David Foster Wallace may not have been the best choice. Palliative care is not unlike a cruise ship; comfortable and existentially horrifying.

The syringe driver’s name is Sylvia and it’s our new best friend.

I stayed the night with Mum last night. The sofa in her room folds out. “We’re camping!” I said. “That’s right,” she said. We were both glad I was there. I am good at rubbing her back when she is throwing up.

Her illness bores her, but she doesn’t dwell on it. She loves having her family and friends around her. She wants to chat and play mah jongg.

“Beautiful mum,” I said, “brave mum,” and she laughed.

Her dear friend Hazel is coming from Sydney today.

This morning I went to Jane’s for a shower and to cuddle my lapwolf. I called Jeremy, who told me about Bebe. “Her eyes are still bright,” he said.

Now I am at Henry Street, where Sarah’s black kitten is mewing hello to me and walking across the keyboard purring, exactly the way Bebe likes to do.

I am glad I saved the works of David Foster Wallace for this moment in my life.

Today was a bit easier, a bit harder. Mum slept most of the day. I sat by her bedside reading, or slept in the quiet room across the hall. Friends visited and the family came and went. Sarah and Kelly sat on the couch for hours finishing a cross-stitch of the Cat in the Hat that Mum had started for Al.

She’s still well in herself – a weird thing to say about someone with metastatic cancer, but she doesn’t feel “old” and doesn’t like calling the nurses because it’s not as if she’s “really sick.” When she’s awake she’s very present and enjoys our company. Nurse Dale believes the pain relief is allowing her body to rest itself for the first time in eight months.

I had a long talk to Big, who pointed out that we really need to make sure Dad’s laptop is backed up in case he drops it in a bucket. This is not likely but if it did happen, it would be bad. Sarah has a terabyte USB hard drive lying around, so Al’s going to take it over tomorrow. Systems administration as an expression of love.

So my darling old catty chose a fine time for her kidneys to fail. That’s not entirely sarcastic: I was dreading making final decisions for her, and now Jeremy will do it for me. He brought her home and is giving her fluids and she’s feeling better and will have a peaceful death surrounded by love. Still, yesterday was not easy, and when I said goodnight to mum and she hugged me I was shaking.

“Shh, shh,” she said, stroking my hair.

“Oh no, don’t comfort me or I will start to cry, and if I do I’ll never stop.”

“Yes you will,” she said serenely, and rubbed my back.

In one way yesterday was magnificent. She has had the pump installed – it’s called a syringe driver – and now she is on a continuous dose of morphine. For the first time since she got sick, last May, Mum has zero pain.

Before Big left he said: “What’s humbling is, she isn’t just content. She’s happy.”

This morning we played mah jongg. Dad was very present. He won twice and Mum won twice. This afternoon my brother Iain dug a new post hole for Mum’s mailbox. My brother Alain arrived in the evening. He and Sarah and Mum and I opened the bottle of shiraz and had uproarious fun. We snuck past the nurse’s station in gales of laughter.

Tomorrow Iain and I will set the mailbox in cement. “We will cement the hell out of that hole,” as he put it. Then he has to go home to Sydney.

In between, as I ran various errands, I wept in the arms of Lauren, who runs the deli, and Karen, my Barraba yoga instructor.

People are beyond kind.

Tomorrow Mum gets a morphine pump.

Heat wave. Glaring sunshine. Birdsong. My fucking heart is broken.

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.