After Read online

  Serenity’s guard is gone.

  7

  A modern story for modern times.

  Elayn Gemmell euthanised herself. I have difficulty saying the words: ‘committed suicide’. Because that bald and emotionally fraught word – suicide – is not often thrown around among all the talk of dying with dignity, which implies rationality, forethought, calm. Yet euthanised doesn’t feel right either. It has, too much, the whiff of the science lab to it, the face mask and nurse-administered needle. Suicide implies the unhinged and irrational, the fatally weakened; euthanasia, the clinical assistance of someone else. Euthanasia is neither spontaneous nor sudden. The perpetrator has agency.

  Neither word feels rigidly correct.

  *

  Paul and I, suddenly at the coalface of this Dying with Dignity world. We didn’t choose to be. We don’t know much about it. Here we go mother on the shipless ocean, here we go.

  *

  Fact: Elayn Gemmell euthanised herself, by herself, in an armchair in front of a blaring television. Just as summer was blazing into the year. Just as her family were straightening their backs after winter’s clench and holding their faces to a soaring sky. Yet all of us were unaware of how deeply, fatally despairing this woman in our midst felt during this lovely, lighten-ing time. All of us were unaware of the tightness of the noose around her life.

  *

  I was the last of Elayn’s three children to see her, four days before her death. One of her sons had not seen her for several weeks, one for months. What exactly to call what happened here, with Elayn’s vanishing from her children’s lives?

  Slipped away. Decided. Actioned. Slept into death. Assisted with suicide. Voluntarily assisted dying. Dying with dignity.

  Elayn went underground. She did it her way, as she had done with so many things in her life. This death, above all, was so very her.

  *

  The builders found Elayn. They had been taking their time renovating her bathroom. Had left her without it for weeks. Telling her they had another job to go to then another and they’d be back soon, no worries; again and again. They’d left an elderly woman without a bathroom, shower or bath. A proud and beautiful female – always exquisitely dressed – was making do with just the laundry sink and a tiny spare toilet. She was sponging herself among the washing powders and fabric softeners between visiting my house to shower every few days.

  The exhaustion of it. The shredding of her dignity. The annoyance at having to carry a showering kit whenever she visited. Elayn had entered a new world of invisibility, of the little old lady whose wants could be brushed off. She had specialised throughout her life in image control but now, for the first time, she could not. The builders could never give her an end date to their renovations, they kept springing on her a fresh flit. The stress of uncertainty, and she hated it as much as myself. In some respects we were so alike.

  *

  ‘If I knew what this renovation entailed I never would have started it,’ Elayn sighed the last night I saw her. She was stranded in fret. But she didn’t complain much because that was the way of her generation. Stoic, accepting, recognising the pressures of modern life; while others, younger, complained more. So the builders went to those more voluble clients. The squeaky wheel gets the most attention, we all know that. Elayn was the little old lady who was easy to brush off, who wouldn’t give them too much grief. Until she did.

  *

  A Friday morning. Elayn didn’t answer the door. The foreman and his men let themselves in with their spare key. The bathroom was a shell of freshly concreted walls. Boxes of heavy tiles were stacked on the carpet outside it. And there was Elayn. With a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream and an empty pill jar beside her. At first the builders assumed she was sleeping.

  The Baileys, ah the Baileys. A nod to seventies cocktail loucheness because Mum didn’t drink except for the occasional celebratory glass. A final indulgence; plunging her back to an era where she felt smart and sophisticated and empowered and in control, her world on fire. The years of her Great Acceleration. Those soft-focused Baileys ads from long ago would slide into our suburban world with their golden promise of other, better places and smoother lives.

  *

  Elayn’s television was still on, the tableau carefully planned. Who would see it, who would not. So very her. She was like a horse kicking out strong with this final scenario. Her last, protesting, gesture. Fuck you, builders, fuck you. So, just a little old lady, huh? To be shunted to the side of your work, put off, given the flick, abandoned. Right.

  *

  Elayn had been in chronic pain. She had had a foot operation eleven months earlier to eradicate a heel spur among other things. She’d been plagued by foot problems in her later years and blamed a gruelling regime of ballet practice as a child and years of unsuitable footwear as an adult. Stilettos, wedges, corks, clogs, platforms, pumps, you name it, her shoe choice had charted the history of fashion at its most audacious. She revelled in the lift – physically and emotionally – they gave her. Until she could wear them no longer, for they had crippled her. In her later years Elayn was retreating into a shell of pain. In her final weeks she was curved like a comma around a walking stick. Agony was hardening around her. Changing her. Consuming her.

  *

  My mother had booked herself in for the foot operation at one of Australia’s most prestigious hospitals. If only I could travel back in time, before the surgery, and talk to Elayn, ask her, ‘Why are you doing this? Are you sure it’s the best option? Is this really necessary at your age?’ There’s anger, now, at a medical system that allows elderly people to undergo such surgery – at enormous personal cost. Physically, mentally, financially.

  *

  When I visited Elayn in hospital, after her operation, the foot looked wrong. The toe next to the big one had been shortened. How was that meant to work? Surely it would affect her entire gait? For an older woman, was a dramatic toe-shortening really necessary? There was a pin with a plastic pearl ball on its end, stuck through the length of the appendage. Elayn was excited about how pretty it looked; her glamorous new adornment. I now know she was off her face with new painkillers that had entered her life; giggly with happiness, energised. She took a photo of the pretty pin. Posted it proudly on Facebook. ‘My foot with jewel on the toe!’

  *

  Everything about my mother’s foot looked painful. Out of whack. But what did I know? I was as ignorant as my mother. She was happy; I was happy. I didn’t talk to the surgeon and should have. He was nowhere to be seen post-op.

  ‘He was so arrogant,’ Elayn told me, months later, when I begged her to go back for corrective surgery. ‘I couldn’t bear to have anything to do with him again.’ Her call. The way of her generation. Accepting, stoic. The medical profession perhaps relies on it; that aversion to making a fuss. Perhaps we all do to some extent.

  *

  Elayn wrote me an email describing her pain:

  I’m in a desperate situation because every step I take is like scissors digging into my groin, back and right leg, causing excruciating pain and making me almost immobile.

  *

  The surgery had broken her. A fortnight before her death she’d been weeping over the phone to me, sobbing with the abandon of a child, telling me that she dreaded going into care and losing control of her life, dreaded becoming a burden. It had left Elayn with a spine thrown out of kilter, twisted around a walking stick like a withered crone from a fairy tale. And Elayn had never been that, never, truly ‘old,’ nor impaired. My mother was utterly, emotionally, naked. Stripped to her bare self by pain. Her voice was conveying that there was no way out, no clear path from this mess. I had never witnessed such vulnerability in her. The sobbing like a little girl, the fear. The mother had become the child. I wish the surgeon had known of it. How he had reduced her. I was furious. And helpless.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ I tried to soothe, believing that there must be some upward trajectory out of this pain, into the light
, Mum just had to wait. I was ignorant back then of what pain does; that it sometimes cannot be managed. Because with chronic pain there is often no sure path to recovery, no map away from it. And pain’s diminishing is often only a temporary fix. I didn’t bother to find out any of this when my mother was alive. Elayn knew. In hindsight, I was shamefully naïve.

  *

  The surgery left my mother with a pretty pin good enough for Facebook plus an opioid addiction. She had a flirtation with painkillers – specifically the drug OxyContin – immediately after the operation, which rapidly became a reliance which developed into something else. After several months the drugs began to lose their potency and then the overwhelming, debilitating pain nestled back into my mother’s world as her constant companion who she could never shake off. And so like a junkie desperate for her next fix, my upstanding, product-of-the-1950s mother launched herself into the murky world of doctor shopping. She was seeing GP after GP for this and that and on top of it having cortisone injections and scans every other week to find the source of the pain now piercing her body in several points: foot, thigh, hip, lower back.

  She was hoarding pills. In hindsight, that felt far too easy; that she could do this. But she had been broken by the foot operation. Was facing a future of uncertainty, dependence and fear. During a scan the week before her death my mother was advised that she really shouldn’t be using her car anymore, the pain in her right leg was too deadening and debilitating. Elayn had to face the fact that her driving days were over. That zippy black car languishing unused in its garage was the final blow. Driving had always been a gift of independence.

  *

  The pain was also sapping Elayn’s looks. For the first time in her life she was going unnoticed, morphing into just another little old lady people brushed past in the harried whirl of life. My mother had never been invisible. The realisation was sapping her strength. In her final months she tried to break free from the wily, triumphant pain holding her strength hostage, but she could not. There was no ‘fix’. She could no longer present a beautiful face to the world. The sheer exhausting effort to quell the agony was brittling and breaking her. Her signature lipstick was not often worn in her final weeks. A bleak truth: medical intervention harmed my mother and eventually tunnelled her into death.

  *

  Euthanasia, from the Greek, means Good Death.

  Was it?

  In Ancient Greece suicide didn’t have the stigma it does now. It wasn’t considered an action of the depressed or mentally ill. Athenian magistrates kept a supply of poison for anyone feeling the need to kill themselves. It was a matter-of-fact response to debilitating illness or pain or incapacity. Official permission was all that was needed. Hemlock was preferred, usually in liquid form. The creeping of the cold, as the limbs become leaden. The awareness, the horror, the inability to turn back. Is that a good death?

  *

  God-botherers changed everything. They declared that suicide was not a rational choice but an attack on the hegemony of their God, an unforgiveable insult to Him. The only will that should decide a person’s death was God’s. Those who took their own life were to be punished particularly severely, in hell, the shame so great that their families would also be penalised. Monetarily, and by social disgrace. Remnants of that attitude linger. I can feel the whispers even now, greedy at the door. The shame, the shame of it. The familial failing.

  *

  Elayn spoke occasionally about her Dying with Dignity forums and importing euthanasia drugs from Mexico; the necessity of choice; celebrities who support empowering death decisions and the importance of Do Not Resuscitate directives. She carried a business card spelling out a DNR wish in her wallet. I didn’t listen enough. To any of it. She made it all sound cultish, faddish. I would get emotional, cry, ‘But don’t you want to see your grandchildren growing up?’ I would cover my ears like a child, shake my head. Because it felt impossible that such an accomplished seizer of life could want anything but life. And so I condemned my mother to an infinitely desolate, infinitely lonely death.

  *

  My mother had an abhorrence of many things: not being given a choice to end her life exactly how she wanted to; loss of voice; the thought of a nursing home, which would mean an inability to access pills which would give her agency over her death. And this the woman who had championed independence, and control, her entire adult life.

  Elayn was a proud woman who couldn’t choose the quality of her life, but she could choose the quality of her death. Ahead, as she saw it, was a bleak certainty, involving several decades of semi-life in a Home of the Forgotten, Removed and Left Behind. As an elderly woman told me afterwards, scratch most women in their seventies and you’ll find a fear of that world, and a desire to kill yourself at a time that you choose if your quality of life deteriorates that much. To have control over your own fate.

  All, so very, Elayn.

  8

  My mother’s despair seeped into my life; it was the harrower of my peace. This at a time when I was struggling to keep everything on an even keel: four children aged four to fifteen, plus work, plus husband, plus household. It was a fraught time of failing at everything; of nothing having my full attention; of boxes-to-be-ticked completed in harried snatches and then every night around 3 a.m. I’d be harangued awake from a fitful sleep with the swamping of it all, too much in the head, too much. At 3 a.m., bang. Big eye. A term used by Australian Antarctic expeditioners, explaining the time when you cannot sleep because of the endless, blinding, hurting light. Big eye, yes, that was it. Harassed awake every night by the endless, blinding light of anxiety, churn, distress.

  Elayn’s pain felt ragingly unfair. So triumphantly immune to intervention. How could that be in our rampantly medicated modern lives? Exhaustion was consuming us both. I was finding it difficult to drive, thrive, complete tasks; cook at 6 p.m. then help with homework and bath time; bugger it, the kids could go dirty, have cereal for dinner some nights. I was falling asleep at two o’clock before the school pickup because I had to, couldn’t train my body out of it, and because my nights were tormented by big eye too much.

  *

  The woman’s lot. My generation’s lot. Both ends, yep. Looking after the kids as well as the parents, holding down the job, sorting out the husband and house and feeling like you’re not doing anything adequately. Drowning in busyness. And after every summer holiday as the kids are heading back to school there’s the sickening feeling that this new year is starting on the back foot once again, that you’ll never quite catch up. That ahead are endless mornings of an alarm shrilling you awake, which is the signal to jump on the mouse wheel all over again. Your life is your children’s. As is the money earnt and holidays and visits to the bathroom, secret stashes of chocolate and good night’s sleeps. A moment for a sugar fix is furtively snatched as is the tweezering of hairs from the upper lip. You don’t actually have your own life, or privacy; your existence is spent in service to everyone else. The sanctity of a secret life no longer exists.

  And all around me, a world in thrall to the Temple of Speed as I’m screaming inside to retrieve something for myself. ‘You never stop,’ my father, Bob, said in horror once, from the perspective of a different, slower life. I know we have to develop defence mechanisms. The ability to pause, recognise the gifts of stillness, recalibrate. But they feel like essential life skills I don’t have. Elayn was aware of the madness of my working-mum life. She’d escaped that world herself. When I, her youngest child, turned eighteen she stopped cooking. She’d had enough. Of the thankless giving, as a mother, the sheer exhausting depletion of it.

  *

  An email, a week before Elayn died:

  Darling Nikki and Andrew,

  Firstly a big apology for imposing on your busy lives. Any help you can give is very appreciated and will only be until I can finalise my situation. EVERYTHING is so.o.o slow. I am needing to get a carer and finding it all very hard. I am too scared to drive as my right leg feels dead. I don
’t feel safe driving. Only if either of you, or anyone you know who I can pay, can drop me off in Bronte Road for a shower and acupuncture today it would be great. So sorry my darlings, I never envisaged I would be in this situation, but then ‘why not me!?’

  Hugs Nonna xxx

  *

  A month before Elayn died I rang Bob, who lives six hours’ drive away. I begged him to ring my two brothers to ask them to somehow share the load of our mother’s care; it was too much on my own. I didn’t hear from either brother.

  In Elayn’s final weeks I tried again. Asked my mother if I could organise a family get-together to discuss her future care. ‘Later, not now. I’m too tired.’ As if it was all too much.

  *

  Elayn’s story begins in a small mining town called Meekatharra. In the Western Australian desert. The era, post-Depression.

  After her dusty baby years with a mesh-covered cot and a lawn of dirt, her family moved several thousand kilometres across the wide brown continent to the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. Elayn’s father was a mining engineer, an agitator in the Engine Drivers’ Association, a communist. Her mother was a Barnardos kid sent to Australia from a London care home aged eleven, and trained for service despite a keen intelligence. Service was expected of girls like that, nothing else. It left my grandmother with a lifetime of bafflement and hurt about how she had been railroaded as a child; sent from institution to institution. A hedge of masculine will surrounded her. As it did Elayn. It shaped their lives. It didn’t stop them though from kicking out strong, both of them, in revolt. Again and again. No one was going to impose control on them. They wanted that for themselves.