Thirty Days Page 14

  As I counted backwards from five, instructed by the anaesthetist, I said to the doctor, ‘Don’t wake me with bad news. Kerryn wants me to live for the sake of the kids.’

  The results were clear.

  And, despite her exhaustion from another round of chemotherapy, Kerryn was there to pick me up from the clinic.

  Time collapses when you’re dying.

  It’s not like seeing your life pass before you in a flash, but rather the past, present and future—imagined future—all appear to merge. Over the months of Kerryn’s illness, we constantly revisited the past. Every photograph carried memories that generated laughter and tears—a lot of tears. The children were full of questions about Kerryn’s childhood. They huddled close as she showed them an album of pictures of her at two. In one taken at the beach, she was holding the sides of her bathers like a ballerina curtsying in a tutu.

  ‘You were so cute, Mum,’ the children crowed.

  The photos jumped through all the stages of our lives and brought the poignant awareness that one day there would be photographs in which the children would be older than their mother. They crowded around her on the couch, as if she was their mooring. And they shed tears that she seemed to absorb.

  Then came the videos that Kerryn had transferred from old technology to DVD format and digital files—forever the family chronicler. She was a witty composer of rhyming lyrics to songs, my favourite belted out by her for my fiftieth birthday. Set to the Beatles’ tune of ‘Happy Together’, she strung together the horror titles of my Holocaust library.

  Fear and Hope, Faith and Freedom

  The Age of Atrocity, With God in Hell

  The Architect of Genocide, Life with a Star

  The Final Solution

  After several stanzas, her song climaxed with the ironic inclusion of my own book, The Fiftieth Gate.

  Numbered Days, The Aftermath

  Eichmann in Jerusalem, I Rest My Case

  Neutralizing Memory, Love Despite Hate

  A Season for Healing

  Beyond Marginality

  War Criminals Welcome

  And The Fiftieth Gate

  Happy Together

  On the family videos, we watched the children grow up. I was usually the one behind the camera, while Kerryn was the cajoling mother, into whose arms the children ran. There was no escaping the truth—Kerryn was the linchpin of the family, a ubiquitous godlike figure in the children’s eyes—and mine, I now realise.

  We were bound together in the knowledge that soon the films would come to an end and the screen would go blank. If only we could have also filmed those moments together, and played the laughter and tears as a backdrop to the rest of our lives.

  After Kerryn died I had a recurring dream: she told me to plant photographs on the topsoil of her grave. Did she mean photographs from the past, or all the photographs to come—of our grandchildren, of the milestones of future joy, and also of future sadness?

  ‘I’ll never be happy again,’ sobbed Gabe, as we watched a video of Kerryn reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to him.

  ‘Yes, you will,’ Kerryn assured him.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ he repeated, reverting to the child he had just witnessed on video, held in his mother’s arms.

  ‘Do you think of me as unhappy?’ Kerryn challenged him.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘I lost both my parents and I found happiness. Dad will make you happy. I promise you.’

  This time it was I who cried, thinking about the role I would be left with, reshaping memories, balancing our immeasurable sadness through even the happiest times.

  It was a familiar role, one that I had learned from my own parents. Each year they went to the Buchenwald Ball to celebrate surviving the Holocaust, dancing in defiance of their traumatic memories. The ball was held on 11 April and that year, a month before Kerryn was diagnosed, she had organised the seventieth anniversary celebrations. She knew I could be relied on to teach our children to dance through their pain. I had helped to create a public legend about my parents’ mythic capacity to sing and dance in the darkness.

  When it was my turn, would I be able to do the same?

  The photo albums were also brought out at family dinners held by Kerryn’s siblings.

  ‘The reason you can’t stop crying,’ Kerryn said to Glenn, ‘is because you never came to terms with losing Mum and Dad.’

  ‘No, it’s not true,’ Glenn protested through his tears, ‘it’s you I’m crying for.’

  When we first told him about Kerryn’s cancer, Glenn shrieked like a child. I had witnessed adults reverting to their childhood selves before. Once, in Auschwitz with a survivor, I watched as she stood in front of a photograph of herself behind barbed wires after the liberation of the camp: her voice modulated to that of a young girl, as she relived the trauma of that precise moment.

  During my university days, I went in search of the vicarious trauma I believed I had suffered through my parents’ wartime experiences. After reading Arthur Janov’s Primal Scream, I found a practitioner in Melbourne. The doctor’s room was filled with candlelit sconces. In group therapy, we lay on the floor and hyperventilated until the participants recovered the moment of their birth and filled the room with the cries of babies.

  Apart from dizzy spells, nothing happened to me.

  Determined to find my primal scream, I took private sessions with the doctor, during which he curled his arm into a vaginal shape and urged me, after a long bout of breathing, to crawl through the hole. Desperate to come out the other side reborn, I feigned a babyish voice.

  Refusing to give up, I developed a daily practice at home. I lay on the couch, listening to Bach fugues, breathing heavily and rapidly in an effort to achieve a climactic moment. To add to the atmosphere, I bought brass sconces from a market and nailed them to the wall. God knows how I found one with a swastika-shaped base, an element I was sure would produce the effect I was seeking. I lit the candles in the sconces, turned off the light, and hyperventilated.

  My mother caught me in the act. It must have crossed her mind that I was committing a lewd deed. Better that than the truth—that I believed I was re-entering her womb when she was a young girl during the Holocaust. She covered her embarrassment by mocking me with the Yiddish epithet, Otem Shverrer, Heavy Breather.

  The trauma that was reopened for Kerryn’s siblings didn’t require props. It was manifest in the love they showered on their dying sister, and through endless questions about why their parents’ marriage dissolved, who was at fault, why Sally had run away with Glenn. They remembered how, after Paul’s death, Buba Esther had hidden an ivory statuette that was intended as a bequest to Ann. Kerryn managed to find it in her grandmother’s house, and returned it to Ann. During a Friday night meal, we took it out of a glass cabinet and marvelled at the carved dress that opened, and at Kerryn’s determination to retrieve an object that rightfully belonged to her sister.

  The bond between the siblings grew stronger than ever. Bradley began to call Kerryn ‘my angel’. Ann would do anything for her—take her to movies, sit with her, bring her gifts—and Glenn came from Sydney for regular visits.

  And when no one was watching, I went back to lying flat on my bed and breathing heavily. This time I knew the source of my pain, but I wanted to be reborn, and emerge as a superhero who could eliminate Kerryn’s cancerous cells.

  The chemotherapy was taking its toll. Not only immediately after each bout, when I had to carry Kerryn to the car and then to the couch, but for longer stretches of time. Primo Levi wrote that ordinary language, words like cold or hunger, didn’t suffice to describe his parallel universe in the camps. Similarly, Kerryn’s tiredness was not the yawn that we who dwell in the kingdom of the well experience after a hard day at work. It was an infinite depletion, where the act of walking, or keeping her eyes open, or raising an arm to pick up the television remote control, required too much effort.

  It was clear that the EOX regime was no longer w
orking.

  12

  BUCKET LISTS

  A message from Kerryn popped up on my Facebook page.

  Will you be my legacy contact?

  What did she mean? And why didn’t she ask me the question directly, in our bed or at the kitchen table?

  I clicked on the link and learned more about her request. Facebook was offering options to plan ahead for one’s death. Effectively, Kerryn was appointing me as delegate over her profile page with its long timeline of postings and photographs. A few months earlier, I had asked her what she would want done with it if anything ever happened to her. I never finished my sentences with ‘if you died’ or ‘when you died’.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she replied. ‘All my passwords are in my diary.’

  I never understood why Kerryn used a handwritten diary rather than the calendar app on her phone, as I did. Each year she would buy a new diary—nothing fancy—and copy out the same lists in the opening pages: carpenters and electricians, banking details, passwords and logins. She wrote all her work and social appointments in the diary, until I convinced her to share an electronic calendar with me as well. At least that way, I could be kept informed of our common arrangements.

  She also had a hard-copy recipe book, a tall black folder that was falling apart. Flipping through the pages, I can read an alternative history of her life. On one of the first pages is a recipe from Steve, the man her mother was briefly married to after divorcing Paul. Whenever I visited Kerryn during our courtship, Steve was in the kitchen, wearing an apron, baking his famous apple cake. His recipe, which Kerryn often used, is the only remnant of him after he disappeared from our lives.

  The recipe book also includes memories of when Kerryn and I attended gourmet cooking classes: Sunday night dinner parties where the pièce de résistance was our crème brûlée, which we crusted using a blowtorch we stored in our garage. Then there is a collection of recipes that I extracted from my mother and her friends, to capture the art of traditional Jewish cooking—chopped liver, giblets, gefilte fish. This section reflects our transition from entertaining on Sunday nights to hosting Saturday lunches. The book also includes the ritual foods of Passover, recipes from a patisserie class that Kerryn took in Paris during our Oxford days, and lists of ingredients from when we lived in Israel and a Persian friend would cook Friday night meals with us.

  Not only are the pages falling apart, but they are stained with the ingredients. The book is a record of the meals we served, or that were served to us by people who have died or vanished from our lives. Its markings could never be captured by a digital mechanism.

  After Kerryn died, I bought a scanner. Over the past thirty days, I have digitised the letters she sent me, the birthday cards she kept in shoeboxes, and also the recipe book, including the sticky-notes I found caught between its pages. I am worried that these pages might fade, or disappear.

  On the Friday night after Kerryn’s mother died, we defrosted the last supply of chicken soup that she had made before going into hospital. The family consumed it as though it were the flesh of their mother.

  I know that in the years to come, my children and I will turn to Kerryn’s recipe book to preserve her memory, to recreate the dishes she collected, and to feel that we are consuming a part of her as in a ritual of resurrection.

  So what was I to do with the Facebook page she had appointed me to preserve, despite her protestations that she didn’t care about the fate of her timeline?

  My first reaction was to reciprocate by inviting her to be my Legacy Contact. It seemed the proper thing to do, pretending that we were on an equal footing in matters of death. She accepted. Once she was gone, I would have to appoint a replacement.

  The last thing posted on her Facebook page was a message from me, sent from the hospice the day before she died. It was an exception to my vow of not showing photos of Kerryn after chemotherapy: the video of a ‘farewell’ speech she had given two months earlier at our son’s engagement party, accompanied by a message from me.

  ‘This is how we want to remember our Kerryn—vibrant, brave, witty, joyous, wise, loving, living. We love you, Kerryn, now and forever.’

  By that time, Facebook was offering a range of emoticons, so the Likes poured in by the hundreds, in the shape of hearts and tearful round-faces. People were requesting to ‘friend’ Kerryn. Using her phone, I accepted the requests, until the children told me that my acting as Mum was weird and that I should stop.

  What was I to do? I could delete the page, ignore it, or exercise the option she had sent me to transform it into a Legacy page. I quickly re-read the instructions. I clicked a button and wrote that my wife had died.

  Within hours, a Facebook representative sent me condolences and, when I checked Kerryn’s page, a single word had been added before her name on the profile banner.

  Remembering

  The virtual living Kerryn had been turned into a memory, a legacy. Her birthday would never again pop up as a reminder to friends. I was confused. Was that a good or a bad thing? Would I even want to add a year to her age on her birthday?

  As her delegate, I was left with the power to select her profile picture and the message on the top of the page. Other than that, I had surrendered control of her page.

  At first, it appeared to be the right choice. We posted the eulogies given at her funeral and at our home during the shiva. But then people started sending messages—‘I miss you my friend’—or posting cartoons that expressed sorrow.

  No, I wanted to scream. Wasn’t it my job as Kerryn’s delegate to manipulate the order of our postings? Only I had the right to add to her timeline.

  I wrote a message to the official who had presumably activated the legacy format. I asked to have more control over the page, or to restore the status quo that would allow me to manage or delete Kerryn’s profile page.

  ‘We will look into it,’ I was told.

  No one ever answered.

  I wrote numerous times, pointing out that when I wanted to hide someone’s post, a message came up saying that only Kerryn Baker could make changes.

  Couldn’t they see the ridiculousness of it all? In a moment of frustration, I wrote to Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, whose husband had recently died. Surely she would understand the hurt I was experiencing? I said I was prepared to get on a plane to Silicon Valley to issue my complaint in person and retrieve Kerryn’s Facebook page.

  Then a friend said: ‘Mark. You’re being irrational. It’s a living page. You can’t own Kerryn’s memory. Other friends want to grieve. Let the page evolve. It’s only Facebook.’

  I realised that, just as I was shutting my own friends out of my life, I was trying to do the same on Kerryn’s page. She had already told me: ‘I don’t care what happens to my page.’

  So I took her advice, and stopped caring.

  Voice message from Kerryn, 7 July 2015, 9.09 a.m.

  Marky, the lights are on in the front garden.

  Can you turn them off and bring the paper in.

  Marky, the lights are on in the front garden.

  Can you turn them off and bring the paper in.

  Marky, the lights are on in the front garden.

  Can you turn them off and bring the paper in.

  Note to self:

  I must not listen to that again.

  I must not listen to that again.

  I must not listen to that again.

  Contents of Kerryn’s handbag taken from hospice on 15 March 2016:

  Eclipse mints

  Nail file

  Lip gloss

  2 silver necklaces in blue pouch, purchased for Sarah and Rachel

  Cabrini business card, Oncologist

  Cabrini business card, Director of Palliative Services

  Sunglasses

  iPhone earbuds

  Tissue pack

  Cloth kerchief with red hearts

  Pen

  I arrange them in a circle.

  Rise, golem, rise!

 
; It is written that after the Maharal created his golem, his creature obeyed his master and protected the Prague ghetto from attacks by marauders. But after a time, the golem resisted his role as servant and turned on his creator. He swung his axe at anyone who stood in his way—even those he loved.

  The Maharal looked up at the heavens and spoke to God: ‘Now I understand why you had to exile Adam and Eve from your garden.’

  And so he devised a plot to capture the golem while he was sleeping. He tied him down and erased the first letter in the word EMET—TRUTH. Without the aleph, all that was left on the golem’s forehead was MET—DEATH.

  He dragged the lifeless golem into an attic at the top of the Old New synagogue, where to this day his remains are hidden in the darkness, waiting for someone to revive him.

  We didn’t need a scan to know that the cancer was breaking through again. The toxic fluid was distending Kerryn’s stomach out of proportion with her emaciated arms and legs.

  ‘I always wanted thin legs,’ she joked.

  Her stomach was drained via a needle. In a closet-sized room, I watched from a chair as the viscous substance filled two litre bags. Within a week, Kerryn said she felt like she was six months pregnant. This time, the draining process filled three litre bags.

  It was time for second-line treatment.

  ‘What happens when you get to third-line?’ I asked some of the doctors.

  They didn’t answer.

  I was cynical about language that portrayed cancer as a battlefront, a military manoeuvre that could be defeated by a battalion of soldiers. In private stomach-cancer groups on Facebook, the patients were described by their carers as warriors. The pages were filled with either photographs of skeletal bodies lying in hospital beds or miracle stories of survival, most of them accompanied by Christian messages of salvation. I urged Kerryn not to look at social media for information.

  The other side of the coin is that cancer patients are also endowed with an angelic aura—magical powers are attributed to the dying, like a bride throwing her bouquet, bringing blessings to the catcher. Friends turned to Kerryn as though she was a spiritual guru dispensing advice from another world. And to be fair, she played that role perfectly, drawing on her natural skills as a listener, a counsellor and a loyal friend with a lifelong reputation for kindness and compassion.