Thirty Days Read online

  Now that she has gone, I want to say the same to her—that I don’t know what to make of my life without her. I can only read and re-read these letters alone, and imagine that our parting will last no longer than the span of a single university semester.

  9

  DEADLINES

  I always told our children that their mother had a poetic side, which occasionally manifested itself. They witnessed it in a speech she gave at our son’s engagement party two months before she died. But I wonder if, when they eventually read these letters, they will recognise this side of Kerryn.

  For now, however, the letters are my secret. But there were more secrets to be discovered—another trove of letters, stored in a different shoebox, expressing the same intensity of love and passion from my side.

  My first letter, written on green parchment paper, was composed on the plane to Oxford. I wrote something that, in light of what has transpired, sends shivers down my spine.

  Isn’t it nice, we’ve only (nearly) been married for 2 years and without each other it’s not really life. We better be able to synchronise our death. In the meantime, we should make the most of what’s left in life.

  When I read these letters now, I feel as though I have climbed the ladder that leads to the golem’s attic in Prague. The words are overblown, often pretentious, but they point to the forcefulness of a love that was sequestered for too many years in the back of a laundry cupboard.

  19th October 1984

  Darling, it makes me so upset to read your letters. Did you know that, despite underestimating yourself, you’re a poet? If you need to remind yourself, in the second right-hand drawer of the desk you will find a folder labelled Documents, which holds all the nice, and not so nice, words you’ve written. But promise not to write while I’m not around to hold your hand.

  You know, I bought you a birthday present today, but it’s a secret. I love you my sweet sweet Kerryn, but that’s your secret.

  Your husband, with kisses all over.

  Mark

  So many things I have forgotten: the present I bought that year for her birthday, the documents in the second right-hand drawer of the desk. Which desk am I referring to? Is it the antique one in my office, or the one with the green leather inlay in her study? Since reading this letter, I have opened and closed that drawer a hundred times, rummaging through the mundane objects of stationery, as though I might find, hidden in a secret recess, something magical that will restore her.

  These letters, along with the talismanic bits and pieces I have discovered these past thirty days, carry a different quality from the familiar objects that hang in her dresser cupboards. They are like C. S. Lewis’s wardrobe, an entry into a secret Narnia where I will find the Kerryn of our youth, waiting to embrace me in the meadows of a pastoral paradise.

  I returned home to Australia so we could make the trip back together. I was excited to introduce her to my new habits of port and cheese, and to share the view through our window of the frozen lake. Instead, a malodorous waft greeted us in our room because I had not emptied the fridge before turning off the power. We spent our first two days scaling off the layers of mould and spraying the room until it was fit to enjoy.

  Our two years in Oxford were, I think now, our best years together. We bought a second-hand yellow Fiat and drove it to the Cotswolds, and to other idyllic destinations. Kerryn also acquired, somewhat less pretentiously than her more fanciful husband, the Oxford attire of flapper jackets, along with a penchant for good cheese.

  In Melbourne, our parents and their friends were incestuously entangled through East European town associations known as Landsmanschaftn, and so Oxford was our first opportunity to broaden our circle of friends and reinvent ourselves. It was difficult for both of us, but especially for Kerryn—it was her first step outside the fortress she had erected around her childhood trauma.

  We spent many weekends in London, sleeping on couches at friends’ homes and exploring the bargains at Camden Lock Market. I also went on regular forays to an ultra-Orthodox bibliophile in Stanford Hill, and built a reputable collection of nineteenth-century Hebrew literature, the extent of which bewilders me when I peruse my library three decades later.

  There were other adventures. We took an interest in bookbinding, only managing to produce one hardbound leather book with blank pages.

  ‘What will we write in it?’ I remember Kerryn saying.

  ‘Our story,’ I answered.

  We never wrote a single word in it, nor do I know where to find the empty book now.

  We also spent a weekend in Wales on an intensive photography course—the undeveloped negatives are stored in a bedroom cupboard. As a child, I had converted a shed outside our house into a darkroom. I still have the proof sheet of one of my early attempts at artistic photography: in our dining room, I dressed a naked statue of a woman in a prayer-shawl, inserted a bread knife in her hand and tattooed a number on her forearm.

  That photograph is one of many reminders of my waywardness, which simultaneously excited and infuriated Kerryn. Over the years of our marriage, we developed a symbiotic relationship in which her anchored normality tempered my excesses. If, at times, I went astray with my instincts, Kerryn knew how to tame me. Or perhaps she simply grew accustomed to her lot.

  My mother might put it differently: I would be nothing without Kerryn as my anchor. I see this as a projection of my mother’s own view of the role she played in civilising my larrikin father, whose manners were learned in Auschwitz.

  But in Oxford, Kerryn was losing her own moorings—she was no longer interested in the clinical work of attending to patients, taking blood, rushing to emergency calls. She confessed to me then that she had never really wanted to be a doctor and had been pushed into it because of her excellent high school results. With the hindsight of thirty years, however, I can see that there was more to it than that. Kerryn had been scarred by her experience during her mother’s illness, when she had been the medical authority in their home. And then there was me, a domineering loudmouth—perhaps I put my own agenda into overdrive, to the detriment of her career.

  But it didn’t take long for her to find a new career path in medical research. Writing home to a friend, she announced with excitement that she had been accepted to Lincoln College.

  Within a month, she was also appointed to the Radcliffe Infirmary, where she worked with a leading doctor on inflammatory bowel disease. Many of her friends, including me, would regard Kerryn as confident, but her self-doubt manifested itself on the first day of work. I was surprised to see evidence of it when I read this letter after she died.

  Those old butterflies are still having a wild time in my abdomen. It’s really hard trying to act confident, competent when those damn butterflies keep reminding you of when you were 5 years old and about to begin your first day at school.

  Soon after, she was invited to a conference in Basel, to which I always thought I deserved an invitation, because that Swiss town was famous for hosting the first Zionist Congress in 1897.

  See? I always put myself before her.

  Oxford was where Kerryn gradually adopted a role in our relationship that strengthened over time: she was the pragmatic one, the organiser, the one who took care of things—flights, bills—the one who shooed away spiders in our room and, to my shame, chased a robber down the staircase while I hid under the bedcovers.

  She always regretted that she never studied architecture, and throughout our married life she liked to collect art or wooden tchotchkes.

  ‘Look at all these paintings on our walls,’ she said in her final months. ‘What got into our heads?’

  ‘But each one has a story.’ I pointed at a heavy ceramic piece in our dining room: a woman wrapped in newspaper print, a child bound to its back. ‘Don’t you remember we bought this in the south of France?’

  ‘You hated it when I bought it,’ she said. ‘I remember you complaining that we’d have to tie it to your back for the rest of our trip.’
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br />   I laughed. ‘What would a marriage be without its history of complaints? They’re our memories—everything here.’

  ‘Maybe we should sell them,’ Kerryn said.

  ‘But then our house will be empty. No more memories.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ll still want to live here after I’m gone?’

  ‘All of our memories are in this house.’

  ‘But without me, those memories will become a nightmare for you.’

  ‘If anything happens, that will be my problem.’

  ‘Maybe we can share the problem. I want to see how the future will look.’

  ‘None of us can know. It’s all out of our control.’

  After we returned from Oxford, I began my first job at Melbourne University, in 1988. ‘What’s Up Doc?!’ Kerryn wrote affectionately on a card addressed to her ‘Darling Markinu’ when I was awarded my doctorate.

  Kerryn truly was my champion and would have done anything for me, as she would later do for her children. I now wonder, when it is too late, if I can make the same claim about myself in relation to Kerryn’s achievements.

  My mentor and friend, John Foster, bequeathed me his Holocaust course. I didn’t understand why he was surrendering his teaching load until he handed me a typed manuscript of his memoir, Take Me to Paris, Johnny. It told the story of John’s Cuban lover, Juan, who had contracted AIDS during the period before it was given a name. I shared the manuscript with Kerryn and, as we read about the tortured death of Juan, we came to understand that this same fate awaited John.

  I will never forget his lecture on the fate of homosexuals in Auschwitz, and his coda about how homosexuality remained a crime on the statute books for many years after the war. Staring at the class with his sharp blue eyes, John ended with a rhetorical question: is the world of the Holocaust really so different from our world?

  After he died, I was invited by his parish priest to give a eulogy in the North Melbourne church John attended. As I rose to the dais, a kippa on my head, the priest asked if I’d feel more comfortable if he removed the icon of Jesus from the balustrades. I shook my head, because John, more than anyone, had taught me about the dignity of all religions, and the partial truths each reveals to its followers. Watching John die was one of the most devastating encounters with death that I’d experienced. I re-read John’s memoir during the period of Kerryn’s illness, as I stared at the icon of Jesus on the cross above her hospital bed at Cabrini.

  I should never have doubted that Kerryn would eventually find a satisfying professional path: she began a new career specialising in couples and family therapy. She enrolled in many courses and attended numerous conferences, including one on grief and bereavement, the notes for which I have read in order to understand my own grief. Every four years, she travelled with colleagues to a huge conference in Anaheim. She would come back inspired, after listening to talks given by renowned psychoanalysts, Irvin D. Yalom being her favourite. His book, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, remains on her bedside table to this day.

  When she left the hospice, after her first chemotherapy treatment in May, she was attached to a subcutaneous handbag that regularly injected chemicals to ease the pain and nausea. She returned home, keen to ignore the shadow of death.

  ‘You have to stop treating your home as a Club Med Cancer Ward,’ a workplace mentor advised, encouraging her to get out and live as normally as possible.

  She did a better job of it than I did. She went out for brunches and lunches with girlfriends, answered all the accumulated text messages, and assiduously launched into the daily crossword and sudoku puzzle over breakfast. After a week, the blue hospital bag she called Bluey Vuitton was removed and replaced with a patch on her forearm to ease the pain. By the time her second chemo cycle arrived a week later, the pain was under control and she was able to lift her leg again. It was evident, without any blood tests or scans, that the cancer was on the retreat.

  Most impressively of all, despite her ailments, she resumed part-time work, often vomiting during breaks. It had been hard for her to share the news of her cancer with people who had divulged their problems to her over many sessions of therapy. In a text message, she apologised to them for her circumstances and offered them referrals to other psychologists.

  Kerryn never told me anything about her clients, although there were times at a restaurant, for example, when she asked to slip away because she’d recognised someone she had treated. But there was a period late in her illness when clients emerged from all over the place, hugging Kerryn, shedding tears for her, and telling our children and me how extraordinary Kerryn was, how she had saved their lives.

  Kerryn also did volunteer work: she participated in a program that offered counselling to couples before their marriage, with the aim of identifying areas of incompatibility that could mar a relationship if left untended. She also trained as a professional mediator for family disputes, focusing on the protection of children whose parents were undergoing a divorce. And she mentored young people whose achievements at school were being compromised by home circumstances. She usually met the students over coffee.

  One student in particular captured Kerryn’s attention. Without divulging anything confidential, she told me she’d like to invite the girl for dinner at our home.

  ‘I think it would be helpful for her,’ she said, adding that she wanted to provide a space where this student could be properly nurtured.

  But then Kerryn had to write and tell the girl that she’d been diagnosed with cancer.

  ‘The last thing I want to do,’ she told me tearfully, ‘is add more emotional problems to her troubled life.’

  How sad for the girl, and how sad for Kerryn. The common theme of all her volunteer activities was a focus on broken homes—protecting children, improving their chances of success, and preventing disputes before a marriage was sealed. Only now do I realise that she must have seen in each of those children a reflection of her former self. That same sentiment of wretchedness she wrote about in her twenties must have continued through her life, and she found a way of channelling it through her professional activities. She did it all without fanfare, in the quiet, unassuming way that characterised her personality. And she presented a deceptive facade of ordinariness to her achievements.

  That was her great talent. And it came naturally to her, through her extraordinary empathy. Over the years, she gave countless people the benefit of her counsel, including some of her nieces and nephews, who looked to her for guidance. She always had time for elderly people, and displayed infinite patience for their laments. Every few months, she met with our old housekeeper and, without telling me, gave her an envelope of money, and even paid for a trip to Europe when her elderly mother was dying.

  After she died, I found some of her clients’ messages on her phone. ‘Thanks for the offer of another therapist but you are the only one for me…Sorry about that!’

  The last message on Kerryn’s phone was to a patient: ‘Take it one step at a time sweet girl.’

  By the second round of chemotherapy in June, her hair was falling out in clumps on her pillow. It was time to go to the hairdresser.

  Kerryn found the wig she and her sister had bought, and the hairdresser kindly agreed to open the salon on a day when no one else would be around to witness her transformation. I sat alongside Kerryn as he tied what was left of her long hair into multiple ponytails.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he said.

  She stared into the mirror as each ponytail was snipped off and dropped into a bag. Using a clipper, he trimmed the remaining hair into a tight shave.

  ‘I look butch,’ Kerryn declared, running her hands around the prickly fuzz.

  ‘It doesn’t look nearly as bad as we expected,’ I said, although I was lying.

  She placed the wig over her head.

  ‘Now I look like a movie star.’

  She snapped a photo and sent it to the children.

  ‘No more photos,’ I wanted to scream
, but it was too late. It was her choice.

  Messages of approval poured in.

  The hairdresser handed me the plastic bag filled with the ponytails.

  ‘You could donate this to someone who can’t afford a wig,’ he said.

  ‘That would be a nice idea,’ I responded perfunctorily, but I’d already decided what I would do with the bag of hair.

  When I got home I hid it in a cupboard in my study. I hoped that Kerryn would forget and not ask about it again. Was I really comparing it to the mountains of hair in Auschwitz, my only reference point for suffering?

  I wanted to keep the bag for myself, as my own private museum for the future. I imagined myself sleeping with her hair spread over the pillows next to me in our bed.

  But when the time came to bury her, I knew I had to surrender the last physical part of her I still possessed. I dropped the hair and watched it glide over the coffin, as if Kerryn was flicking her head in front of a mirror. I then knelt down, refusing the shovel. I picked up a clod of earth and listened to it thud on the lid like an angry knock on a door.

  10

  FAMILY SECRETS

  Everyone should have cancer…for a day.

  The mediaeval philosopher Maimonides says it differently. He writes that when we visit a house of mourning we should imagine an axe is hanging above our heads. After Kerryn’s diagnosis, a whole circle of friends were feeling that threatening axe. Concern and sadness for her condition flowed from all quarters. Hordes of people wrote, offering their help, but there was nothing anyone could do to ease the situation.

  Religious circles suggested a collective baking of challah, twisted loaves—a traditional way of bringing blessings to the sick. But the last thing Kerryn wanted was to be in the limelight, so she politely resisted these gestures of support. Relatives dropped loaves off in our letterbox, and told us with conviction that the power of this ritualised baking was known to restore health and bring luck to young girls in search of a husband. I told them I doubted the healing powers of challah, thanked them, wondering to myself if young girls might be better off avoiding the fatty bread if they wanted a husband.