One Saturday morning in September, two years after Rowena had first moved into the hospital, there was an accident with her life-support machine, Rowena suffered a heart attack, and had what is perhaps best explained as a near-death experience. The nurses brought her back to life, thumping her chest ‘in a special way’; that was how it was explained to me, by whom I can’t remember. Dad, probably. But here is the remarkable part: before her ‘little death’, as my parents called it, she had been afraid to die; afterwards, she was not. Now, everything had changed. She said she had seen something beautiful that made perfect sense, a place she found impossible to explain, and that now she wanted to go back there.
‘Go back where?’ I asked.
‘Heaven,’ said Mum and Dad.
She was seven years old, and she said she wanted to go.
My parents must have cried, but I didn’t see any of that. After almost two years of living on a respirator, Rowena was losing her voice. It took a great deal of energy for her to speak now. She chose her words carefully, spoke them quickly, so they’d fit in the short gaps left between her noisy machine and its next breath. Even still, it was sometimes difficult to understand what she was saying. I remember being right up near her face, putting my ear to her mouth. Mum did the same. Mum says that over the following days, she asked Rowie a couple of times about what she had seen, but Rowie must have grown tired of the questions because the final time she asked, Rowie answered quite firmly, in between the pumping of the respirator, saying, ‘Mum, stop asking me questions. It’s too beautiful to talk about.’ Then she paused in between breaths and said, ‘But I want to go there.’ And that was that. Mum never asked about it again.
I remember one October afternoon, when I was five, Mum took me to the train station. It was sunny that day, but cold, and unusual, because instead of visiting Rowie in the morning as we normally would, Mum and I had been to the Moorabbin Arts Centre with my kinder class to see a live orchestral production of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. In the theatre, after we found our red velvet seats right in the middle, near the front, the whole world went dark, and a man with a friendly voice appeared on stage to explain that each character in the story would be represented by a different instrument from the orchestra. The cat was the clarinet. The flute was the bird. The oboe was the duck. The horn section was the wolf. Peter would be played by the string section of the orchestra, which was where it all began: with Peter in the big green meadow.
As the piece progressed, and I heard the sound of the wolf approaching, I grew scared and hid my head. It was the sound of the hunter’s rifles—played by kettle drums, I think—that struck the terrible fear into my heart and I began to cry. I said I wanted to leave, so we did.
I don’t know how we got from the theatre to Sandringham station. We were on public transport that day. Perhaps we caught a bus, or a taxi. What I remember is standing there on the platform, always a little further back from the safety line than everyone else. Mum didn’t like taking chances with her precious baby (that’s what she called me). She squatted down and held both my hands and my waist. The train sounded violent as it rattled in closer, and the suddenness of its toot made her jump a little. She saw me watching her and tried to make a joke out of her reaction by jumping again, higher this time, an exaggeration of the first, and making a funny sound of pretend fright.
She was so clever, my mother. She worked so hard to protect us, to maintain the innocence of our childhood, but it was impossible. Although she used games to mask her shattered nerves, and warded off my fear with farce and absurdity, it was still impossible. We all knew. But nobody ever lost hope, I don’t think. I remember that she was always pointing out evidence of what she called the living presence of a loving God: the butterfly, the sand dune, the lavender. She did what mothers have always done since the beginning of time—she did her very best. And, still, things inside me often felt terrible.
Many times in my life, people have asked me about my mother and father during this time, and how they did it. ‘I don’t know how they survived,’ they say.
No one has ever asked me how I did it, how I ‘survived’—it’s just not something people seem to ask children. Maybe we should. Maybe if someone had asked me how I ‘survived’, I would have twigged that the reason I felt that way was not because I’d done something bad and wrong. Rather it was because
