat?

I still hear Clea in my head, crying out that the torrijas are for everyone, indignant at the sheer injustice of her father promising to eat all of them by himself.

How can such a sweetly perfected family comedy routine vanish? Why?

I’d pour tonnes of sugar over them if that could lure her back, and I’d feel no guilt or shame for giving my child all the sugar she wanted. Just this once.

Tenses

A few weeks ago I read a blogpost titled ‘Forever 19 or What if?’ by Rebecca Carney, in her blog Grief:A Woman’s Perspective. Like with everything Rebecca writes, her words resonated in me, they made me think. This one post, however, made me think especially long and hard about language, not just the words in her post but rather about how our daily grammar has changed.

You see, I can't help being a linguist. A philologist. I have taught English and Spanish as second languages for many years. I have also been a translator and an interpreter for many years. I take notice of language and grammar. I perceive changes when they occur.

The conditional perfect is defined as “a grammatical construction that combines the conditional mood with perfect aspect”. One typical example of the conditional perfect in English is ‘I would have done things differently’. Thus, the conditional perfect is “used to refer to a hypothetical, usually counterfactual, event or circumstance placed in the past, contingent on some other circumstance (again normally counterfactual, and also usually placed in the past)”. All of those quotes are from Wikipedia.

For most people, the verbal tenses of their daily lives are both the present and the future. The rhythms of the everyday dictate their lives: the things they do or are doing at a certain time of the day, but also the things they plan to do or wish to do in the short and the medium term.

But for the parents of a dead child, their present and their future have been truncated. Their lives are anchored in the past, in a past that has become a ‘forever’. Forever 19. Forever a young man full of promise, like Jason Carney. Forever 6 years and 9 months. Forever a schoolgirl enjoying her first real holiday on the tropical sands of a paradisiacal beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, like Clea. Forever.

The conditional perfect is the verbal tense that defines the daily life of the grieving parent. We no longer think about our child in the future tense. We think about them – a lot, constantly, continually – but we do not think about what they will be doing in months or in years. We think about them and use the past tense as we reminisce about their interrupted lives. We think about them and use the conditional perfect as we muse over who they would have been, about what could have been, what should have been, what might have been.

For the parents of a deceased child, “What if?” is a ubiquitous question in our lives. And the answer is always in the conditional perfect, never in the future, forever in the past.

Snow

Snow has again covered the Brindabellas. Overnight, a white blanket had fallen on the hills and created a marvellous sight for Sunday morning. It will not stay there long. When snow makes its rare appearance on the smallish hills that surround Canberra, it is never a lengthy stay. It hasn't been a cold winter at all, and before we know it, it will be over. The chill in the wind will soon be the only reminder of the presence of the snow to the south-west.

I vividly remember the few times my parents would drive us outside the city of Valencia to see the snow. It was a rare phenomenon, too. But as a child I was mesmerised by it: there was something magical about so much whiteness. By the road, however, snow would become slushy and dirty; you had to walk away from the car park to see big stretches of the cleanest white stuff. We never had proper snow gear, and invariably would get cold and feel miserable. These days I think I actually dislike the snow: I can’t ski, I don’t see myself trying to learn now, and I much prefer the company of a book by a warm radiator, with a hot cuppa nearby.

This photo is the first time Clea saw the snow. It was September 2008. After the solitary wintry blast of the year – for that’s what it has become, winter: one very cold weekend per year! – we drove to the Brindabellas and parked the car near the Corin Forest Mountain Retreat. There would be another trip to the Selwyn Snowfields for a one-day snow ‘treat’. Quite uneventful, really.

There wasn't much snow on the ground, but it was enough to make a few snowballs and throw them at each other. Clea enjoyed the battles with her brothers and took aim at her parents. Laughing. Giggling. Shrieking with joy. Shocked when a snowball hit her near too close to her face. Feeling the cold in her hands. She looked beautiful, pure, as beautiful and pure as snow. My beautiful babita. I miss you, mi amor.

Treaty yeah!

A great Yolngu man died yesterday. Yunupingu died of kidney disease at 56 years of age, at an age much younger than most Australians have died or will die. Like so many of his indigenous people, he died too young. Australia has lost a great man, a great artist and a great indigenous leader.

Yunupingu was the leader of Yothu Yindi, a fantastic band. In 2009, during one of the school assemblies, my daughter Clea and all the students in her year danced and sang along to one of Yothu Yindi’s greatest hits: Treaty. She played these bimli, the clapping sticks, which she had hand-painted herself. It was a fantastic display of energy, of commitment, of youth who could believe in themselves and in a more just future for all their connationals.

It feels it was only the other day that I was standing there, watching and clapping along, encouraging the very young school kids in their singing and dancing, in their embracing the indigenous culture of the First Australians, in demanding a Treaty for this country.

Maybe one day there will be a treaty. Probably not in the next few years, I'm afraid. I think Clea would have liked to see a treaty for all her people, indigenous and non-indigenous.

She's now buried in this Ngunnawal land, where she was born: she's also part of this land.

Blueback

We like to talk about books at home. Even if we do not actively discourage watching TV, it is our firm belief that a book tells you a lot more than any movie or TV series can. It is all about how you read, actively engaging your imagination and allowing your imagination to be engaged, in ways that are far more rewarding than the passive intake TV usually means.

The other night, the boys were discussing the Lockie Leonard TV series. They were both quite surprised when they were told that Lockie Leonard is actually based on a series of books by an Australian author, Tim Winton (who happens to be one of my favourite Australian novelists, by the way). They both think the Lockie Leonard TV series is quite cool; I explained to them that while the TV episodes are very funny, the books are even more.

That brought to my mind another book by Tim Winton, Blueback. Blueback is a story about a young boy, who meets a giant blue groper while diving near his home on the western coast of Australia. The boy will grow up developing a sense of affection and protection for the fish, and in adulthood he becomes a marine biologist.

I mentioned Clea had once begun reading the book, which she stopped reading because it was way too hard for her level. I also said how sad it is that she was unable to finish it. So sad, so very unfair. Her brothers’ response was one that makes me very proud of them. They are not afraid to express their emotions. They are learning to be real, genuine, and that makes me feel good, despite being sad.

I will one day reread Blueback. And I will be thinking of my daughter, I will be wishing she could read it herself. At 10 years of age, it would certainly be at her reading level now.

Lily and Huff

Perhaps I have imagined this: during the (occasionally unendurably) long hours I spend home alone I have recently walked into Clea’s bedroom; I have sat there and have grabbed some of her books from the bookshelf.

Maybe I have started reading out this story, Lily Ladybird, once more, the way I used to read it out to her when she was a toddler, she sitting on my knees after her bath, smelling clean and fresh and so, so very full of life. Maybe I have read it again translating the story into Spanish, the way I used to read it to her, even though the book is written in English.

It is just possible that I have been unable to finish it, but I remember it well. It tells the story of a good little ladybird who lived in an enchanted garden. One day she lands on an old branch that happens to be the nose of very horrible witch, who gets very cranky with Lily and casts a spell on her. “No longer will you be good and kind and helpful!” says the witch with an ominously wicked, croaky, throaty voice, and then lets out the most horrible laughter a daddy pretending to be a witch can put on.

Lily’s nose gets all twisted and crooked, and she starts behaving really badly. Her poor mum cries. Her friends stay away from her… Where was her father, by the way? He never gets a mention in the story… But Lily makes new friends: a hideous spider, Dolly, and a very slimy toad, Tony. And then one night they steal a magic wand from a fairy, and start mucking around… and suddenly, the spider turns into a carrot, and the toad turns into a bunny! That'll teach them a lesson! So the fairy sees that Lily is actually good-natured but she’s under the malignant spell of the witch, and so she turns her back into her good old self.

Perhaps I have had to put Lily Ladybird down. It is just possible that I could not go beyond the wicked bout of laughter Clea loved to hear. That childhood excitement of being suddenly given a little fright…

Maybe I have then taken in my hands this other very old book, called Huff the Hedgehog. It actually belongs to Clea’s mum. Her name is still handwritten on the cover. A very very old Christmas present.  Huff is a very hungry hedgehog, who goes around looking for food. He repeats his little rhymed self-introduction to every animal he comes across. I remember that when Clea first asked me to read this book, I had of course to come up with a rhymed version in Spanish. I did, and I suspect it was probably nearly as good as the original:

“Soy Huff el puercoespín,

todavía no he cenado,

si no como pronto,

voy a quedarme muy delgado."

Every time Huff finds something edible, a farm animal comes up and tells him that it’s their food Huff is taking. He walks away every time, hungry and disconsolate, knowing that if he does not get his dinner, he'll “get thinner and thinner”. And eventually he meets a lovely blonde girl who gives him a bowl of bread and milk. Huff loves it.

Maybe someone was listening, maybe not. Perhaps tears welled up and then they were falling down my cheeks, and desperation again filled my mind. It is just possible that I had to close the books and put them away.

I think maybe Huff and Lily felt lonely, perhaps even a little sad, when I tried to read their stories.

Beachgoers

We’ve once again headed back to a beach for a long weekend, to the beautiful shores of the Pacific Ocean that killed our daughter, our sister. I have always loved the sea: I grew up by the Mediterranean Sea, which is a much gentler sea than the absurdly called Pacific. Peaceful, it isn't!

Those two days by the beach I was watching Clea’s brothers play in the water, how much they enjoy the beach. The first morning we were at the South Coast town where we stayed, they both were so impatient and excited they ran together across the dunes to check out the surf. They are not afraid of the ocean, even though they are well aware that it was this very ocean that took their sister away from their lives, even though they know that this was the ocean that nearly killed them, that could have killed the whole family that Samoan morning in late September 2009.

It took us a whole year to be near a beach again after the tsunami. I remember someone offered their beach house to us a couple of months later, during the summer, only to nod sympathetically when I declined and replied that going to the beach was not my idea of a relaxing holiday. And of course it wasn't just then.

It was Lalomanu Beach in Samoa that we chose to return to, a year later, as we soon realised that it was essential for these two Aussie kids, Clea’s brothers, not to be scared of the ocean for the rest of their lives. What better place than Lalomanu, then? It was of course a very painful thing to do, yet it was necessary. It was the right thing to do.

Clea’s brothers now enjoy the sea. They are not scared of the waves; they were riding the fairly small waves there were on the beach last weekend. They were riding the same boogie board their sister Clea had been trying to stand on in very calm waters, just a few months before the ocean came over the land and drowned her. Clea just loved going to the beach. Now Clea’s brothers scream in sheer delight every time they catch a wave and come rushing towards the shore. They look up and seek my acknowledgement, my approval, my encouraging eyes.

I give them the thumbs-up, and they go back in for more excitement, for more waves, for bigger ones. Some good we have done.

Last week the rope of the boogie board finally broke and could not be mended. But I wanted to keep the Velcro wrist band that was once around Clea’s tanned wrist. The rope can be replaced, and her boogie board can continue to be ridden by her brothers and even myself for a few more years.

Being in the ocean brings mixed feelings. I am not religious at all. I do not think we have a soul, the way Christian religion describes it. I do not think there is another life after we die. Yet I stare at the ocean and I like to think that in that vastness, in that indomitable expanse of blue water, there is perhaps a tiny drop, perhaps a very small dot of something that once was Clea, and whenever we enter the sea, we are somehow closer to our daughter, to our sister.

It may seem to make little sense, perhaps it is contradictory, but it is meaningful to me.

The Impossible

We have been receiving a few well-meaning warnings about the release of the movie The Impossible. In case you don’t know, it tells the story of a Spanish family who were holidaying in Thailand when the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami struck. They all survived, miraculously. The Spanish director, Bayona, enlisted two extremely famous actors to play the roles of the parents, María and Quique.

The other day I came across a lengthy newspaper article titled ‘Unidas por el tsunami’ (United by the tsunami), and signed by a Toni García. I was curious, so I read it. I can’t help but see it as part of the huge ongoing promotional campaign for the movie; I just cannot consider it any other way.

But for me, the only thing of value in the whole article is María’s words. She chose to sell her story, and that's fine. I suppose she did so because it's a story that ends ‘well’, so to speak. Had she lost any of her three children, I'm certain the movie would have never seen the light of day.

María says she now knows herself strong, “because I know I'm fragile”. I do know what she’s talking about.

She knows her/their survival was a miracle, but says that any religious connotations attached to the word need to be removed, dispelled. In other words, it was impossible for her/them to survive, but somehow, inexplicably, she/they did. I also know what she means, and I completely agree with her. I feel exactly the same way about what my two sons, my wife and myself went through on 29 September 2009.

She acknowledges that she did make an attempt to read a book about the survivors who lost loved ones that fateful day, but she was unable to. I read Pacific Tsunami: Galu Afi, but I doubt I'll ever read it again. María thinks that the proverb “Time heals everything” is just a big lie. And I agree with her. “Time does not heal anything, time is life […] . […] from afar everything becomes more bearable, everything has become more anaesthetised. The rest are clichés”, she tells the reporter.

The journalist, Toni García, writes the following: “[María] rescued one of her sons from the water, despite being badly injured.” Hey, welcome to the real world, Toni García! Any worthy parent, let me tell you, would try to save their child in such circumstances.

Asked whether it is good to talk [about the tsunami], María replied: “It depends on who you talk to. There are very few people who will sit with you and talk about the subject openly. Me, I ask a lot of questions, and if someone’s had an accident I will ask them, patiently. However, at least in my case, people think it is taboo to talk about it, about the wave, the tsunami. When I returned [to Spain], people would look at me with fear, as if saying, ‘Take it easy, I'm not going to ask you anything’.” I know all too well what María is talking about.

I read elsewhere a stupidly cruel review of The Impossible. It more or less said it was a very melodramatic film about a family of tourists who had lost their entire luggage in the Boxing Day tsunami. The point the reviewer wanted to make was that hundreds of thousands of people died, that so many thousands of families lost loved ones, children, siblings, parents, grandparents… so why make a movie about a Western family whose five members survived? Other reviewers have drawn attention to the fact that the movie basically ignores the Thai victims by focusing only on a Western family. I will offer no opinion on that, because I have not seen the movie.

But I have watched the trailer of The Impossible. Online. All I can say is, the tsunami scenes are incredibly realistic. It is very much like that. But I also want to emphasise the 'incredible' aspect of it. Don’t forget it's a movie. Reality is a f**king lot worse.

Luckily for the director, María had a lot of input in the script. I guess we should not be surprised if it were awarded an Oscar for the FX.

But what I really wanted to consider was this: I wonder what we would say to each other, if one day I met María. I have seen her photograph: I have noticed how her eyes look somehow lost, like they're glancing at something that is not there. That look is vaguely familiar.

She still has all her three children. I have only two left.

On the morning of Boxing Day 2004 we were on a beautiful beach in New South Wales, thousands of kilometres away from the death and destruction that was taking place in the Indian Ocean. Clea was almost two years old; she was running on the white sand, running away from the waves that came too close, and she was giggling, giggling, like she always used to do.

I will not watch the movie. But it's nothing to do with the tsunami images, it's nothing to do with fear. The truth is I don't need a movie to remind me.

I guess I just don’t enjoy happy endings that much these days.

Valid art

“The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to someone who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art. Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and … woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. […] It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 592.


Or that the real and the sad and the woeful have been becoming utterly unbearable for most people, to the extent that we appear to prefer fiction to fact, virtual worlds to tangible realities, and the safe remoteness of distance to any kind of uncomfortable closeness.

Happy 10th Birthday, Clea

You are ten years old today, Babita. You know you will always be mi Babita. Siempre. Ten years ago you made me feel the most special, the most fortunate man on the planet.

I wish we could hug you, and make a cake for you, and put 10 candles on the pinkish icing. I wish we could give you the presents you wanted for your tenth birthday, Clea Soledad.

Today I have bought pink roses at the market in Da Lat, Babita. I have bought them for you. I cannot take them with me all the way to Gungahlin, Clea. So I guess I will have to leave them somewhere, perhaps under one of those beautiful bottlebrush trees that grow tall and proud by the lake in Da Lat.

I wish, I wish, I wish. Te quiero, Babita, Siempre.

Papa.

Penyagolosa

Penyagolosa

For many years the idea of my own death and what would happen to my body thereafter did not worry me too much. I had never really contemplated my own death as an event that was near. ‘Dead’ was not a word that I used on a daily basis. All that changed on 29 September 2009, and ‘dead’ is part of the vocabulary that reality has assigned to my life, every day, when I wake up.

And it’s not that I had not witnessed death before. As it happens to most people, my grandfathers went first (I hardly recall my paternal grandfather, he died when I was a small child – I do remember my maternal grandfather fondly, he was a loving man who was always surrounded by children; he worked as a clown for a few years after the Spanish Civil War, during which he lost his only son, Rafael, just a few months old, to disease and malnutrition).

A few years later, and over an ever-worsening process that took several months, I saw my paternal grandmother die a slow, terrible death because of diabetes and poor blood circulation. My other grandmother died suddenly in late 1995.

My own father died when I was 25. He died of a heart attack on a hot August morning, and the ambulance that was sent did not have the equipment that might have saved his life. But I only found out ten days later. I was abroad and no one was able to locate me. Yes, I was young and stupid. Haven’t we all been young and stupid at some point in our lives?

As per his wishes, my father was cremated. My mother suggested that I might want to bury his ashes. I agreed, of course. I buried them under the Norfolk pine tree we had always mistaken for a fir-tree; the Norfolk pine tree now towers majestically above my mother’s house. After digging a hole and pouring the ashes in there, I put a rock on top.

I had always held on to a somehow idyllic plan for my own funeral. I had always thought I would die before anyone else in my family. I would be survived by my wife and three children. My wishes were (still are) that my body would be cremated.

My (somewhat romantic) dream was that, eventually, my daughter Clea would make the trip to Spain and fulfil my wishes by climbing Penyagolosa Mountain [the picture above was taken in summer 1992] and scatter my ashes, that what once was me out to the wind, not necessarily from the top, but at least from a good vantage point, somewhere with breathtaking vistas. Just somewhere beautiful in a place that once meant a lot to me.

I do not want my ashes to go to Valencia now. The bond that once joined me to those lands is very fragile, to the extent that apart from family and very few friends, I have no business there any more. But even if my sons offered to carry out the task when the time comes (and it will), I would say no. No, I would rather have my ashes scattered in the land of the Ngunnawal, on the petal-coated lawn beneath which my Clea is buried.

Still, I do hope that my boys will travel to Spain, and that they have a great time, or even move there for good if they wish to do that when they are older. They’ll be able to do that if they wish. They could even climb Penyagolosa, and admire the views. It’ll be their choice. But there will be no need for them to take my ashes over there, to a place with whose people I no longer feel a truly meaningful attachment. Another part of me died over the months and years after 29 September 2009, and it cannot be resuscitated.

Call that a radical shift? Yes. Is it justified? You betcha!