Dying (11 page)

I'm not sure what I want done with my ashes. My problem is that, like Dad, I've spent
my life moving around, so I'm not sure where to call home. In the past, whenever
someone has asked me where I'm from, I've always struggled to answer.

‘I was born in Queensland,' I say. ‘But we left when I was a baby.'

As if that means anything. Only that my mother came back to Queensland to have all
her children, because my father was never home to look after her. I was actually
born in a hospital in Southport, where Ril and Norman had a house they retreated
to in the summer, and where all the families gathered for seaside holidays. Mum brought
me back to the house after my birth and we were cared for by a nurse, which seems
like an extravagance now, but these were boom years in the wool trade and such luxuries
were apparently not unusual. I don't know where Dad was at the time, flying for the
old Trans Australia Airlines I think, out of Sydney. Or perhaps he had already quit
TAA and taken up the crop-dusting job based in Armidale. In any case, I have no memory
of Southport, so it can't really count as home. I don't even know why I
mention it
when I'm asked, only that you have to start your story somewhere, and what happened
next is too convoluted to bother with.

I should probably say I grew up in a car, crossing some interminable stretch of country,
between a town I barely remembered, and a town I'd never heard of. It was the travelling
that I recalled the best. Mum was usually at the wheel, Dad having gone ahead of
us. In my memory, it was Mum who packed up all the houses, piled our belongings in
the car, farmed out all the abandoned pets, then set off cheerfully down the road
with hope in her heart that this might be the last time, the time we might finally
settle and put down roots. But it was not to be, at least not for some years.

For a while, Canberra became home, not on the first try, not even on the second,
but on the third, after a disastrous year spent in Kenya, where my father had a
job flying for East African Airways. That's when Mum called it quits, when I was
fifteen. In an act of sheer self-preservation, she dug her heels in and declared
she'd had enough. She told me she was never going to move again. It turned out not
to be true, of course, because Canberra was too small for the both of them once my
parents had divorced. We did stay there long enough for me to finish school and university—only
a few years, but it felt like an eternity to me. And I did develop a love of the
place, not
the city itself, which is stultifying, but of the rolling, empty landscape
around it, and the broad skies above it. When I was old enough, I took my mother's
car and drove all those wide, loopy roads leading out of town, just to see the country.
Maybe that was me going home, back to those childhood voyages through days and nights
of unfurling plains under their canopy of sky.

Nevertheless, I couldn't wait to get out of the place. When I left for England, I
thought I was putting as much distance between me and home as possible. Over the
next few years, I kept coming back to Australia—to see Mum, to make money—but escape
continued to be my main aim in life, possibly my only aim. How else to explain the
insouciance with which I got on a flight to Tokyo in 1982 with no real plan in mind,
except to run away from Sydney, a city to which I'd decided I could never belong.
Now I see it was only what my upbringing had trained me to do: pack up and move on,
and never mind the consequences.

The consequences, in this instance, were only good. I've been travelling back and
forth to Japan now for more than thirty years. Being married to Shin has meant learning
as much as possible about where he is from, not just for my sake, but for the sake
of our children. It hasn't been easy. Because we decided to educate the children
in
Australia I have not spent as much time in Japan as I would have wished, and I'm
not as fluent in the language as I'd like to be. But what I have lacked in expertise
I hope I have made up for in enthusiasm. There is a lot to love about Japan. If I
have a home in that country it would have to be in Arita, the old porcelain town.
There are dozens of places in Japan I would just as happily return to: Shirakawa,
in Kyoto, where the spring cherry blossoms explode in a pink blizzard at the hint
of a breeze; Yanaka, in Tokyo, where the megacity retreats and the old narrow streets
are a warren of small-town traders and hip bars; Mount Aso where you can sit in an
onsen
outside and watch the snow fall on the cedars. In all of these places, and
so many more, I have imagined I could happily end my days. If they are not my home,
then they are places that have marked me, shaped my sensibilities, created affinities.
Added together, they take up the space in my heart where my home would be, if I had
one.

Shin and I have lived in Brisbane since 1998. Our sons grew up and went to school
here. My mother died and is buried here. I'll die here myself. But Brisbane is not
home to me. Not really. I'm a latecomer to this town. It still strikes me as an unlikely
city, too raw and rough to take seriously. It does have its charms, however, and
I do like the fact that on the streets of my neighbourhood I'm reminded all the time
of my children when they were
young, of my mother when she was still alive, of myself
in a former life. So I'm attached to the place in that way, but not as attached as
people I know who have lived here all their lives, and for whom the city is like
a second skin. This is not the fault of Brisbane, it's just that there is a level
of belonging I can never aspire to and must live without.

In Arita, where we have our other home, they make handsome porcelain funeral urns.
I have asked Shin to decorate one for my ashes, with his trademark laughing skeletons,
and told him to keep it with him until he is ready to toss me out. Where he should
scatter me is still a topic for debate. We had always talked about going to Okinawa
together, because it's a part of Japan we have never seen.

‘Maybe take me there,' I tell him. ‘You and the boys. You could find a pristine beach
somewhere and throw me in the sea.'

It's just one idea among many, and not very practical. None of us has the slightest
connection to Okinawa, so the gesture would probably be meaningless, if not downright
offensive to the Okinawans, who take their homeland very seriously.

Another idea we've had is to divide my ashes and throw half of them into the Brisbane
River. Shin could then take the other half to Japan and scatter them in the
stream
that runs through the centre of Arita. What worries me is that Shin might well leave
the town at some point, once he grows bored with it, and move to somewhere new, veteran
nomad that he is. The best argument in favour of this plan is that it would satisfy
a symbolic purpose, reflecting the way my life has been divided between Australia
and Japan for three decades.

If I'm honest, I don't really care one way or another what becomes of me, so perhaps
I'm not the right person to make the decision. The best thing might be for Shin and
our sons to decide for themselves what to do. I'd prefer they make an arrangement
that suits their needs and that brings them some comfort. I trust them to talk about
it sensibly in a way that Sarah and Eliot and I could never discuss these matters.
And I trust they'll be together on the day they dispose of my remains, so they can
offer each other support. I'd urge them to go off to a bar together afterwards and
grieve for me over a couple of drinks, because I know that's what I'd do, if I was
in their situation.

The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto explains his obsession with the sea as stemming
from an early childhood memory. He is travelling on a train with his parents. The
track hugs the coastline, entering a series of short tunnels—light, dark, light,
dark, light, dark—then emerges to reveal the bright sea stretched out in front of
him all the way to the horizon. At that point, he claims, he comes into consciousness.
This is me, here, now, seeing this—the sea, the sky, the sun.

Ever since I heard this story I've tried to remember my own moment of coming into
consciousness. It's not my earliest memory—an insignificant recollection of playing
in mud—but the time I saw a kookaburra swoop down from a branch to spear a skink
and gobble it down live. This is what dragged me out of unconsciousness. This
is
me here, I thought, and that is you there, and where there was a skink there is nothing.
Sugimoto also claims that immediately following his awakening to his existence he
experienced a premonition of his death, and I'm prepared to believe him, because
it was certainly that way for me. The skink's disappearance was explicit. Things
live until they die. Consciousness begins and then it ends.

How it ends I'm only now discovering. I can only speak for me, of course, and everyone
is different, but dying slowly, as I'm doing, feels like a retreat from consciousness
back to the oblivion that precedes it. This retreat is led by the body, which grows
weaker and weaker, requiring less and less fuel and more and more rest, until a few
trips to the bathroom and back are all the exertion you can manage in a day. I am
no longer shocked by how feeble I am. My body is a dying animal. It is ugly and deformed,
a burden I would like to lay down if only I could. But the body has its own schedule
in the matter of dying, and its own methods, none of which I understand.

What I do know is that my world has contracted to the size of two rooms, my bedroom
and my living room, because these are the rooms where I spend all my time. I sleep
in my bedroom, I write and read and watch television in my living room. I'm much
like an infant now, with an infant's dependence. My husband does all the shopping
and cooking and takes care of all the chores. My son helps
out with the driving,
the banking, the running of the household, all of which I used to do when I was well.
In the meantime, I lie around and dream. I most resemble a baby in the early mornings
when I first hear the birdsong outside my window. It takes me right back to the time
of the kookaburra and my earliest lesson in death. The more wakeful I become the
more I yearn for the state of unknowing from which I emerged back then.

The kookaburra belonged to the first garden I remember, next to a eucalypt forest.
The house was in a clearing but a few tall gums grew at the back and front, so that
it seemed to me as if we were in the forest rather than separated from it. And the
forest seemed to be in the house, because the rooms were full of forest smells and
sounds, and because I brought the forest in with me from my games, and dreamed of
it when I slept.

When I was on my own I played in the shadow of these giant trees, poking sticks around
their roots to look for cicada skins, stabbing at the gobs of golden sap that oozed
from the tree trunks, peering at the armies of ants that ran up the trunks towards
the high branches. I stripped ragged lengths of bark and made houses for slaters
and snails. When my brother and sister were home I went with them up into the bush,
chasing after the dog. I regarded him as human, as human as I was, I thought,
with
the same feelings, the only difference being that I felt the cold and needed clothes.
It fascinated me that he had eyes like mine, and a tongue the same colour, and feet
divided into toes. I liked to watch his chest rise and fall while he slept. I liked
to watch him eat dead things, and chase after birds, and shit in the forest. I even
took to shitting in the forest myself, because it didn't seem strange to me after
seeing him. Human, animal, it was all the same to me.

The point is that I never thought of my body at that time as something separate from
the bodies of the dog or the kookaburra, or the skink, or the mother cat up in my
sister's sock drawer, who, one day, had somehow produced more bodies, tiny versions
of herself. And I certainly didn't think of my body as separate from my new consciousness.
They were one and the same thing, consciousness being a bodily sensation, just like
sight, or touch, or hearing. So, if I had it, everything else must have it, too.
I knew this, not from my reasoning, but because it was obvious. When a snail felt
my touch, it curled up. When a bird saw me approach, it flew away. When I flipped
my sister's tortoise onto its back, it righted itself and lumbered on. It was all
only consciousness at work as far as I was concerned.

I enjoyed my body in the same way the animals enjoyed their bodies. I liked to lie
in the warmth of the sun the same way the dog did. I liked my mother to clean my
skin the same way the cat cleaned the skin of her tiny kittens. I loved to be fed
the same way my sister's horse loved to be fed. For me, the kitchen was the centre
of the house. The food my mother made in there was the greatest pleasure of my life,
particularly the cakes—the taste of the batter on my finger, the smell of the oven
as the cakes came out, the hot sweetness of the first bite. Or if I'd been sick and
off my food, my mother would bring me a soft-boiled egg with toasted soldiers and
the salty butteriness would take me to the epicentre of pleasure. I was still half
convinced that my mother's body was made for this purpose, and for nothing else:
to supply me with sustenance, to make me glow with health. And I did. I ran, I jumped,
I swam at the beach, I learned to ride a bike and speed down the track at the side
of the house. And I slept the deep sleep of the healthy and was undisturbed by forebodings
or doubts. It was bliss to be alive.