Nothing to say

About four or five months after Clea died (sometime in early 2010, it was probably mid-February) I got home one afternoon and found a message on the answering machine. It was partly an offer of employment, partly a request for assistance. The message had been left by someone who I used to work with. Someone who had known Clea, had held Clea as a baby in his arms, had talked to her and praised her. This same person had not been brave enough to call or write to offer his condolences, yet barely five months later he was choosing to call at times when he knew I would not be home.

I did not return the call. The caller insisted a couple more times, leaving messages about this stupid job but not once saying anything about our loss, our trauma, our grief. I never returned the call.

On the one hand, I was not interested in the job I was being offered: I had a permanent full-time position in those days, so there was no way I would have quit in order to take a few hours of tuition as a casual. On the other hand, it felt absurd to return a call from someone who seemed incapable of acknowledging my daughter's death. I know for certain this person knew what had happened to us in Lalomanu on 29 September 2009.

Fast forward three years. Yesterday I saw this person again. He was at the school Clea used to go to, the school where her brothers are receiving an education. This person must have walked past the little plaque by the bottlebrush bush that the school planted in memory of Clea.

One of the things I have learned from having had a very close brush with death is this: I do not need to pretend I like people. I do not need to feign interest in persons I have no interest in. I can speak my mind: I can voice my feelings and can express what I think. I have nothing to lose.

I did not speak to this person. I did not want to. I don't have anything to say to him anymore.

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.

Unfinished Business

The screen grab I have reproduced above shows Clea’s scoresheet for game tasks completed on her Lunnis CD-ROM. The disk was a present she was given by her tía Mayca, and from the very beginning she found it very enjoyable and wanted to play over and over again. The games on the disk have been designed to teach the player all sorts of skills in Spanish, and are divided into three stages, for different ages: under 4, over 4 and over 6 years of age. Clea had completed almost all the tasks; only a few remained as never attempted or successfully completed. Clea was not given the time to complete the scoresheet.

Grief feels like unfinished business, too. Just like the tasks Clea was not given time to complete, the loss of your child is like a wound that will never heal completely. When someone does have the guts to ask, I always tell them that the blow has softened after two and half years, but the pain the blow caused remains exactly the same as on 29 September 2009. It is unfinished business. On the one hand, you are painfully aware that you cannot turn back the clock. On the other, as much as you would want to turn forward the clock, it will never be the same. Some sort of limbo, a timeless swoon. Trapped forever in a time and state you do not wish to be in, unable to get out of the dark, exit-less tunnel your life has become: you cannot go back, you cannot go forward.

I guess this is a very widespread misconception amongst people who have not experienced the loss of a child, a traumatic, irreparable loss, that the bereft parent eventually will get over it, or even ‘has to get over it’.

I recall a telephone conversation around Christmas 2010, a little over a year after Clea’s death in the Samoan tsunami. In this particular, very brief conversation, the person who then wished to talk to me (it escapes my comprehension that some people decided it was OK to call me while I was visiting Spain but would not do so before: it’s not like telephone calls across the world are that prohibitive, are they?) asked me how I was. I hardly replied, I think I said "How do you think I am?", and this person (a relative) said to me: “You have to get over this”.

I think my silence was the most eloquent response I’ll ever make. You just do not get over the loss of your child. Ever.

On later reflection, however, what I find most revealing (or is it disturbing?) is the way the caller resorted to a rather vague word such as “this”. It is such an unclear, equivocal term! What exactly is (or was) “this”? It brings to my mind the title of Francisco Goldman’s book about his deceased wife Aura, Say Her Name. That’s what I feel like yelling to people who tiptoe about the subject. SAY HER NAME! HER NAME WAS CLEA! CLEA DIED IN THE TSUNAMI!

For someone who has lost a child, “this” is deeply offensive, because it aims to create a distance between the person speaking and the deceased. Our child had a name; our child had a life; mentioning our child’s name does not hurt us: it is our child’s death that has hurt us beyond repair. Underhanded approaches conceal cowardice; there is no respect in deliberately avoiding saying the deceased’s name.

She was my first child. Her name was Clea Soledad Salavert Wykes. She was six years and almost nine months of age when a tsunami struck the beach of Lalomanu and drowned her. Her family were all very close to perishing. She could not complete all the tasks on her Lunnis CD; she was unable to obtain the antidote to save the inhabitants of Luna Lunera.

Alfie

His name was Alfie, and he was just two years old. He had come to the Taufua Beach Resort in Lalomanu with his parents, both migrants from England and residents in New Zealand at the time. The night of 28 September 2009 at the Taufua Beach Resort restaurant, Alfie wanted to sit near other children; he asked to be sat next to our three children. Now I remember looking at him briefly and smiling at him sympathetically when it was not possible to make room at our end of the table. Everyone at the table was having a good time: communal eating is a Samoan cultural trait, and we were all either enjoying the local beer or other beverages. It is still difficult to comprehend that twelve hours later the whole place would be wiped off and thirteen members of the Taufua family would perish in that very place.

Alfie was his parents’ only child, their most cherished, their life. Alfie was taken away by the water the next morning. Unlike Clea, Alfie was never found. We have returned a few times to Lalomanu since: in October 2010 we went back twice to open the Clea Salavert Library at Lalomanu Primary School, and we took the boys back to a beach for the first time since 29 September 2009. In November 2011 we went back again a few times, to hand over the management of the Library to the Samoan Government, to check the Library out and to attend the Prize-giving Day at the School.

Even though I am now unable to remember his face, what he looked like, I often think of little Alfie. And I also think about his parents, who, on top of being completely destroyed with the loss of their only child, were left with no body to bury. With nothing at all. I often wonder how they are faring in this parallel, interminable journey of pain of theirs. For a while, Trudie kept in touch with Alfie’s mum. We know they went back to the UK and were living in Spain for a few months. Details were sketchy, scarce. Communication then ceased.

In October 2010 the four of us took the walk we could not finish a year before. We retraced our steps past the fales that were slowly being rebuilt on Lalomanu beach. A reunion then occurred: the man who helped me get my son out of the water recognised us. He then led us to the spot where Clea was found, by a huge tree trunk that eventually died because of the saltwater. Faleaga and his wife Masela recognised us from that morning. Faleaga grabbed his machete and cleared the way towards the place where the tsunami had dragged Clea.

It was hard to believe that so much vegetation had grown in just twelve months. The whole area between the seashore and the hillside had been inundated by seawater; needless to say, it eventually killed almost every plant on it. Samoans have their own words for a tsunami, Galu afi: the wave of fire.

That day we learned that their own little baby, Frazer, aged 2 months, had also been found dead right there, very close to where Clea was found on 30 September. He was ripped off his mum’s arms by the water. Faleaga and Masela had another daughter, Meri, whom he was able to take up the hillside seconds before the tsunami hit. It makes me glad to know Meri has a doll she can play with. We bought it for her in Apia, as an early Christmas present.

I sometimes wonder what sort of response Alfie’s parents got from the people who should have been there to support them. I wonder if, after the initial condolences and the worn phrases, they found themselves suddenly facing some unwritten cowardly code of silence, too.

I wish to say that Alfie deserves to be remembered, even by those who never met him, who never heard his voice or saw his smile. I feel I was fortunate to meet him, and I will never forget he had a life. Too short a life. I will never forget Alfie. I will never forget Frazer. Why would I forget. How could I forget.

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.

Being a Teacher

Soon after we returned from Samoa in October 2009, I notified the educational institution where I was teaching Spanish that I would no longer be able to teach. At the time I only had one Advanced Spanish Conversation class, people whose company I truly enjoyed for two hours a week and whose enthusiasm for the language spurred the teacher in me more than anything else.

Most of them had been my students for a few years, but I thought I’d be doing them a great disservice if I tried to engage normally with the class, only to break down in front of them, say, twenty minutes into the lesson. I was of course suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but was not totally aware of its symptoms and consequences.

When I migrated to Australia in 1996 I had to reinvent myself professionally. I had been a teacher of English in Spain for over ten years. I applied for a couple of jobs as an ESL teacher in Sydney, but was told (over the phone) that I “had an accent” (and who doesn’t?). I think that says a hell of a lot about Australia and the attitude we – please note the plural – have towards migrant workers. But that’s another story.

So I began teaching Spanish, one of my two mother tongues. My first job was two hours in Hunters Hill on Wednesday evenings, about an hour away from our flat in Coogee. Eventually more hours began filling my evenings elsewhere.

Since then I held many positions teaching Spanish, at many different places in Sydney and Canberra. Some were more enjoyable than others, but I can certainly affirm that one-to-one tuition is by far the mode where the teacher has to become the most involved, and give the most of their selves. Nothing, however, equals the pleasure and the joy of teaching a (foreign) language to your own children.

Clea had been my best and my favourite learner of Spanish from the day she was born. She loved the tongue twisters and how I would play on words all the time. Because we had been to Spain for a month when she was two, she had been able to pick up the language very quickly while we were there. She was able to read well in both languages, Spanish and English. On the night of September 28^th 2009, as we had done almost every day for many years, we all read a book in Spanish, a fairytale book, in the fale where we slept that night, under the stars, so very close to the Pacific Ocean, its peaceful lullaby of wavelets caressing the seashore.

The books were forever lost the next day, of course. They were gone with Clea's life, with so many other lives which were wiped away in an instant, along with so many of our dreams, along with the simple possibility of having a normal life.

Now I do not wish to teach the language to anyone other than Clea’s twin brothers. I feel particularly incapable of engaging in the kind of very close relationship implicit in teaching a language to a stranger. I sense there is too much exposure, and I do not necessarily want to open up.

Experience has shown me that not everybody has the guts to acknowledge you, your loss, your pain and your intolerable suffering. You may have been spending with someone three hours on a daily basis for nine months: you have been trying hard to support them; you have been encouraging them; you have done your best to try and instil some strength and self-confidence into them. Yet a few months later you may suddenly become invisible to them, you may cease to exist in their minds.

You have done nothing wrong, really. It’s just because you have lost your daughter, a six-year-old, in a tsunami.

An Amazing Voice, an Amazing Woman

A few days ago I was again wonderfully surprised by someone whose musical skills and talents are only matched by her profound sense of understanding and her big-hearted display of friendship.

More than a year ago, months after I had written and printed Lalomanu, I learned that musician and composer Faye Bendrups had put music to one of my poems, ‘Roto’ [‘Broken’]. Faye transformed my poem into a beautiful milonga, a type of Argentinean melody that preceded the internationally better-known tango.

‘Roto’ was first performed at University House, in Canberra, in 2011. There is a video on Youtube that I recorded (here) and, despite its poor quality, you can get an idea of Faye’s amazing voice and musical flair in TangoMundo’s extraordinarily beautiful rendition of the poem. Even today I cannot comprehend how Faye was able to give such beautiful music to my words.

While in a recent visit to Melbourne, Faye surprised us again by giving the most beautiful gift a friend artist can give: she has put music to another one of my poems in Lalomanu, ‘Epilogue’. ‘Epilogue’ is the final poem in the book. I could never thank Faye enough for the gift she has created and shared.

Given the muted response Lalomanu received from some quarters, I am not only immensely moved but also forever grateful for this amazing woman’s respectful, artistic homage to my poems. I still believe the Lalomanu poems are simply words of immense sorrow, of unspeakable terror, of indescribable pain.

Let the world know that I feel privileged beyond measure. Thank you so very much, Faye.

Communicating

This happened quite a few years ago, maybe six or seven years; it was after we moved out of Sydney. I was engaged in a conversation with a friend, discussing the issue of keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances as months and years go by. Suddenly this friend of mine said to me something like, “You know, the problem is that you don’t communicate”.

At the time I found the charge quite bizarre, let alone absolutely untrue and inaccurate, since my whole professional life of over twenty-five years has been based around communicating. I have been a teacher of languages for nearly thirty tears; I have translated between languages and interpreted for people who did not share a language, both in professional and familial settings. Words have always been part of my daily work; the act of communication – either my own thoughts and ideas, or those of others across languages – was, is, and will continue to be bread-and-butter for me - presumably for a long time.

Following my daughter’s death in the 29 September 2009 tsunami in Samoa, not to mention the extremely traumatic experience of surviving such a catastrophic event, I wrote Lalomanu. The book – at least that’s the way I see it now – was my initial form of grieving. Lalomanu was also a very painful effort to convey things impossible to express, that is to say, it was a sorrowful attempt to communicate the experience I (or rather, my whole family) had gone through.

The book was written mostly in the very early mornings of January, February and March 2010. Some mornings I would write of the recurring nightmare of the water swallowing my son J. and me, our seemingly endless spinning and my struggles to ensure we could come up for air. I wrote about the unspeakable terror; about the aftermath, the horror; I wrote about coming back home without our daughter and sister. I also wrote about what Clea’s short life means to me, about all the things she deserved to have lived but was deprived of enjoying.

Someone said to me the book is ‘beautiful and terrible’.

It was the book I needed to write. They were the feelings and thoughts I needed to communicate. The book’s design and layout was very kindly made by a friend, María, for free. She sent the Indesign files to the Canberra printers, and 300 copies were made. With my poems, I was trying to tell the reader what happened on 29 September 2009, what happened afterwards. I did communicate SO VERY MUCH.

I personally mailed numerous copies. Many were posted overseas; I even spent a whole autumnal day driving around Canberra and leaving a copy in my students’ mailboxes. It can hardly be said that I did not make a huge effort to communicate.

Some people did respond, in one way or another; others never did. Some never bothered to acknowledge the book, ie, to acknowledge the unbearable pain of a human being they knew. Highly educated people on the other side of the world kept silent or chose not to search for words, as I explained here.

Whatever communicating means, I think it is not about forwarding a PowerPoint presentation or the link to a video or an article. Never before has ICT (Information and Communications Technology) used so often to actually avoid communication. Instead, it seems to be (ab)used to pass on trivial stuff, or to appear to be “staying in touch”. So powerfully useless.

But then again, I might be wrong. And does it really matter?

My Own Family Sticker

You see them every-bloody-where, but they’re most prominent on the rear windscreens of people-movers and 4WDs. They depict happy families: dad, mum, eldest child, second child, sometimes third and even fourth child, dog, cat, goldfish: the works. All smiling faces.

I did a bit of a search on the web, but was unable (not totally unexpected) to find the sticker that describes my family. They don’t seem to have drawings for a very sad father or a grieving mum, not to mention the drawing of a plaque in the cemetery where the eldest daughter is buried. That does not sell too well, I suppose. So I guess we’re not within their targeted market segment, and somehow that feels kind of a relief. Honestly, it is such a banal concept, but of course everybody seems to fall for it.

If I were to make an accurate drawing of our family, I’d go for something this: try and picture a taciturn, sad dad who is regularly woken up too early and sits down to write in an effort to stop himself from crying his heart out; a desolate mum who chooses to punish herself at the gym so she does not have to think too hard; two boys who love each other but fight each other all the time because the gentle judge who would sort out things between them two is no longer there; these twin boys look indeed quite happy and healthy. Anyone who has seen them in action will say so, but I bet inside their minds they would rather be forgetting what happened to them and their sister; I bet they both see the future (the rest of their lives) in a totally different way to that their two parents see the rest of their lifetimes. One can foresee some serious conflicts down the path of years to come.

I’m quite certain such a figurative drawing is almost impossible for anyone to imagine. Too dreadful. Not nice. But what is probably worse, for some the reality such an imaginary drawing would represent appears to be almost unbearable to look at or to come anywhere near to.