Dad keeps asking for a half-pint of cold milk. He doesn’t talk of dying but of going home. And it’s some consolation that the cabbage-y room in the aged care facility, with its hoseable floor, is a stone’s throw from where Gran gave birth to Dad on their kitchen table.
My two sisters and I have set up camp here, with knitting and books and herbal teas, and it reminds me of preparing for birth. The burrowing-in. The stopped clocks. Something huge coming.
“Everything goes back to the beginning,” Dad says.
“Like the milk?” my sister Kate suggests. The half-pint must be a throwback to childhood?
“Everything.”
In the corridor beside a glass memory box displaying Dad’s first book of poetry, Inside the Whale (1960) – his neighbour’s box has chess pieces and a whisk – the doctor talks us through how the dying might go. She can’t say how long he has left but it will be days, not weeks. We have questions about how to best care for him. The gist of her answers: He can do whatever he wants now.
***
Didn’t he always?
Beside Dad’s diminished form, in the temperature-controlled room, memories come thick and fast.
I can see the four of us at his scarred cedar table at twilight. Fats Waller blasting from the turntable. The magically replenishing carafe. Dad picks up his plate and begins to lick. We follow suit. Four mousy heads, ducking up and down, savouring every last drop of that good roast beef. We do this in restaurants too.
I see us swimming out to Bird Rock, little me gripping Dad’s shoulders and my sisters swimming alongside. We collect mussels and Dad cooks them back at the caravan. We eat them with bread and butter.
For a time, I remember, Dad collects snails from his back garden to fry in a pan.
He is a law unto himself – but this has its shadow, and alongside the joyful memories are darker, harder ones.
Dad’s bipolar disorder went untreated. Sometimes he walks through the night, plots, pens poison letters; drives fast and angers quickly. New poems appear like bloodstains around the house. I hide in the wardrobe because when I look into his eyes, he isn’t there.
One time, in his delusion, he is a maharajah. Another, he uncovers an international drug ring. We take the gun from his house and blame thieves.
Sometimes I wished him dead.
But Dad shows me what it is to love fiercely. Nothing comes close to his hugs.
And right through our childhood, he reads us Grimms fairytales, with green apples to clean our teeth. The wind howls. Dad smokes his pipe. He is the woodcutter and the king. We are his three daughters.
***
The aged-care facility where Dad lives is on a hill, and from his room on the second floor is an uninterrupted view across Melbourne/Naarm’s northern suburbs to the city skyline. We watch the sun rise and we watch it go down and it is beautiful, and abstract. I think: everything that matters is in this room.
In George Orwell’s essay Inside the Whale (1940), he uses the story of Jonah and the whale to make an argument for submitting to one’s confinement. “There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens … ”
Did Dad aspire to indifference? After a bad fall in his late 80s, he was furious when a team of doctors prescribed 24/7 care – confinement. And yet he has enjoyed a measure of peace these past few years, in this room on the hill. It has been a softer, more cushioned time.
We feed Dad vanilla ice-cream on a teaspoon – it’s all he’ll eat.
He recites Lewis Carroll’s You are Old, Father William, and his eyes tear up with soundless mirth.
I cannot imagine a world without my father in it.
Later that night, we put on Bach’s cello concertos and pour some Garganega. Dad sips his through a straw. The city sparkles. I think he enjoys the music, the wine and our company.
The next morning, Dad is quietly panting.
He asks when he is going home. “Is everything organised?”
We tell him it is. He will be home soon.
I have to leave briefly that day to meet with a publisher. Early offers have come in for my new novel. I’ve worked hard for this, but in the blank meeting room, I choke on tears. We are discussing the love and brutality of fictional fathers, and I need to be with my dad and my sisters.
Back inside the cabbage-y room, Dad seems to have shrunk further.
When my sisters are stretching their legs, I tell Dad I’ve dedicated my new novel to him. He hated the last one. Too much swearing. But perhaps that’s what compels me. I want his approval – I always will.
He squeezes my hand. “Good.”
Dad refuses milk. Can’t get comfortable. Can’t catch his breath. Can’t lift his head from the pillow. Wants music on; wants it off.
“Pick me up,” he whispers. He is holding his arms up as if he were tiny and we were big.
Everything goes back to the beginning.
The doctor starts the morphine to soften his pain and we wet Dad’s mouth with a giant cotton bud. We kiss his forehead, his cheeks, his knuckles.
The grandkids come in to say goodbye. Dad is unresponsive, but when they leave, he lifts a hand in farewell.
At midnight, my sisters and I settle on cushions on the floor and Dad starts to snore. It feels like we’re going to fall asleep under the heavy woollen blankets and wake to him singing Whiskey in the Jar.
Who’d have guessed this time with Dad as he’s dying – the four of us, together again – could be so ineffably precious. A final wild gift he gives us.
Rae abruptly stands. She’s noticed a change in Dad’s breathing.
We are with him at the end.
***
Dad would have loved the undertaker. An exceptionally tall, strong, sombre fellow wearing snow-white gloves. A fairytale figure. He will pick Dad up and carry him home.
Much later, rifling through books of Dad’s verse, I come across one from the Serendipity Kid series. I wonder now if this lone cowboy in the wild west, lawless and in love with life, was his most autobiographical.
***
Fastest Luck in the West
Evan Jones
When the Serendipity Kid rode into town
the bars closed up, the guns were locked away;
the banks went bust, the ladies wore pretty frocks,
the drinks were cold, the water full of rocks:
no-one had any trouble keeping things down …
That was a while ago. The Kid’s still riding
somewhere out east, perhaps across Moon River,
singing some sort of song …
while under the stars, the bunnies that were hiding
from the hot sun all day come out to frisk and play.
Here’s luck to you kid. Mind if I string along
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday … perhaps forever?
• Cool Water by Myfanwy Jones is out 28 February (Hachette)
