Someone shared a psychological model with me once about the inner circle of grief. It was all about supporting the people closer to the centre of the loss than you are, dumping your own stuff on those further out in the circle from you. Maybe Mum’s struggle seems alien to me because she never ‘dumped in’。 A haunting image pops up of Mum, alone, crying herself to sleep.
‘What did she say that worried you, Justin?’
He looks hesitant, like he’ll be breaking her confidence saying any more.
‘Well, she fell apart,’ he explains.
Fell apart? I flop into the chair in the corner of the cubicle. Whenever people talk about family trauma, it often seems to go the other way. Trauma in the older generation, inherited by the younger. People talk less about instances in which something deeply upsetting travels back up the metaphorical umbilical cord and infects the mother.
There are thirty-two years between Mum and me. Is that enough time for an adult to develop the wisdom and pragmatism to process their adult child’s loss? Not just an adult child. A grandson, too. I remember asking my grandfather once when you start to feel old in your mind. He told me you never do. Mum must have been at such a loss when life threw this at us.
‘This reminds me of when Knightley died,’ I tell Justin. ‘He was our dog.’ My throat constricts with emotion even uttering his name. ‘Cam had a policy of only getting rescue dogs, but I made him come with me into a pet shop in Mittagong on the way home from a weekend in Sydney, just to hold Knightley for a minute or two. That’s when they told us he’d been rejected by his biological mother . . .’
Justin recoils, hand on heart as though he’s been shot with an arrow.
‘We hadn’t factored in a dog at that point. Toilet training a puppy that would tear up the whole house hadn’t figured in our plans for the honeymoon period. So we reluctantly handed him back, drove off, and all I could see were tragic images of this rejected little puppy being rejected twice over.’
‘Stop it, Kate! This is worse than talking to your mother!’
‘No, wait. A few minutes down the road, Cam pulled the car over unexpectedly, shuddering to a stop on a gravel verge. Then he swung it around in a U-turn and said, “We’re going back for that puppy.” I think it was the most romantic moment of our entire relationship.’
Gosh. I need to pull myself together.
‘The reason I’m telling you this story is that only a few months after Cam died, I had to take Knightley to the vet.’
Pretty sure the woman in the next cubicle is sniffing now.
‘Don’t break my heart,’ Justin says.
‘Charlie loved him. He’d grown up knowing him, of course, but Knightley had congestive heart failure.’ I’m still trying to convince myself I made the right decision – such a difficult one to make on my own.
‘I’m sure you did the right thing,’ Justin says, guessing my mental torture.
Dogs know things. Knightley seemed to know Cam was sick before we did – he got clingy with him, weeks before Cam’s diagnosis. And I think his heart failed in part because his beloved owner was gone. I hadn’t been prepared for the double whammy of grief I would experience. All the way to the vet’s, I was having flashbacks to that heroic moment when Cam swung the car around, wishing I could swing it around now. Pushing myself to drive forward, only to sever another link between us, as if Cam’s death and Knightley’s were inextricably tied.
‘I told Charlie we would pass Knightley straight into Daddy’s arms.’ I can barely get these words out, Lord knows why I’m insisting on doing so. ‘But watching my already grief-stricken little boy hug somebody else goodbye was some of the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. Like Mum must feel watching us!’
What I don’t tell Justin is that when Knightley’s beautiful head sank peacefully onto the vet’s table as he slipped from this world, I’d whispered, ‘Tell Cam I love him.’ And I rested my cheek on the top of his head, wanting to be as close as possible to the veil between this world and whatever lies beyond it. So close I imagined I could reach out and touch Cam, as he reached out for Knightley. So close I could almost slip through too.
‘I’m sorry about your dog,’ Justin says.
People blunder through in early grief. ‘I know just how you feel,’ they say, when you’ve lost a human being. ‘I lost my pet.’
At the time, I found it breathtakingly offensive. But the day Knightley died, the grief was off the charts. The aftershocks turned out to be nowhere near as powerful as losing Cam; the bounce-back was light years faster. But that initial passing devastated me in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
‘Your mum was okay when she left,’ Justin says, to my relief.
Poor Mum. My heart hurts. How could I have been so wrapped up in things that I missed this? For a woman with no filter, she has expertly hidden her deeper thoughts.
Oh, dear. This is not why I messaged Justin. This is meant to be about Grace. I can’t raise that now, though. Not after he’s just done our family a massive kindness.
Why is everything so complicated?
23
I turn and face the mirror, feeling demoralised enough already without also being confronted by a full-length reflection of my semi-naked self under stark fluorescent lights.
It’s not about appearance. Not completely. I’ve done enough work on body acceptance since having Charlie and losing Cam to be grateful for a body that gave someone life and has also managed to keep itself alive, despite all the trauma and stress it was forced through.
Watching Cam degenerate, physically, as the disease ravaged him, gave me a perspective on the workings of the human body that transcends image. Once you’ve watched a strong man fade, when you’ve borne witness to a body in peak physical condition spiralling until it’s unable to will itself into one more day, it’s harder to care whether breastfeeding has deflated your boobs or a miracle growing within you has graffitied your skin. And when you’ve spent a few minutes with a body that no longer houses a soul, so still and lifeless and empty, you really see it for what it is, and how incredible it has been, no matter how it looks.
At least, that’s the philosophical position I’d arrived at before everything got messed up on that motorbike. And now I feel like a hypocrite. With confidence issues. I’d reached that comfortable place with Cam where he loved me the way Mark Darcy loved Bridget Jones: just as I was. He’d seen me in the delivery suite during childbirth and looked at me like every moment of that experience brought us closer together. Since he died, I’d been perfectly content going about my post-Cam life living vicariously through Grace’s dating capers, but now I have a vague recollection that there are things a body can do beyond haul sadness around. And a vague idea that perhaps I might want to do those things again one day.
The bell tinkles over the door to the shop. As the door opens and shuts, the breeze blows open a slight gap in the changing room curtain. Peering through it, I see Hugh looking around the store, searching for me. It’s strange seeing him so relaxed here, in cut-off jeans and a black T-shirt. Strange to be here with him at all, in a setting like this.
Behind this flimsy curtain, which looks like it was hung in the 1980s and could disintegrate at any moment, I feel more exposed than ever. I pull the two pieces of fabric tightly together and press myself up against the side wall of the cubicle. Catching my breath.