Mum explained death to me early, using stories from the Bible and the metaphor of the cocoon and the butterfly. She said that Rowena was actually meant for greater things, which was hard to understand, but I would have to trust her. She said all of us were meant for greater things: that this life was like a cocoon, and it was in the next life that we would come into the fullness of our possibility. I took all of this in, thought about it as I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, as I flipped through pages showing the cakes and gherkins and plums the caterpillar ate as he prepared for his transition, his transformation.
During the two years Rowie lived in the children’s hospital, food became increasingly important to me, as did the routines and rituals of meals. This was one of the many frameworks around which my parents built stability in to our ruptured family life. Beyond religion, beyond faith, there was no reassurance available, not for my parents, not for Rowena, not for me, but food, and the dependable tastes and routines did help me to feel safer. It gave me something to anchor to.
There was fish and hot chips on Friday night, lemonade and crispy chips on Saturday night, which was ‘movie night’, and on Sunday roast lamb with peas and potatoes after mass (another of the dependable routines). Dad was a bit of a whiz in the kitchen. In addition to roasts, he also cooked meatloaf, a mean chopsuey and mile-high scones. Sometimes, he made his own pizza bases, and topped them with jam. Heaven on a plate.
Then, there was the hospital food: the softness of the jelly and custard and stewed apples Rowena ate, or didn’t eat, depending on how she was feeling. There was the hospital cafeteria: the chocolate bars, the crunch of salt and vinegar Samboy chips; the sting on my tongue. Like Proust and his madeleine, the taste of these foods, even today, is like a portal back to Rowena; to a time and a place and a person who is no longer here.
Rowena rarely finished her food. I remember this one time, eyeing off her custard pudding in the plastic packet with the plastic spork on top. I stuck my finger into the custard, did it a few times, until Mum finally noticed and asked Rowie if she would mind me finishing it off for her. Sometimes Rowie spoke so quietly that you’d have to put your ear up close to her mouth to hear what she was saying. Mostly, she said, ‘No, I don’t mind,’ but this time she said, ‘Yes, I do mind.’ I was terribly put out. How selfish, I thought. How mean. Why does she get all the good stuff? I didn’t say it aloud, but I thought it, and I stomped around her bed a bit in a huff, sticking out my bottom lip. I remember wishing then that I could break a leg or an arm, so I too would get to spend the night in hospital, as though a night in hospital were some special treat, some special event, a thing a child might wish for.
My sister had to sleep on her own in the hospital every night. As an adult, when I say that, it gives me a terrible feeling in my throat, but those were the rules back then. To keep her company, we made cassette tapes that the nurses would play for her. As I did for the relatives in Holland, I would talk and sing into the tape for forty-five minutes, until it went ‘pop’, then turn it over to the other side and keep going. Later, when the tapes came home, I listened to them over and over. I sang the songs again, and changed them. This is how I came to think of myself as a songwriter; this is how it became a fact for me.
My sister was upset at me sometimes. Annoyed with me. Fair enough too. She was in hospital when we moved house in 1979. I was four and she was six and I realise now that of course she wanted to come home, and I got to go home every night, and I must have been a reminder to her, in a way, of the life she was not able to live. Some part of me knew that just by being there, I ran the risk of hurting her, of rubbing it in—how well I was; how I could do things that she couldn’t do. I tried so often to settle down, tone it down, not rub it in. But there was also a competing impulse at play: one that said perhaps there was something I could do that would make it all right, that would inspire her to sit up on her own. That if I just kept trying, I would work it all out, and she would be okay. We would be okay.
My parents fantasised about hiring a full-time nurse and bringing Rowie home to live with us, but the hospital said this would not be possible—it just wasn’t done back then, my parents were told. And, yet, who could blame them for hoping?
When I think back to this time as an adult, I still cry with gratitude for how kind, and how good, people were to our little family, and to our darling one, Rowena. For the two years Rowena was ill, our community carried us. Friends, neighbours, mothers from school, people from the parish, and strangers too. They dropped around with meals, they babysat, they held us up, they remembered us in their prayers. And a few
