Life after death

Six days on a bike in New Zealand

The water doesn’t hit anything like as hard as I’m expecting. I come up like a geyser, shouting, exuberant, arms wide, flinging what could be ice particles from my hair in the late afternoon sun. In the distance I can practically feel Mount Cook smiling indulgently, her fringe of snow catching the light.

“It’s not that cold!” I’m shouting like a lunatic, throwing a deranged thumbs-up at the others standing on the shoreline. “Not really!”

(This is partly a lie – a glacial lake on New Zealand’s south island is frosty even in the middle of summer, but to prove the point I dolphin back under because I love it, that move, no matter where, no matter when.)

sun

mountain

water

cold

alive

alive

alive

I come back up and it hits me like a fist for the hundredth time that day: Mal’s not, Mal’s not alive, Mal’s dead, December 18 around 9.40pm.

A week before Christmas. His heart has lurched, constricted, shuddered.

Stopped.

His heart, the one that beat next to mine urging on the Waugh brothers those long hot afternoons, bare legs over the side of the lounge; the heart that ticked up late nights when the Cavs were killing it in the early ‘90’s; his heart that brought home kittens, twice, and let them sleep in his bed; his heart that beat fast loving a boy he didn’t think he could tell anyone about, until he did.

That heart. The one that without a doubt would’ve followed me into this lake, and maybe chucked a big old bit of kelp from the shore at my head while he was at it. Because that’s what little brothers do.

That heart, stopped, without warning. A week before Christmas, on the floor of his bathroom, while the man he’d loved for twenty years cooked dinner for him a room away.

We did Christmas, raw with shock and pain, and organised a room in a pub to remember his life and cry with his friends. Mum and Dad, shaping and sharing the story of the second of three sons: “At the end of every text or call, he would say to us – ‘Rest up, mum and dad’. And so now we say to you Mal – rest up. We love you so much.”

The pain of this. The wrongness. The un-doneness of 50 years, and gone. The huge raw hurting for my mum, for my dad, for Dean.

Where do you go from here?

We went to New Zealand on a cycling trip with friends. It had been organised months ago. We’d been looking forward to it. I couldn’t figure out if it felt like a betrayal, a necessary respite, or just something we had to go through with.

In Lake Tekapo the day before we picked up bikes, the sky cried grey and bereft; the lake murmured back. Our flight out of Sydney had been on the wings of a dragon that scarred the east coast  - fires and 43' heat.

Walking the lake’s edge, with clouds whispering low, I wondered about forgiveness. Maybe it was okay to be away on a trip.

The first night, I laughed over pizza as the light ebbed over the lake and the rain let up for a while, laughed over the idea of 300km on bikes in this shitshow of 10 degrees and drizzle. I laughed because Doug and Jem and our friends are funny, and have hearts that are huge and ticking and present: for the world, for me. A gift. I opened it.

Six days of riding is to be grateful for padded cycling shorts and a motor on your bike that you can kick in any time the incline gets dicey.

In New Zealand, it’s a landscape that takes the breath clean and clear out of your lungs and changes as fast as you can keep up – alpine lakes that have gleefully reimagined the idea of blue under changing skies, throwing back the reflection of granite and limestone and mountains frosted white. It’s pine forest and soft grasses, all-swaying, all-colours, stubbly mountainsides, playful streams rushing to nowhere into which you can plunge hands and water bottles.

It’s cows on rocky outcrops, or coy amidst sunflowers, chewing pensively in hills a hundred different shades of green while the rain caresses everything and blurs up your vision and maybe, just maybe, washes clean the canvas of your mind.

It’s people who are sweet as, ay. Pool tables, picnic tables, packed lunches eaten off your lap in grass that will later mottle your legs and drive you crazy with itches because you lay back in it to watch the birds soar and try for silence.  Silence that sings, silence that scorches you with gratitude and grief, sometimes so tightly fused you can’t tell one from the other.

It’s the gentle hiss of gravel beneath your bike tires, and knowing you can’t let your mind wander off the track for too long because if you do, you’ll stack it. So you’re present. You have to be.

Being away, living, after Mal’s death, was the whiplash of beauty and life against pain and death, again and again.

How is it possible, you ask yourself, to marvel and bask and hurt from laughing; to slip into the warm bath of conversation with friends who understand what makes minutes and hours and a life worth living; to lurch suddenly into the memory of your Dad’s anguished voice on the phone; the cold, cold hand you held in the room they tried gallantly to make look homey, your brother’s face as though sleeping but not ever waking, not ever to wake again to this lake and mountain, birdsong and blue, to strain and exaltation and quiet satisfaction?

I left three tiny shells beside his ear, from the beach we went to as children, and I kissed his forehead and told him we all loved him, and I was sorry. And we all loved him, and we all loved him, and we all loved him.

Driving under a cerulean sky, I’m murmuring the lyrics of a hick country tune watching fur trees cloaked in green slide by, and then I quietly come undone at the refrain in the Powderfinger song I realised too late we both loved.

So much I realised too late.

But this is how it is, being away, living life after death. The quiet elation, the moment of hijack, the see-saw of simple joy and searing sorrow, guilt, defiance, rage, peace, gratitude, regret, wonder, exhaustion.

I’ve been here before, after Hugh. Months with Jem giggling helplessly at stories we told, balancing on a log with wild daisies pushing up defiantly through the summer grass, sneakily scoffing bits of chocolate; holding my hand as we took flowers and shells to the smallest of graves where the earth had not yet settled.

Throwing up endlessly while a billion tiny cells and a soul danced in the muffled chemical dark of my body, perfecting itself to be the kid who came out yelling, laughing, crying, singing, letting us know there was more, more, more. Bry.

Jem and Bry, with Hugh in between. Life/death. Joy/pain. Grief/love.

The sudden brutality of death brings this into the sharpest of focus, but isn’t this all of us, really, this shadow dance of light and dark?

We all have our own tragedies and triumphs, our mundane wins and losses, and we’ve dealt with them as best we can, in our humble human way, bouncing from one to the other, staying bravely upright and in the game. Perhaps it’s been do-able.

But the last ten years or so, we’ve also had the global village pulsing twenty-four-seven in the palm of our hands with its grotesque contradictions, its cat videos and charming human quirks, its children dying before our eyes and ICE agents and gaslit rhetoric and ducks wearing hats and news that solar has now overtaken coal as the number one source of power for the human race.

We didn’t evolve to be exposed to this. Our tiny brains and hearts and souls can’t cope.  

Some of us stand with fingers clenched, jaws locked, waving our flag: the world is all good, or all bad, and no in between, and we will die on our hills to convince you of our causes. And we are exhausted, and joyless, and raw.

But most of us, I think, go quietly numb. Overwhelmed. In the face of whiplash - between horrors writ large, and the guilty pleasure of AI animals playing maracas, we retreat. Retreat from big feelings, retreat from political discourse, retreat from compassion, retreat perhaps, even from pleasure and joy, because who can feel okay about such things in a world so flogged and rent and bleeding?

Overwhelm often means losing the capacity to be moved.

When we check out, we lose the ability to move in any direction – toward joy, toward sorrow. Toward who we could be, how we could think, toward something new.

We simply stand still.

We all understand the instinct. On the trail, the final day, we came across a hedgehog, curled into itself on the track. Immobile. Maybe clipped by a bike, maybe overwhelmed by the news from Trump and Greenland. Relatable. We coaxed her gently off the track. I hope she made it.

She didn’t go lightly, and neither do we, and why should we? Movement hurts. It requires a strength that few of us have. Better to stand still, perhaps, and lock in, lock out. That would be only natural for all of us, right?

But if six days cycling in New Zealand taught me anything, it’s that movement heals.

One night, catching some wifi in the Omarama pub, I came across a poem on Instagram.

Waves

I go in and out, don’t you?

Into flow and gratitude,

And out of it again

Into grief and hopelessness,

And out of it again

Into routine; cooking, walks, connection

And then into bed, the bath

My head, my tears.

These days call for the ability to sway

Sway into reality, sway into empathy

And back again

Dip toes into fear, anxiety, awareness

And rest in creativity, distraction, comfort.

We go in and out, like tides

Creating our own slow rhythms

Finding the pulse of our survival.

-Alix Klingenberg

“Waves” from Quietly Wild. 

These days call for the ability to sway.

 Trust a poet to articulate in 16 lines what it's taken me 1500 words and ten days to nut out on paper.

We spent the last few days of our trip on the coast, where I watched the waves and let them work their magic.

In, out: feeling joy, feeling pain.

Doing both.

Resisting the urge to flatten out the comical delight of a seal pup, determined, bumbling across the rocks toward its mum. One of those little things I know Mal would love and laugh at, and will never see. Resisting the urge to close down that thought, and instead, letting it put razorblades in my throat and walking alone on a rock shelf to cry as much as I wanted.

Our lives, our world, is beautiful and broken. I am moved, in both directions, and I will stay moving.

Because this is what it means to be truly alive. It's the pulse of our suvival, yours and mine.

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I have written about overwhelm here in When the News Is Too Much