When Australian musician Nick Cave’s teenage son fell to his death off a cliff in Brighton, England, Cave said it was his community of fans that enabled him to continue. He wrote: ‘I felt very acutely that a sense of suffering was the connective tissue that held us all together. Without being hyperbolic, this feeling of collective love has saved my life. It is a transcendent circle that just seems to grow stronger. It is religious.’ The key to living, he says, is to try to ‘actively reduce each other’s suffering’. This is also ‘the remedy to our own suffering; our own feelings of separateness and disconnectedness. And it is the essential antidote for loneliness.’ I strongly agree with this. If your heart is sore, and you cannot soothe it, turn to help or to open up to another, and in doing so you may happily forget yourself for a while.
SOMETIMES, EVEN COMPLETE STRANGERS can give us unexpected comfort. One day recently, I went into hospital for a scan I had been dreading. It was three months after my third surgery, and I was still in severe, untouchable pain on most days. It seemed I had developed a complication, and it was hard not to be anxious that the cancer had somehow rapidly returned. (It hadn’t.) I decided to go on my own, and relieve my friends from yet another hospital visit.
I was standing at the front counter waiting to check in. The woman next to me was trembling and apologising to the receptionist: ‘I’m so sorry, I am feeling nervous.’ I reached across, put my arm around her and squeezed her shoulder.
I was then ushered into a windowless room with a row of armchairs, where a nurse draped a blanket over my legs as I sat down. Another nurse came to put a cannula into my arm but made a mess of it: she lost the vein but kept jamming the needle in, forcefully, until blood spurted out. To my embarrassment, tears began running down my cheeks from the shock of the pain as she apologised and tried again. But I cry so rarely that once I had begun, I could not stop.
I walked around the corner, sat on the chairs outside the scanning room and cried. All the pent-up fear — often called ‘scanxiety’ by cancer sufferers — flowed out. Then the woman I’d met at reception, a middle-aged mother with a kind, weathered face, sat down next to me with urgency, grabbed my hand and said, ‘Look, love, this happens to me all the time. Boy, you should see me when I lose it — I really lose it, I go off. Let yourself cry. Go on, have a good blubber.’
My new friend, Deanne from Dubbo, kept a firm hold of my hand and talked in a stream as I stared at her, red eyed. She knew what it was like, she said. She had been a single mother with cancer — breast and then lung — and was still going. She was very proud of herself for giving up alcohol, but quitting cigarettes, which she had become addicted to as a twelve-yearold trying to quell hunger pains when out gathering sheep, was harder. She told me I looked thin, and gently scolded me for trying to tough it out on my own. She told me to learn to rely on my friends more. ‘You look like you’re always the strong one,’ she said, ‘but you have to know it’s okay if sometimes you are not.’ I nodded.
We walked out after our scans were over and during the removal of our cannulas it dawned on Deanne — who had travelled fourteen hours to get to the hospital — that she could now break her fast. Her eyes glazed as she contemplated her options out loud, before deciding upon barbecue chicken. She grinned at me and waved goodbye. As she walked through the large swinging doors to the exit, I could still feel her fingers gripping mine.
Chapter 16
The Lassie Effect
A FEW MONTHS AGO I found myself sitting in front of a vet, raccoon-eyed from lack of sleep, asking for advice on how to manage a manic puppy. Since my father, in a well-meaning act of grandfatherly generosity, had found a little fluffball to give my children, my life had been hell. It had been decades since I’d raised a puppy, and I had forgotten the intensity of the work: I’d been mopping up wee from floors, scrubbing poo from carpets, making numerous trips to the vet to try to put an end to the dog’s diarrhoea, and waking several times a night to take him outside for a toilet stop. He developed a penchant for socks, regularly ejecting them from his backside; one took an entire morning to extract.
My life was dominated by another creature’s faeces, something I thought had happily ended once I had I toilet-trained my kids. Yet here I was. Yes, I had done my research. But, as a single parent with two children, an ailing mother in care and a full-time job, it was clear I had made a mistake in so significantly adding to my load. I called friends and said I would have to give little Charlie back to the breeder, or to a more amenable home, one that could give him a better life. In return they told me horror stories. One friend spends days clearing out her dog’s anal sacs; another’s dog drags its bottom across carpets; another had her furniture destroyed by a hound that still wakes her at 5 am to be fed. I decided to give him two weeks.
The vet looked at me, then wrote down the name of a trainer on a piece of paper. The only other solution, she said, along with dog training, was to buy him a collar that would emit a scent that would make him less stressed.
I stared back at her. ‘Wait, can I have one?’ And I wondered what had changed since the olden days, when you put the puppy in the laundry with a towel and some water? I was sure that’s what we had done with ours when I was a kid. Now I had to get a pheromone-drenched collar? The booming dog industry appeared to be increasingly catering to neurotic dogs — and their owners — and frankly it was getting a little ridiculous.
This is how the marketing for the anti-anxiety collar reads: ‘Mother dogs communicate with their puppies through natural chemical signals, or pheromones. These pheromones are scientifically called Dog Appeasing Pheromones. These pheromones are odourless messages and are only perceived by dogs, not cats or people. [The product] replicates these pheromones, providing comfort and security to dogs of all ages. This helps dogs and puppies to feel reassured and relaxed in challenging situations, reducing signs of stress and anxiety.’
After reading that, I really wanted one.
I was very tempted to give Charlie away, despite his dear little goofy ways. I travel a lot; my father had promised a cocustody arrangement, of which we shall not speak. My daughter blankly refused to pick up after him. My son was, at first, too lazy to walk him. And I was wondering why, when the cat and I had reached such an amicable home-sharing agreement, I had allowed such a demanding creature into the house. When I heard him whimper as I closed the front door and walked down the hill, the guilt was overwhelming.
THEN THERE WAS HIS SIZE. Charlie is a groodle, a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle. They are friendly, goofy, fluffy and sweet natured, and are often trained as therapy dogs for children with autism or other needs. They are also, crucially for our family, low allergy. My father had been taken with a groodle called Fred at our local surf club and offered to find a puppy for the kids. I asked that he get a medium-sized version, as the standard size is enormous. The breeder assured us little Charlie was a medium and would grow no larger than a border collie.
In the first week, he put on 2 kilograms. Every day thereafter, he grew bigger and heavier, and I grew alarmed. Before long he weighed almost 30 kilograms — while still a puppy — and, with his large furry mane, resembled a lion.