I wrote this piece about Lucy, a paramedic, that appears in today’s The Sunday Age newspaper.
Tag Archives: grief
Jeremiah Jan
She sits in the waiting room, reading. Any patient who enjoys a good read will enter my consulting room in a good mood. I do allow my patients time for a very good read.
The book she reads from is thick, with old-fashioned morocco covers and red-tipped pages. Looks like the Bible! She doesn’t look mortally ill. Perhaps she’s mortally afraid of the new young doctor.
‘Good morning, my name’s Howard.’
We shake hands. Her hand is fair, a youngish hand. The owner of the hand says, ‘Hello, I’m Jan.’
‘You’re reading the Bible? Which book?’
‘Jeremiah.’
Jeremiah the cheerless, prophet of doom, a man willing to be jailed for speaking truth to power. Serious reading. Might have been worse, could have been Job.
The serious reader sits down. She speaks: ‘Howard, I’ve come for a talk. I don’t need a diagnosis; if I want a diagnosis I’ll see Doctor Don. I don’t need a diagnosis, I need a talk.’
We have our talk.
Another visit by Jan, another long period in the reading room. Eventually I show her in. We are only about ten minutes into today’s talk when the phone interrupts us: ‘Howard, Doctor Don needs you in the Treatment Room. Now!’
‘Gotta go, Jan. Sorry.’
I go.
When I return, after about twenty five minutes, I resume: ‘So, Jan, you were about seven when…’
‘Howard, you can’t just do this.’
‘Do what, Jan?’
‘Take up our conversation without a break, as if nothing terrible or significant has just happened.’
‘Can’t I? Why not?’
‘You need time, some space. You need to come to terms with whatever it was that was so urgent. You are a person too, Howard.’
In my consulting room, situated at the furthest end of the building from the Treatment Room, Jan would not have seen the frantic mother, the pale plump doll that was the baby, the child inert, lifeless. She would not have felt the body still warm, not seen two adult males breathing desperate air into a new body that would not breathe again. She would not have seen the face of the mother passing through shock to grief to the start of lifelong self-accusation.
Did she perhaps hear sounds of stifled sobs?
Many chapters of Jeremiah and of Job have been read in the thirty-five years since that day. I remember the child, I have not forgotten the mother.
Nor have I forgotten Jan’s instruction.
Robert Hillman’s Review of Carrots and Jaffas
Identical, red-haired twin boys are born to Luisa and Bernard Wanklyn, who live in Melbourne. The year is somewhere in the fairly recent past. Since we’re in Australia, the twins are naturally nicknamed Carrots and Jaffas, the only alternatives being Bluey and Ranga. Luisa, the mother, is a native of Argentina; Bernard was born in Australia. When the boys reach the age of ten, Wilberforce Reynolds, an addled one-time addict, makes an attempt to steal them from their parents. There’s a bleak irony there – ‘William Wilberforce’ and ‘Henry Reynolds’ being the names of emancipators. Indeed, Wilbur Reynolds is acting out of a grotesquely misconceived impulse to redeem a life of ratbag behaviour by making a gift of the two boys to Greta, an Indigenous woman of the Flinders Ranges who played a role in raising white Wilbur many years past. Greta’s own two sons had been taken from her in the 1950s by men with the legal authority to do so. The two red-haired boys will compensate her, so Wilbur hopes. But Wilbur manages to steal only one of the boys, Jaffas. The agony of Jaffa’s parents is matched in its intensity by the agony of the twins, each left yearning for the touch of the other.
The impression the reader will be left with after a quick reading of Howard’s novel is of a drama constructed around an appalling crime and its widening repercussions. Hearts are torn out, and in the broader community, people who hear of the abduction on the news put a hand to the head and murmur: “Dear God!” But the story told here is far more thoughtful, far more involving than that. As it was bound to be. This is Howard Goldenberg’s first novel, but two works of non-fiction precede it, “My Father’s Compass”, a memoir of Myer Goldenberg, Howard’s dad, and “Raft”, a book that records Howard’s engagement as a doctor with Indigenous Australians in remote communities all over the continent. Each of these earlier books is distinguished by the vernacular philosophy of a thriving intellect, and by a quality of observation that yields one poetic insight after another. If we speak of intensity of feeling, insight and quality of enquiry, Carrots and Jaffas is of a piece with those earlier works.
The broad strategy of the novel, in my reading, is to allow the story to unfold through five movements – Birth, Growth, Catastrophe, Healing, Reunion. With this strategy in place, Howard gives himself the liberty to riff on the themes that brace his story: the binding force of love; the rigour of grief; the perseverance of hope; the will and the wherewithal to imagine the life we hope for, and especially, what we expose ourselves to when another human being becomes more crucial in our vital life than our own wellbeing. (We might think of Bacon’s Hostages to Fortune lines: “He who hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune” but we should cheer Bacon up a little and subvert his meaning by saying: “Anyone who loves has given hostages to fortune.”)
Out of these themes emerge the book’s two arguments. The first establishes the enigma of individuality, taking in the sources and purpose of human individuality, and the second demonstrates the stubborn persistence of those forces in the world that oppose evil.
Let me return to love, the great emphasis in everything that Howard writes. Here is the mother of the twins experiencing the growth of love for her newly born, prematurely born children:
Luisa laughed the laughter of tenderness and body fluids, of manic collapse, of sleepless necessity.
On an impulse, or in forgetfulness or in simple exhaustion of thought, Luisa picked up both babies at once…offered each baby a breast. Both sucked….two small heads swiveled and searched, bony limbs extended, antennae into the void. One arm, flung outwards, came to rest on a brother’s shoulder. Gazes locked, spines unarched, mouths resumed sucking, smoothly, to satiety.
This conveys the growth of love of a mother for her children, and also the dependence of each twin on the other. Carrots and Jaffas cannot satisfy themselves individually; both must be satisfied together.
Later, Bernard, the father, in his quest to grasp what being the father of two children who can barely be differentiated involves, quotes from a poem on the subject of identical twins:
“The twins retain/intimate knowledge of each other,/ Theirs alone-/Of mind and body and being –/a knowledge preceding speech,/Transcending speech: Knowledge subtle as song,/Deep as the womb,/Pure as echo./Identical twins: One? Two? One?”
I wrote an endorsement for Carrots and Jaffas before its publication, and said this, amongst other things: “Howard Goldenberg’s story of identical twins, violently parted at the age of ten, reveals the hunger that dwells in all of us to stand distinct in the gaze of God.” To achieve that distinction in the gaze of God is our human struggle; to demonstrate that we cannot be packed by the gross; that we are marked with an individuality that honours, in its way, the teeming variety of life in the world. Think of Hopkins poem, “Pied Beauty” in which God delights in “All things counter, original, spare, strange…”But for Carrots and Jaffas, that struggle for originality is over at birth, or even at conception. The gaze of God is the gaze of the identical twin. The suggestion of Howard’s book is that the mystique of the identical twin is closely related to the mystery of divinity in our lives. We are unlikely ever to know what the identical twin knows, and unlikely ever to know what God knows. But one thing we can know is this: God is Himself, Herself an identical twin.
Wilberforce Reynolds parts Carrots and Jaffas. He hadn’t meant to. He had intended to steal both boys. It is a feature of acts of violence that they often do even greater harm that the perpetrator intended. Wilbur’s hope is that he will win the approval of a woman, Greta, who suffered the theft of her own two boys. In Archie Roach’s haunting song, “Took the Children Away”, Archie says: “You took the children away, The children away. Breaking their mother’s heart, Tearing us all apart, Took them away.” Those who took away Indigenous children decades ago knew that they were causing grief, but felt that a greater good justified the harm. And this is also Wilbur’s rationalisation.
My head will be right, doing this good thing…it’s the right thing to do, to bring kids, to steal them and replace kids stolen from blackfellers.
Howard makes very clear that Wilbur’s failure of imagination re-enacts the failure of imagination of those who had conceived the scheme of parting Indigenous parents from their children so much earlier. Jaffas, after his abduction, cries out in his anguish: “Run! Run back to Carrots! Run!” and we think of Leah Purcell’s song, ‘Run, Daisy, Run!’
Jaffas finds himself in the care of Greta and the white Doctor Burns up in the Flinders Ranges, the oldest place on earth. The creation of each of these characters are amongst the finest accomplishments of the novel. This Healing movement of the book sees Greta revealing to the traumatised Jaffas stories of the land, of her country, while the Doc contributes tales of scientific discoveries, of Indigenous distress, of the land as understood by a white man. Neither the Doc nor Greta know the true story of Jaffas abduction; Wilbur had spun a plausible tale to explain why he was leaving the boy with Greta. The Doc begins to suspect that Wilbur’s story is rubbish, and he wonders whether Wilbur’s real motivation has something to do with Greta’s past. He asks her, one day, about that past:
My boys, they take my two boys. Never come back. I reckon they big fellas now, fathers. Maybe grandfather. I never see them. Maybe they die, maybe they just lost….That what happen. That what they do. Steal ‘em…
But back at Jaffas home, his brother is tearing himself apart with grief, while his mother, Luisa, torments herself with stories of the unspeakable things done to other abducted twins by a certain Doctor Mengele during the Second World War. The strong suggestion is that Luisa, herself a one-time victim of hideous violence under the Junta in Argentina, will go mad if she is never to see Jaffas again. I spoke earlier of those forces in the world that oppose evil, and of their power. While Luisa is losing her mind, guarding her remaining son with a maniacal determination, Greta and the Doc are painstakingly rebuilding hope in the abducted Jaffas, mending, healing. In the oldest region of the earth, the aged (and Doc Burns is no longer a young man, nor Greta a young woman) dispense hope and love to the young.
Howard Goldenberg’s novel brims with suggestion, as a novel should. And the suggestion I want to make a big deal out of is this: that love, human love, is the finest accomplishment of the imagination. Maybe it is too easy to use a word like ‘evil’ and expect that everyone agrees about what evil is. But we do know what ‘wrong’ is. It is wrong to snatch a child from the street and drive away on some mongrel errand. It is wrong to wrench children in their thousands from the embrace of their parents on some state-sponsored mongrel errand of larger scale. It is wrong to gather people in their millions into camps, reduce their existence to wretchedness, then murder them. To do wrong requires no imagination at all; merely malice or egocentricity. To do good requires imagination. The Doc and Greta imagine the path to recovery that Jaffas might follow, then urge him along it. Their imagination stands in strong distinction to Wilbur’s crude lack of imagination.
Howard Goldenberg’s book is itself the product of a fine, creative imagination, and of a big heart. Like all such works of literary art, Carrots and Jaffas adds a welcome something to our chances in the world.
Robert Hillman is the renowned author of sixty books, including “The Rugmaker of Mazr a Sharif ” (Wild Dingo Press). His most recent works are the celebrated novel, “Joyful” (Text, 2014), and a young adult novel, “Malini” (Allen and Unwin, 2014)
Robert launched Carrots and Jaffas at the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2014 with his speech above.
‘Joyful’ by Robert Hillman – A Review
There’s a CD I listen to when I want to write about something serious or something true or sad. It is Disc Two of ‘Dirt Music’, the album compiled by Tim Winton and Lucky Oceans to accompany Winton’s great and sad book of that name. Two tracks on the disc speak from the darkest room in the house of sorrow. (I refer to Sculthorpe’s ‘Dijille’ and to ‘Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten’ by Arvo Part). The grief is absolute. It neither cries nor shouts nor tears its hair out. It simply quivers and ultimately exhausts itself and lapses into barely audible human breaths. And thus into harmony with life. The experience leaves me quiet, reconciled – I suppose – by sheer truth. And beauty.
What has that to do with Robert Hillman’s new book, “Joyful”? I read a passage in the later part of the novel where a character who has lost his only two children weeps silently in the utter darkness of a room in the mansion that gives the book its name. His quivering presence is sensed by his host, Leon Joyce, owner of “Joyful”. Joyce, who has been observing his own prolonged season of bottomless grief, stands, wordless and motionless. The weeping one comes to realise he is not alone. Each sorrows in silence, both men understand. No sign, no word. But something beyond words is known: the two men and the grateful reader make their way from that room in “Joyful” somehow reconciled to loss. And that is what Hillman’s book is about – its chief theme – how we humans risk all and lose all when we (inevitably) invest in passion.
Robert Hillman is not famous for misery, any more than Winton. The misery is there in the book as it is in life. But “Joyful” is also a story of the greatest vitality, the most audacious imagination, the most original characters, (from the carnal priest who absolves himself habitually, to Dally the Wordsworth-loving Iraqi Kurd, to the sexually hyperactive Tess, to the hapless Emily who cannot love any man who loves her, to the world-weary, gusset-guzzling, false-poet Daniel.) And the book is full of gems from the bowels of Hillman’s imagination that made me roar with unexpected belly laughing.
I defy the reader to get through “Joyful” without shedding tears of mirth and tears of joy. In short, I like it. I admire it. I respect it, I envy it, I treasure it. I’ll remember it.
“Joyful’s” characters are destined to live in memory alongside Winton’s Fish and Lamb families that emerged from “Cloudstreet” and took up lodging in a nation’s treasury.
Text published “joyful.” Howard Goldenberg will launch it at Readings in Carlton at 6.30 pm on Wednesday 7 May. Please come along.
The Big Issue Review of Carrots and Jaffas
The Big Issue 17 April 2014
Consider Phillip
Consider Phillip. He lies in his hospital bed, a person unknown. Deep in the stupefaction of alcohol he lies as one asleep. Possibly he is asleep.
I stand silently and watch Phillip and I consider him.
The police were alarmed when he vomited violently in their lockup. They called the ambulance that brought him to my one-doctor hospital. The nurses, veterans in the management of all forms of intoxication, called me, troubled by his scatterings of impulse, his wildly fluctuating state of mind and mindlessness.
I arrive to find a thin man of twenty-five lying on his side, inert. His body has curled into the position of a foetus in a textbook. Phillip’s narrow face, tapering downwards to a thin chin and a Ho Chi Minh beard, buries itself in a pillow. His eyes are closed.
I address him: “Phillip.”
No answer.
“Phillip. Phillip!”
Not a flicker.
“Phillip, I’m the doctor. I’ve come to help you…Phillip!”
Only minutes before my arrival the nurses found Phillip conscious and verbal. One moment he was weeping for the death earlier in the day of an aunty in his hometown on a nearby island; the next he was wolfing the sardine sandwiches the nurses prepared for him.
Now he is immobile, unhearing, a narrow form, a closed face, a straggle of black beard.
In these parts the death of “an aunty” can signify unbearable loss. And the access to alcohol can trigger irresistible impulse to harm.
I stand and consider Phillip.
Do I leave him lie – the chicken option? Or stir him up, revisit loss, possibly unleash the grog-drugged demons?
“Phillip, show me your tongue.”
Eyelids flicker, the eyes open. A mute question on a busy face: What – show my tongue?
“Phillip, I am the doctor. Please show me your tongue.”
Lips part, a pink lizard shows itself and retreats. Now it crawls from its dark cave and rests, clean, a healthy pink. But dry.
Phillip’s chart records a low blood pressure reading. Less than 100/60, it might betoken the relaxant action of alcohol on blood vessels. Equally such a reading might simply reflect his norm, his youthful good health. He’s a stranger here. We don’t know his normal BP. And it matters.
Abruptly Phillip sits up in bed. A pillow goes flying, bedclothes are flung aside. Phillip’s scrawny arm reaches behind his back, deep into his undies. He scratches furiously. He looks around. A wildness in his movements. He lies down and begins to whimper. He buries his head in the crook of an arm and weeps now, regular little bleating sounds, a child giving way to grief. Before I arrived, the nurses tell me, Phillip squatted on the floor, folded his head in to his torso, his body a concertina; at the same time he drew his arms against his chest and his fingers into the attitude of prayer – the nurses were taken by the strange gracefulness of his fingers – and he began to cry.
This second weeping exhausts itself. Quietness falls in the darkened room.
Without warning Phillip’s fingers race around his belly, scratching in a frenzy. Now they plunge to his undies and pull them down, exposing a circumcised member. Meanwhile my own hands yank bedclothes upwards to restore what? – dignity? – modesty? For the exhibition is so insistent, so obscure, so confusing, I feel alarmed and I am sure my alarm is for the women around me, anxiety occasioned by the actions of the thin man in the bed, actions quicker than thought, movements without reason or purpose. As the bedclothes jump and subside before me I am reminded of the inscrutable movements of the unborn. And indeed there is much that is infantine about Phillip, his way of looking at and into the attending nurse or at me, his helplessness, his mute, unknowing enquiry, his submission to tenderness.
I decide on an intravenous saline infusion to rehydrate Phillip, to wash out the grog and to lift his BP. And not incidentally, to provide immediate access to a vein in case of urgent need. I am thinking of sedation that might short-circuit a fatal impulse. On the other hand, sedation can further lower a low pressure and depress grogged breathing.
First I have to sell the deal. Phillip is (still) a voluntary patient of whom involuntary treatment would be assault.
“Phillip, we’re going to give your body a drink. We’re going to put a needle in your vein so we can make you feel better.”
The busy face, thinking what?
“We’ll put a needle in here.”
Phillip looks at the finger I have placed on his arm vein as at something mystic.
Nurses bring the gear for a drip. The nurses who are due to go off duty do not go. Every able bodied person in the hospital gathers around Phillip. No-one has expressed it but all of us feel anything might happen.
The sharp trochar pricks Phillip’s cubital skin. Beneath my sentinel palm that rests gently on his shoulder I feel his muscles bunch. Now his hand flies up towards the face of the cannulating nurse. Her face tightens and darkens, her voice finds steel: Don’t. You. Think. Of It.
A moment that freezes. Ten eyes stare, Phillip subsides, we breathe out.
“Midazolam, 2.5 milligrams, now!” My command is a whispered shout. Moments later Phillip is sedated, leaving nurses and doctor unsedately measuring blood pressure and monitoring respirations.
Two hours later the nurse in command calls me, apologising needlessly: “Phillip is agitated again, should we repeat the sedation?”
“Should we? We have to!”
Incidentally the nurse’s midnight enquiries to the clinic on Phillip’s island confirm that his BP is always low. The pressure of a healthy child.
Sleep will not come. The eye in memory sees a teenager, crazed, sad, helpless, feeling everything, understanding nothing, terrified of the feelings that clamour and hammer in his head.
At length a question crystallizes and brings me back to Phillip’s bedside. We two are alone in his dark room. His eyes are open, his body at rest. Before I can pose my question Phillip has one of his own. He gazes at the inside of his elbow. He fingers the bandage that holds his cannula inside the vein. The white bandage is bright in the gloom. “What if I pull all this out?” His finger explores dangerously, his voice asks innocently. I beg Phillip not to touch the tubes, not to disturb the bandage. “We want to help you Phillip.”
Now for my question: “Phillip, what else have you had today – apart from the beer?” There has to be something else. I don’t see this behavior with grog alone. And more than that, Phillip stays beneath the roof a special house in this community. It is the house of an older white man. A white man with many younger black visitors and residents. A nurse at the hospital says: “We treat a great deal of sexually transmitted disease among the young residents of that house, and too many drug-taking people.”
Artlessly Phillip gives answer: “I smoked ganja today doctor. You know, dope.” He looks to me, that look he has, free and clear of adult care, of consequence. He looks to me, the grownup. Aunty has passed: it is for me to know, for me to be a parent.
Copyright, Howard Goldenberg, 27 February, 2014.
A Review of One Thousand Cuts, by Rod Moss
One Thousand Cuts by Rod Moss
One Thousand Cuts: Life and Art in Central Australia
A book of the dead?
Yes, explicitly so.
Names are named, a violation of all norms, all practice in both whitefella and blackfella Australia.
Rod does this by virtue of trust, explicit consent, indeed the command of Rod’s friends.
Rod Moss’ singular role – to witness, to record and transmit.
Rod Moss grew up in the country. Well, in the 1950’s the Dandenong Ranges were country-ish. But he was never “in country” until some time well into his long apprenticeship under Edward Arranye Johnson, in and around Alice Springs.
Moss’ first book, “The Hard Light of Day” recounts that apprenticeship, which began with a spontaneous act of neighbourliness and evolved through friendship to become a connection of spiritual father to son. The building and the losing of that bond are the subjects of that first book, winner of the Prime Minister’s Award. It might sound like a large statement that the second book builds on and exceeds the first in its power. It does so by the swelling sorrow of loss after loss after loss, of the weight of pain.
The present volume is unique in the way it illuminates the experience of being “in country” – an opaque expression that whitefellers who work outback hear often from blackfellers. Subtly, delicately, in a characteristic Moss undertone, being ‘in country’ becomes luminous. The light is shed by Moss as he moves around Arranye’s hereditary domain as his named spiritual heir.
Moss gives us birdsong, birdflight as he walks beneath. He breathes the breezes and tempests that flutter or flatten foliage and carry mood or prophecy.
He names and describes the fauna – from grub to reptile to marsupial – that create the country.
Moss does all this in the same manner as in his painting. His colours are florid, his verbal sallies frequently outrageous, his attack fearless. But in all this bravura there’s nothing flash or glib, as Moss walks and paints and photographs the lands of his spiritual patrimony, bearing the loss of spiritual father (and of many brothers and sisters), accruing more and more losses until their weight becomes unbearable.
Most of the losses come abruptly. Each comes with the force of a thump to the solar plexus.
Moss, with his reader at his shoulder, absorbs blow after blow.
At this point we have Moss Agonistes, crying: “It rains in my heart. One drop at a time.”
Moss misses a much anticipated funeral: “I find myself crying on Saturday morning …Though I was sad at the gravesite, it has taken until now, opening the brochure and studying the commemorative words…for me to be sobbing.”
Mrs Hamlet’s Advice
Mr Hamlet Senior, formerly king of Denmark, has passed on. His son Hamlet Junior is sad, sulky, grumpy with Ophelia (who suicides), stabbish with Polonius lurking behind an arrass (who just happens to be Ophelia’s Dad, who dies incidentally of Hamlet’s stabbishness); obsessed, ruminative, haunted; angry, angry, angry; refusing to be consoled, refusing to be reconciled.
His Mum, pragmatically re-queened to Hamlet’s uncle, offers some advice to Hamlet Junior: ‘Tis common. Why seems it different with thee?
In other words, Get over it, son.
And in time we do. As a rule. ( If Hamlet fails to get over it’s because his uncle killed his Dad. And because Hamlet is, well, Hamlet.)
This week my sister and my surviving brother and I remember our father and our firstborn brother. The anniversary of Dad’s death falls on the 13th day of the month of Ellul; Dennis died three years later, on Ellul 18.
Dad was 92, Dennis 63.
They died when they had to – Dad once his broken body began to break his iron will; Dennis, who lived for Mum, Dennis whose meaning was to be a son, Dennis constitutionally unable to live a motherless life. He died while Mum was alive. (Mum, most buoyant of my three lost ones, mourned Dennis, mourning lightly, living on, ever lightly.)
I think of them, all three. I wrestle with memories of the brother, he the first of his father’s strength, the brother who wrestled always with Dad. Two firstborn of firstborns, two men of fire who burned each other in their hot loving. I think of them, I remember their awful strife, I who knew, I who witnessed their mutual love, I, powerless to stop them hurting each other. Powerless in the end to stop the pain to myself.
I dream of them. The Dad dreams are never anything than pleasant. He smiles as we bump into each other in the lounge rooms of our lives. Dad prepares his enslaving coffee, I write, we smile, we know each other, we accept each other.
When I dream of Dennis the anxious need to rescue him clouds all. Not accepting, never reconciling to my brother’s pain, I strain against his self destruction. Aware always – in these dreams and when awake – aware of his love, his heavy tenderness towards me.
In my waking I recall Dad’s request, directed to me when I was twelve, Dennis fifteen: Some have a clear path in life. They are the lucky ones. You are one of those, one of the blessed. Your brother, your older brother, his path is not so easy. Help him, help Dennis when you can.
I tried, Dad. I never stopped trying.
The years pass. ‘tis common. We get over it.
And yet, and yet, that Hamlet scene returns.
Hamlet’s Mum, Gertrude: “Thou knowest ‘tis common.
All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.”
Hamlet: “Ay Madam, ‘tis common.”
Gertrude: “If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?”
Hamlet: “I know not seems, Madam.”
I had a father. He passed through nature to eternity. I had an older brother, I lost him; I lost a limb. The phantom sensations do not end.
I write, a destiny. Until I have written the courageous, the impossible life of my brother, that hurt, hurting life, I will not earn dreamless rest.
Yitgadal ve’yitkaddash, shmei rabah.
Patriots Day 2013
The Boston Marathon is the oldest and most celebrated of the mass marathons. You need to qualify. Twice I qualified and ran. in 2005 I ran again, this time as fundraising runner. I never won the race: hometown decisions, I guess.
Today’s Boston was to be my fourth. I was running as a fundraiser, this time for the Michael Lisnow Respite Centre. This morning I visited their HQ in Hopkinton, near the starting line. I met people who face their colossally difficult lives with genuine joy. I met the fundraisers who punctuate their serious marathon training by devoting themselves for months to help fund this small enterprise.
Why am I going on at this length about these small matters in the face of the bombings?
You need to be in Boston on Patriots Day to appreciate the celebration that is the Marathon. A city of less than one million comes to a stop; people take their chairs, their picnic rugs, the treats they will give to the runners; they line the 26.2 miles and stay all day, cheering on every runner; they hold banners – everything from “You are all Kenyans” to “Kiss me, I’m flexible”.
Picture Melbourne on Cup Day or Grand Final day without the booze.
Boston is high on its marathon and the runners. Patriots Day is the time to enjoy the embrace of the people of Boston.
If you have the good fortune to be a charity runner, you run at the tail of the field, feeling that embrace, the surges of love for the people – usually young – who are supporting local causes. Often the fundrunner commemorates one lost or saved or suffering the disease she runs for.
One young woman survived melanoma; another is in remission from her leukaemia. I have close relatives saved from those diseases. So, apparently, do hundreds in the crowd who roar their gratitude.
One, a spoonerist, runs with the words: Cuck Fancer. The crowd echo her sentiment.
Someone else came to the Marathon today with a different purpose than to celebrate. Someone whose malignity exceeds his knowledge: his bombs exploded near the finish around the four-hour mark; in an elite marathon like this, the ‘bulge’ – the greatest concentration of finishers – occurs 30 to 60 minutes earlier. The terrible toll might have been much heavier.
I plodded to the 22 mile mark, when a spectator offered me a slice of orange. His kindly young face looked troubled. “There have been explosions near the finish line. The marathon has been temporarily suspended.”
Naively I ran on. Perhaps they’d resume the event.
A mile further on, I was one of very few still running. Police and runners were mingling on the course, faces troubled. Hands held mobiles, sending text messages; local phone coverage was out. Some wept wrenchingly, their features distorted in grief or shock or anxiety for others ahead on the course. Many had relatives waiting near the Line.
My progress from mile 22 to 25 was slow. The crowds fell quiet. Overhead, helicopters gathered and clattered. Police vehicles racing everywhere, ambulances, sirens shrieking, tore between barriers as the crowds melted out of their path. Not for the first time, the matter of placing one foot in front of another felt slight. Here was immediate danger and evident bloodshed.
Police turned back those of us who were running into danger. I needed to contact family – in Boston, in New York, in Israel, in Australia (where I had bled my friends to donate to the Respite Centre). I had no phone. Strangers handed me theirs, refusing my offers to pay. I asked a teenager for directions to the Citgo sign, a local landmark, where my relatives would collect me; the teen insisted on escorting me the mile distance to make sure I found it.
As I waited, strangers seeing this stranded runner, stopped to offer help. One bloke, himself a (non-marathon) runner, wanted to give me his jacket so I wouldn’t get cold. Passers by touched me, or took my hand to shake. One stopped, gazed at me, shaking his head. He said, “I am sorry.”
Boston silenced, in shock, in grief. Its citizens reaching out to each other in spontaneous solidarity,as we see repeatedly in Israel following such atrocities. More than that, people felt implicated in a wrong, embarrassed: their guests had been hurt, frightened, frustrated. They turn their goodness upon me and I feel like crying.
A terrible beauty born.
Bostonians reach out and turn their goodness on me
The Boston Marathon is the oldest and most celebrated of the mass marathons. You need to qualify. Twice I qualified and ran. In 2005 I ran again, this time as fundraising runner.
Today’s Boston was to be my fourth. I was running as a fundraiser for the Michael Lisnow Respite Centre. This morning I visited their HQ in Hopkinton, near the starting line. I met people who face their colossally difficult lives with genuine joy. I met the fundraisers who punctuate their serious marathon training by devoting themselves for months to help fund this small enterprise.
Why am I going on at this length about these small matters in the face of the bombings?
You need to be in Boston on Patriots’ Day to appreciate the celebration that is the marathon. A city of less than one million comes to a stop; people take their chairs, their picnic rugs, the treats they will give to the runners; they line the 42.4 kilometres and stay all day, cheering on every runner; they hold banners – everything from “You are all Kenyans” to “Kiss me, I’m flexible”.
Picture Melbourne on Cup Day or Grand Final day without the booze. Boston is high on its marathon and the runners. Patriots Day is the time to enjoy the embrace of the city’s people.
If you have the good fortune to be a charity runner, you run at the tail of the field, feeling that embrace, the surges of love for the people – usually young – who are supporting local causes. One young woman survived melanoma; another is in remission from her leukaemia. I have close relatives saved from those diseases. So, apparently, do hundreds in the crowd who roar their gratitude.
Someone else came to the marathon today with a different purpose than to celebrate. Someone whose malignity exceeds his knowledge: his bombs exploded near the finish around the four-hour mark; in an elite marathon like this, the ‘bulge’ – the greatest concentration of finishers – occurs 30 to 60 minutes earlier. The terrible toll might have been much heavier.
I plodded to the 35-kilometre mark, when a spectator offered me a slice of orange. His kindly young face looked troubled. “There have been explosions near the finish line. The marathon has been temporarily suspended.”
Naively I ran on.
A kilometre further on, I was one of very few still running. Police and runners were mingling on the course, faces dark. Hands held mobiles, sending text messages; local phone coverage was out. Some wept wrenchingly, their features distorted in grief or shock or anxiety for others ahead on the course. Many had relatives waiting near the Line.
The crowds fell quiet. Overhead, helicopters gathered and clattered. Police vehicles racing everywhere, ambulances, sirens shrieking, tore between barriers as the crowds melted out of their path. Not for the first time, the matter of placing one foot in front of another felt slight. Here was immediate danger and evident bloodshed.
Police turned back those of us who were running into danger. I needed to contact family. Strangers handed me their phones. I asked a teenager for directions to a local landmark, where my relatives would be; the teen insisted on escorting me.
As I waited, strangers stopped to offer help. One bloke wanted to give me his jacket so I wouldn’t get cold. Passers by touched me, or took my hand to shake. One gazed at me, shaking his head. “I am sorry,” he said.
Boston silenced, in shock, in grief. Its citizens reaching out to each other in spontaneous solidarity. More than that, people felt implicated in a wrong, embarrassed: their guests had been hurt, frightened, frustrated. They turn their goodness upon me and I feel like crying.
A terrible beauty born.
Reproduced from The Age 17 April 2013.
howardgoldenberg 