Thirty Days Read online

  I stepped into a pool of holy water and imitated my spiritual guide as he led me from one gargoyle to another.

  ‘For your heart,’ he said, standing before a stone lion, from whose mouth spouted a fountain of water.

  He muttered a prayer, each time repeating the same ritual with flowers and incense. I stood before the lion, pressed the flowers into my palms and offered the sacrifice of fire.

  ‘For your liver,’ he said before the next statue. I imitated his every move.

  ‘For purity of speech.’

  ‘For your feet.’

  ‘For sexual drive.’

  Surely it was too soon, in my days of mourning, to pray for sexual drive before a statue of a fertile woman?

  I allowed myself to tread deeper into the water, as though it were a ritual bath that would cleanse me.

  Tahor. Tahor. Tahor.

  Is he pure? Pure. Pure.

  After the tenth statue, I turned to my guide. ‘Where can I offer a prayer for my wife?’

  ‘It is coming,’ he answered mysteriously.

  We moved to another pool where the gargoyles were creatures from a netherworld: dragon-tailed monsters and elephant goddesses.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This is where you must pray for your wife. Your words will reach her soul.’

  I carefully accepted his treasure of coloured petals, tucked them behind my ears, and held them between my fingers as I immersed my body neck-high in the pool, preparing to receive the words I wanted to send to Kerryn.

  I looked up at the receptacle for my petitions. It was a shapeless rock, a mouth carved into its surface, from which water poured forth. And on its forehead, like a golem’s head on which I might have written three Hebrew letters, was carved a swastika.

  In that moment, I stopped running and returned to myself. I saw visions of the seas of Egypt parting, of Moses hitting the rock, of swastikas emblazoned on the flags that spawned Auschwitz and Bełżec.

  And I saw my darling wife in our home in Caulfield, folding a stiffened mixture of beaten egg whites and sugar into yolks, adding passionfruit pulp, pouring the viscous substance into a bowl, from which she served our guests her famous Passover ice-cream.

  And then I heard her spirit inside me laugh, that belly laugh, at the sight of her husband praying for her wellbeing at the font of a swastika. I laughed with her, tears of laughter that ran into the holy waters, as I sat at our long dining-room table and scooped the passionfruit ice-cream that carried the taste of her spirit into the depths of my soul.

  11

  SO HAPPY TOGETHER

  After Kerryn’s death, among her affairs, I found a poem she had transcribed by hand on a single sheet of paper. ‘I Am!’, by John Clare.

  I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

  My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

  I am the self-consumer of my woes—

  They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

  Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

  And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

  Into the living sea of waking dreams,

  Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

  But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

  Even the dearest that I loved the best

  Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

  I long for scenes where man hath never trod

  A place where woman never smiled or wept

  There to abide with my Creator, God,

  And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

  Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

  The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

  Who was this John Clare, I asked myself, and why had Kerryn chosen to transcribe this particular poem?

  I learned that he belonged to the Romantic school of nineteenth-century British poets and that he had written ‘I Am!’ in a mental asylum.

  I was devastated to imagine Kerryn writing out this poem that yearns for death over life. When had she done it? Was it before we started dating, or while I was at Oxford? Or did she write it years later, before we had children? Or maybe after? I set the page against other letters she had written, comparing the handwriting as though I was a detective. Without a date, there was no way I could second-guess her motivations.

  Maybe there were other poems she’d transcribed, poems that had been thrown out, or that were hidden away in boxes I hadn’t yet found. After days of soul-searching, I realised why I was transfixed by this sheet of paper: I wanted to know if she had found happiness with me. Or had I failed to fulfil her longing for escape from a sadness that felt like a vast shipwreck?

  Already at the age of twenty-three, she had written to me: ‘I feel old at present—like life has passed me by. My youth, enthusiasm, and passion drained, like the water in a bath.’ And in a rare confession to a friend midway through her medical studies, she wrote:

  It seems to me that I can just close myself off and stop feeling things. I feel, at times, that I have built myself a giant fortress that I can simply hide within so as to protect myself from too much pain. I feel that I can harden myself and my heart and become oblivious to my surroundings at my own will.

  This really scares me because if I can do that then it means I have lost my vulnerability, lost my humanity.

  I had always assumed I had broken through that protective wall, and given Kerryn the love that she craved as a remedy to the loveless marriage she witnessed as a child.

  When I found the John Clare poem, something she said to me during her illness replayed itself in my mind. It was one night when we were walking around the block, the same walk we had done so many times. She was getting weaker by the day, and complained about the strange sensations in her hands and feet—the neuropathic side effects of chemotherapy. Her shoes felt like they were filled with sand, and even though the temperature was mild, her hands were cold.

  I held her hand as we walked—for support, but also as a gesture of love. It was the first time we’d held hands for years. When did we stop?

  ‘You’ve come back,’ she said to me.

  I didn’t say anything. But I knew what she meant. Over the years, a part of me had become detached from her. Our marriage was solid, but it had become conventional. Its foundations were those of so many marriages—a house, the objects that filled it, dinner dates with friends, familial devotion to my parents, and most importantly, care of our children. But the drawbridge that had once forced me to fight with passion to reach Kerryn’s heart had been exchanged for something more accessible and mundane—a manicured garden and an ornate front door.

  We rarely fought; if we did it was over the trivial matters that so often arise while maintaining a household, or negotiating care of the children. A friend from England enjoyed reminding us that he had witnessed us having a serious altercation in the lift of a hotel. He would joke as though we were the perfect couple and it was our one and only argument. Of course it wasn’t. Sometimes when we fought we said unforgivable things that were lost among the usual four-letter obscenities unleashed in anger.

  Fights are the stuff of a marriage and take their toll less in the moment than in how they are resolved. Our strategy was to talk them through or leave them to simmer until they boiled down to nothing. It was that nothingness that must have bothered Kerryn—the modes of disengagement we relied upon, the routine of marital habits that diminished the excesses of love.

  Kerryn was right; I had come back.

  Since her diagnosis, I’d dropped everything—my work, my writing, my social outings. For the first time in thirty years, I stopped moving. By moving, I mean that constant motion of flurried activity that reaps success at work yet neglects the tender harvesting and renewal of love. There were so many trips we took together over the years, yet the one journey of loving commitment that we had promised each other in our early days was sidetracked by attention to external details.

  Perha
ps my confessions are an expression of guilt about my wife suffering the unfathomable prospect of dying too soon. I doubt I would be asking these questions if life had continued as normal. But then I have to wonder what would have become of our lives together if we had continued on the same path towards old age. Would we have found our way back to holding hands again on our walks around the block? Or would we have grown further apart?

  In the face of death, our love was reborn and, despite the overwhelming sadness that accompanied Kerryn’s dying, and our tears in private, we came as close as ever to living out the words we had once expressed in our youth. The stairs I climbed might not have been for furtive night visits, but for offerings of peppermint tea to soothe the pain in her stomach, and the new mattress I bought was to ease the pain in her back, not for wild trysts. But we found a tenderness in our love that made dying easier for Kerryn, and harder for me.

  How sad that, by the time we held hands again, her fingers had grown so cold that she had to wear gloves.

  •

  A few months into Kerryn’s illness, Rachel suggested we attend a yoga class in a new studio—or shala, as I have learned to call it. I was cynical at first, having always practised more conventional physical exercise. But I was ready to try anything, especially if it involved time with my children.

  The four of us went on a Friday afternoon, wishing that Kerryn, who had natural flexibility, could have joined us. We lay next to each other on mats in a hall vibrating with a hum that apparently matched the energy zones of the earth.

  ‘Start like this,’ Rachel whispered, while we waited for the teacher.

  I tried copying her, drawing in my heels towards my thighs, but my spine was so tight, I couldn’t press my body onto the mat. I needed a bolster to manage the manoeuvre, and that was before the teacher led the class into knotted contortions.

  Next, I was instructed to raise my hands into prayer position, breathe heavily and chant a long ommmm.

  I surrendered and, by the third om, joined in with a quiet mmmm. For the next ten minutes, I did my best to focus on things I’d taken for granted—like breathing. It took a while for me to understand that inhaling and exhaling through your nose didn’t have to sniff out snot. Eventually, I got the hang of making an oceanic sound by constricting my throat, producing what the teacher called a triumphant breath.

  On my first Downward Dog I almost collapsed. My lower back couldn’t manage more than a couple of seconds of Warrior One, Two, let alone Three. The only posture I managed was a weak Child’s Pose, which I returned to repeatedly. At last the teacher called out Shavasana at the end.

  I swear I thought she was telling us that it was Shabbes now—and it was, time to go home for our Sabbath meal. But we held the wakeful meditative pose for five minutes as the sun threatened to set and cause me to commit a religious infraction.

  ‘So, did you like it?’ Rachel asked at the end.

  I was confused and didn’t know how to answer. But the feeling of breathing and being anchored to a mat, of setting an intention that could be for one person only—for Kerryn—and of connecting my mind and my body, stayed with me all weekend. On Monday, I went on my own, but took a wrong turn and found myself walking into a pole-dancing class. The gods must be toying with me, I thought, as I wound my way back to the correct set of stairs.

  Like many other things in my life, yoga became my obsession. I began going twice a week, sometimes with one or more of the children, sometimes on my own. By the third month, I was doing my best to go every day, even jogging on Saturday afternoons to the shala so that I wouldn’t miss out on a yoga class. Not only can I now lie flat on the mat, but I have fulfilled my ambition of crouching in Crow Pose—hands pressed to the mat, feet lifted in the air behind me. It took some time, however, to let go of my attempts to excel in agility, and instead focus on simply holding an Utkatasana pose or sustaining my Pranayama breaths.

  Yoga became my salvation, and although Kerryn might, in the past, have considered it another of my fads, she now encouraged me to leave her bedside every day for the one thing that was bringing some tranquillity to my life.

  ‘Imagine me in the future like this,’ I said, in Crow Pose on the carpet alongside our bed.

  She smiled. I had given her an image to hold on to. But none of us could have imagined that months later, during the week of the shiva, instead of sunrise prayers, my children and I would begin our day with an hour of yoga meditations on mats, a Sanskrit chant, followed by the Kaddish in Aramaic.

  Om.

  Amen.

  But I didn’t stop jogging. Sometimes, as I ran the five-kilometre esplanade track from Brighton to Elwood, the wind whipped the tears on my face. Staring at the ocean, as the seagulls glided across the water and disappeared into the distance, I was always reminded of the smallness of our problems set against the vastness of our world. I went for night runs, both fearful and comforted by the dark, invisible walls of sky, water and ground that composed our universe.

  We talked as a family about death, life and faith.

  ‘I’m not scared of death,’ Kerryn said. ‘I won’t know anything once I’m gone.’

  It was too hard for the children to speak through their tears.

  ‘Really. It’s dying I’m scared of. The present. When I see how much you’re suffering and worrying about me.’

  More tears.

  ‘I don’t want any pain. I want you all to promise me.’

  Only I could speak. ‘I swear. We won’t let you suffer.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, then poked her tongue out the side of her mouth, drooping back her head, as she feigned her own death. ‘I want it to be quick.’

  ‘Mum!’ the kids screamed, laughing and crying at the same time.

  Why us was a question we often asked ourselves, but it was unanswerable. There was no divine voice that spoke to us from a whirlwind, and all the theodicies I had studied as a student were meaningless when we were confronted by her fate. Someone sent us a video of a saintly old rabbi with a long grey beard, telling his viewers that he looked forward with joy to the day he could embrace his death, shed his body and free his soul. I wanted to smash the screen and ask if he would dare say the same words to a child, or a woman who had not come close to reaching his age.

  Only the doctors could offer us hypotheses.

  Why Kerryn? we asked them. Was it something she ate? How long had the cancer been eating at her stomach?

  Kerryn had her own theories. She was a chocoholic—perhaps that’s what did it? She had ignored earlier symptoms, such as indigestion, which had bothered her for a year. About six months earlier, she’d had difficulty swallowing a banana, a sign she could have taken more notice of.

  One day, checking my Facebook messages, I noticed she had sent me an article about living with cancer. I read it with interest: it articulated her own fears of dying. When I looked at the date, however, I realised the message had been sent two months before her diagnosis. Was there a glitch in the Facebook messaging system?

  ‘No,’ Kerryn said, ‘I sent you that article back in February—before I knew.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just thought it was an interesting article.’

  Did she have a premonition that a tumour was growing in her stomach—that this would be her story?

  We had spent a lifetime peering into other people’s tragedies. Why were the dice falling this way for our family?

  We began to focus on one overwhelming question: was it random or genetic?

  Genetic testing was a double-edged sword. It held the exciting promise of targeted therapies that offered some hope for a cure. Sadly, none of the results were in her favour.

  There was one more test, the most terrifying of all for Kerryn. She had always feared that she might carry the BRCA gene, dominant among Ashkenazi women and responsible for breast cancer.

  Five years earlier, when she turned fifty, she commented, ‘Well, I’ve made it to the same age Mum was when she died.�
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  She went for a mammogram each year, always relieved when the results were clear. We had never considered, however, that there might be a genetic link between stomach and breast cancer. Then we learned there was an obscure gene called E-Cadherin that could connect the two.

  What if she had that gene?

  Kerryn’s mother had died three decades earlier when genetic testing was in its infancy. The hospital holding her records had burned down. The testing fell to Kerryn.

  Nothing in all the months of our living and dying with cancer would be more horrifying than finding out that, if Kerryn carried the E-Cadherin gene, there was a fifty per cent chance our children were carriers. And if they were carriers, there was an eighty per cent chance they would develop gastric cancer by the age of thirty.

  That was now.

  The medical advice in such cases was for pre-emptive resection of the entire stomach. We would have to return to our favourite medical god to perform an operation not on Kerryn, for whom it was too late, but on each of our three children.

  We said nothing to them while we waited a week before returning to the hospital for the results.

  ‘The news is good,’ the doctor told us. ‘You’re not a carrier of the gene.’

  The genetic pool favoured us. Kerryn sobbed into her hands. ‘My mother would never do that to me.’

  ‘Kerryn darling, you know better than I do that genes are not something we do to our children; they are randomly assigned to us.’

  ‘So why me?’ Kerryn asked.

  ‘We don’t know the answer to that,’ the doctor answered. ‘You might have contracted Helicobacter pylori.’

  It sounded like a helicopter hovering above us, dropping yellow rain. Most of us carry a strain of it, the doctor added, but it’s only activated in certain people for reasons not yet discovered. He suggested that I test for the bacterium. So, with a referral from Kerryn, I went back to the same doctor who had diagnosed her Linitis. My second colonoscopy in four years.