I woke at dawn, beset by bird life: galahs, cockatoos, King parrots, rainbow lorikeets, magpies and currawongs all yelling their fool heads off just outside my window.

I’m staying with Jane. She and Darcy and the twins live in one of the lovely old Federation brick houses on the hill above the river. Her spare room is vast, with a high ceiling and a glowing wooden floor and nothing in it but a shelf and a bed, and it opens onto an east-facing verandah. It is so exactly the quiet refuge that I need that when I saw it I was struck dumb. No idea how I can ever thank Jane and her family.

Quiet, that is, except at dawn, with the birds.

I sat on the verandah and glared at the birds and called Jeremy as the sun rose. When Darcy and Jane came out for coffee their dog Chicken came too. She’s a Scottish staghound but she looks a little like the Anatolian shepherds I saw in Turkey and a little like a wolf. She’s bigger than I am. I cleared off the sofa I was sitting on and Chicken kissed me and put her arms around me and her hairy cheek against my face.

“She was bred as a pig dog,” Jane explained. “She could track the pigs and hold the pigs at bay, but she just didn’t want to kill them. They even gave her some piglets -”

“To tear apart?”

“Yeah that was the idea, but she played with them instead. When I heard that, I knew she was the dog for me.”

How do people get through this without animals? Sarah picked me up and I went to Henry Street to snuggle with the creatures there: four dogs (Jake, Peppa, Jess and Toby) and three cats (Oskie, Missy, Tiz). I always thought it would be me with the menagerie.

When we got to the hospital Mum demanded mahjongg. Big had forgotten the rules but not so much that he didn’t win the third game, after Sarah won the first and Mum won the second.

My brother and I arrived to find Mum with her pain under control: radiant with delight at the sight of us, quick to laugh, interested in everything. The palliative care room is beautiful, with a sofa for guests and a door onto a patio. We brought in the quilt that Mum’s friends at the Claypan made for her and it lights up the space.

We talked and talked.

Me: “I asked Dad what he liked most about the years you two were traveling, and he said: ‘Lizards.'”

We all fall about.

Big: “…although lizards are cool.”

Me: “They are!”

Sarah: “Remember the big goanna in Townsville?”

Mum: “With the plastic bag?”

Sarah: “That was amazing.”

Me: “I don’t know this story!”

Sarah: “This goanna – he was huge, like three or four feet long – apparently he hung around the picnic ground a lot, and the day we were there he turned up with a shopping bag wrapped around his head and caught in his jaw.

“So Dad lay down on the grass and the goanna, this wild goanna, it came up to him.

“Everyone in the picnic ground stopped talking. Dad carefully unwound the bag, and the goanna opened his mouth and let Dad lift it off his teeth. Everyone was staring. You could have heard a pin drop.”

Me: “WHY. ARE THERE. NO PICTURES.”

Mum: “We were just caught up in the moment.”

Sarah: “This was before people had cameras all the time. The thing could have savaged Dad. I remember it as being four or five feet -”

Mum, laughing: “Not THAT big -”

Sarah: “No, but in my memory, it’s a Komodo dragon, you know, dripping blood off its teeth.”

Me: “With WINGS.”

Big: “Breathing FIRE.”

(Dad blogged it!)

I found out when I called Mum as we transited in New Zealand. “How are you?” “Not so good.”

I kept it together for her but when I hung up I folded in half, making noises I had never heard myself make before.

My poor daughters, aged 11 and 8, helping my husband to hold me up.

—–

Things are proceeding rapidly. It is probably not as much as two months now. Mum’s in the palliative care room at the hospital across the road from her house. Sarah believes I will get to her in time, but admits she’s glad I rebooked on an earlier flight.

——

Mum just turned 78 and I will be 43 next month. We have had a fine, long run. We have travelled together in Australia and Ireland and England and America. She is the only other person who attended both my graduations, my wedding and the births of my children. The years since I had Claire and realized exactly how much my mother loves me have been our best years, years of profound mutual affection and happiness and peace.

None of which reconciles me to her loss.

—–

It is like birth in several ways: we wish to avoid overly medicalizing things, but we’re not opposed to the judicious use of drugs; it is a passage to another state; to overgeneralize only a little, the women get practical, if weepy, while men try to compartmentalize and problem solve; we can’t really imagine or understand what’s going on, and we probably never will.

But there’s no baby at the end.

—–

I said to Jack: “I’m mostly okay, except for the bouts of ugly crying.”

—–

This entry is All About Me, and I apologize. I am in the gate lounge at San Francisco, ready to leave, having spent almost exactly three and a half days in California. When I reach Mum’s bedside tomorrow I will tell you some more about what an excellent person she is. She’s just lovely.

I was telling her about how much the cat has benefited from her new heating pad. “I know!” I said. “I’ll get YOU a heating pad!”

“That does sound nice,” said Mum. It’s a hundred degrees in the shade in Barraba.

Also I apologized for all the times I was a crappy daughter.

“You were never a crappy daughter,” she said. “Oh, except when you were dating Pig Boy.” Pig Boy is our pet name for a certain ex-boyfriend.

“His feet were too big,” said Mum.

“Your SONS have big feet,” said Sarah.

“That’s totally different. They’re my sons.”

Two to four months.

Another mixed year in my reading life. I read a lot of books by comedians, which are fine to keep your eyes moving when the world is falling down around you. I read a number of multi-generational sagas and a number of books set in 21st century New York, choices that reflect publishing industry trends more than my personal tastes. I did better with audiobooks, especially after I acquired an hour-long commute. I read as much good escapism as I could lay my hands on.

Of the 147 or so books I read this year, here are my favourites. Can’t help noticing that only one of these was written by a man. Get it together, dudes.

Fiction

We are in Barraba, staying in the Playhouse Hotel. This morning Jeremy, Andrew and I had a mighty argument about Harold Pinter over freshly baked croissants. My mother is frail but valiant. My sister is a force of nature. We swim every day and galahs fly overhead, having a bloody good time. There is too much Baileys and Christmas cake with marzipan and icing. Today Julia won mahjongg thrice.

Both are structured in threes. Beowulf fights Grendel, Grendel’s mother, the dragon. Janie marries Logan Killick, Joe Starks and Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods. Both are punctuated by funerals: Scyld, Hyldeburh, Beowulf; the yellow mule, Joe, Tea Cake. Beowulf seeks and attains honor. Janie searches for and finds love like the pear tree in bloom, and then it is taken from her.

What a year, eh? I said goodbye to Bella and to Jackson; they’re both knee deep in clover, eating their adorable heads off. Dad’s a little worse, Mum’s much better. I called her during her birthday party yesterday. We get another Christmas in Barraba with mah jongg and too much marzipan and Baileys. After that, who knows? Claire and Julia are happy at their respective schools, although they don’t like doing homework, an attitude I am not necessarily helping to overcome when I mutter to them that “Homework is boring.” Although I did vow before I had them never to lie to them, so.

A crowd of us piled into my living room yesterday to drink tea and champagne and watch spellbound the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, and it could have been written for me, it touched so many of my id vortices: my older and younger selves trying to reconcile with one another, not necessarily in chronological order; my rampant survivor guilt. Plus it soared over the Bechdel test and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart is probably my favourite character in the entire canon, because Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is my mental model for the grandfather who died three weeks before I was born. And then the curator came in, and I said: “I know that voice.”

Fall is the most beautiful season in San Francisco and the city has never been more spectacularly lovely. We hiked around McLaren Park, which is like having Golden Gate Park almost entirely to yourself. In a meadow studded with daisies we were struck dumb by a great blue heron that took off and soared right over our heads. Last night on our way to and from her swim lesson, Julia and I gazed at the Golden Gate Bridge just before and just after sunset. Your mind cannot comprehend the scale of it, not even when you have seen it a hundred times. “Did we build it to there or did they build it to us?” she asked. “We started at both ends and met in the middle,” I said. She said: “Oh my.” This morning as Claire and I ran over the hill and back along Precita, the morning sun slanted across the dewy grass in the Coso triangle and made it sparkle.

Things I will miss about Jackson the horse as he enters his well-deserved retirement, a non-exhaustive list:

That he likes to shake his head when I take the headcollar off, and if I let him do that, he will stand quietly while I put his bridle on.

That he likes to stand for a moment when coming out of the shed row to let his eyes adjust to the sunlight.

The way he showed me how to sit in the saddle.

The way he talked to me through the reins.

The way he would reach forward with his outside hind to step forward in a perfect canter depart.

The way he would swagger when he’d jumped a perfect round, swinging his back and showing off. “I’m a good horse!”

The way he grew another four inches at the show, so proud and happy to be there.

The way he would turn around and put his nose on my boot when he needed reassurance.

The way he would neigh crossly if I stopped to pat Zelda the barn cat before paying attention to him.

The way he would press his nose into my back when I gave him cuddles, cuddling me back.

Going through security in Auckland International for the, what, twentysomethingth time this year? I thought, plaintively: I want to go home. But I could not work out what I meant by the word home.

Sydney is very much itself: glary and humid with a gusty breeze; the loud billboards and cheap furniture importers all along O’Riordon Street, and beyond them glimpses of tree-lined streets with nineteenth-century terraces; the lorikeets screaming; the coffee delectable.

Mum has responded well to her treatment and is eating better. Sarah has been a brilliant caregiver. But they are both sick to death of being so far from home. On Friday we will all pack up and go back to Barraba.

First let me say that Mum is in Sydney responding well to treatment and feeling much better, and that I will see her on Wednesday.

Still, though. One of the other great narrative arcs of 2013 is Jackson The Horse And Me: A Love Story. When I rode him on Sunday he was okay on the flat but so clearly uncomfortable over fences that we put him over a crossrail and let it go at that. Today when I turned up to ride, he was in his stall. Toni said he has a contusion injury on his suspensory ligament.

“They let us know when it’s time,” she said. “If he was in full work and this happened, you’d say, oh well. But he pretty much only works with you, so if he’s banging himself up under so little work…”

“I know,” I said, and I do: this whole past year I have been acutely aware that he’s a none-too-sound nineteen-year-old Thoroughbred. They’re going to see how he looks after a week of stall rest and hand walking, but he’s not going to be around forever.

Worse, much worse, is this news out of Ariad Pharmaceuticals. Beth, who is the reason I am at McIntosh Stables and whose horse Austin is the best horse who ever lived, was on the first human trial of Iclusig. The drug is keeping her alive. God forbid that the FDA withdraw it.

“The last four years have been a gift,” she said this morning. Damn straight. Every minute, every second of it.

I rode Olive, a dead ringer for the horse of my dreams. She is amazing.

“You have natural feel,” said my instructor, Avi, and I laughed my head off.

“Does it still count as natural if I’ve been working on it for years and years and years?”

I find a note she wrote me:

“For Rachel
Gwen Harwood
Poet
Bone Scan”

She doesn’t even remember writing it.

I look it up and find:

In the twinkling of an eye,
in a moment, all is changed:
on a small radiant screen
(honeydew melon green)
are my scintillating bones.
Still in my flesh I see
the God who goes with me
glowing with radioactive
isotopes. This is what he
at last allows a mortal
eye to behold: the grand
supporting frame complete
(but for the wisdom teeth)
the friend who lives beneath
appearances, alive
with light. Each glittering bone
assures me: you are known.

…at her new school, so completely San Francisco that it started with a drum circle. There was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new community center, then the traditional school opening ceremony with music and singing, and for the first time there was a space big enough for all the parents to attend.

The first graders looked so wee, and the eighth graders so hulking. I hope Claire makes friends; I hope they love her for her shiny awesome; I hope she is happy.

I thought, a school like this would have changed my mother’s life.

the booming trade of information

exists without our paid labor

what to do with all this leisure

I blink at my orange trees

spangled with captions,

landscapes overlaid

with golden apps and speculation

nudging hope like the sham

time machinist who returns from

the future, convincing

everyone with his doctored

snapshots of restored

prosperity and a sea full

of whales huge as ocean liners

singing the call-note of our
relieved tears.

All of you who have texted or DMed or emailed or called; all of you who saw me and gave me a big hug; all of you who came to dinner and brought your kids and dogs; who dragged me out to ride; who said how sorry you are and what a shitty thing it is (it is); who sent flowers; who listened or held me while I raged and cried: all of you. I do not know how I would have gotten through the week without you. What did I ever do to deserve you all? Thank you.

My mum is brave as a lion, which we knew. My sister is magnificent. I wish they didn’t have to be.

My mum has cancer.

I dreamed that we and everyone we know had been drawn into a large corporate cult. We walked around the glassed atrium of a sandstone building with excellent natural light. I kept running up to friends – Shannon Lee, Shannon Engelbrecht – and saying “Cult! Cult!” They’d nod gravely but edge away from me.

I found a terminal and tried to message Jeremy, but the screen said: “Blocked.” I saw someone leading the a group of children outside, Claire and Julia among them, and I ran after them calling their names, but they had been told to ignore me.

I woke up in a panic. The cult is life itself, and when you notice that it is a cult: that is death.

Don’t listen to me, listen to Zed:

Suppose you have a job that was once the job of your dreams, but which for several years has ceased to feed your soul. What do you do? If you’re me, you accidentally read three books that form a strange, powerful trilogy.

The first book describes a young man who is paralyzed in an accident, and who goes on to become a yoga teacher. It speaks to you for months before you understand what it is trying to say: that some large part of your self, though you can’t feel it, is still part of you, and that you have ignored it for too long. The second book describes your predicament in more detail, the writer having dwelt there in the darkness herself, and gives you a passphrase that might open an occult door: “radical self-possession.”

And then you might pick up the third book, this book, which is so simply written that you might be deceived into thinking that it is simple. It is not. In fact, it recaps the earlier material:

Yat also talked about people who were cut off from sensing areas of themselves. ‘He has no arms,’ he would say, or ‘She has no legs,’ and you could see what he meant.

A ‘guru’ doesn’t necessarily teach at all. Some remain speechless for years, others communicate very cryptically. All reassure by example. They are people who have been into the forbidden areas and who have survived unscathed.

Then it goes off in an altogether unexpected and impossible-to-paraphrase direction.

A story is as difficult to interpret as a dream…

This is the book that pioneered “Yes, and…”, the improv technique in which actors do not block one another’s offers but accept and build upon them. Doing this in the large, between actors, helps people do it in the small, with the many different voices in their heads. The walls come down and the energy flows in and out of the walled-off places. I can feel the blood running through my whole body. I can feel sleeping parts of my brain coming online. I can feel where I am blocking Jackson, and feel how to let go, and feel the energy flowing between us.

The titles in my accidental trilogy, by the way, are Waking, Depression and Impro. This amuses me.

My new job is great. And even if it all goes cattywumpus, it was worth it just to make the change.

I kinda wanna copy out the whole first chapter, but will restrain myself somehow –

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I’d lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age – just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn’t understand that clarity is in the mind.

On Gifted And Talented Education (GATE) as the gateway drug to being a massive douche:

I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me. I tried to be clever in everything I did.

On school as trauma:

My ‘failure’ was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now.

On the importance of writing about something other than what one has read – ironically, the exact opposite of what I am doing here:

I had expected that there’d be a very gentle gradation from awful to excellent, and that I’d be involved in a lot of heart-searching. Almost all were total failures – they couldn’t have been put on in the village hall for the author’s friends. It wasn’t a matter of lack of talent, but of miseducation. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life.

On aging disgracefully:

I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children.

Reminds me of something – what was it – oh right –

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy…