The Household Guide to Dying. Debra Adelaide

       One

      The first thing I did this morning was visit the chickens. Archie had already given them the kitchen scraps, so I leaned over the fence and scattered handfuls of layer pellets. As always, they fussed and squabbled as if they’d never been fed before and never would be again. Then I opened the gate and went to the laying boxes, where they still crowded into one corner, even though there was plenty of room. There were three clean eggs: two brown, one white. Not so long ago I could tell which chicken had laid which egg. Now sometimes I couldn’t remember their names. I picked the eggs up carefully. One was still warm. But touch is extraordinary, how it triggers memory, and so then I did remember that the tea-coloured ones were from the brown chickens, and the smaller white one was Jane’s. I held it to my cheek for a moment, savouring its warmth, its wholesomeness. I wondered if this was something that poets would ever write about, because it was an experience I treasured. The comforting shape, the startling freshness. The idea that this egg, white and perfect in the palm of my hand, was a potential new life, requiring of the world nothing but warmth.

      Ripeness is all. That was something a poet once said. Eliot, I think. Or Shakespeare. Perhaps both – it’s hard to remember now.

      With the eggs in my pocket I made my way back up the garden. Inside the house, the phone was ringing again, but I didn’t bother rushing to answer it. It stopped after five rings. It had been doing that a bit lately. The air was rinsed clean from the rain earlier. I could hear the clipping of hand shears. That would be Mr Lambert next door at work maintaining his lawn, Mr Lambert for whom a heavy dew, rain, or even a snowfall – if such a thing were possible here in the temperate suburbs – never inhibited his devotion to the task. As if in his latter years, all his focus could only be directed down. I realised Mr Lambert had avoided my eye for years. I wondered if he thought about returning to the earth, now that retirement had gripped him and even his grandchildren no longer visited. Or was that just me, thinking about my own future?

      Did I say future? I really wish there was the right word for all this, because irony doesn’t come close, is completely inadequate. For a start, I discovered that Eliot was right about the cruellest month – except for me it wasn’t April, but October. Spring was mocking me with its glorious signals that summer was on the way. The wisteria outside my window making the most splendid mess of the verandah. The driveway littered with papery blossoms. My car confettied with them. If I’d been driving this morning it would have been annoying, but instead I was free to admire the way the flowers had been tossed across the windscreen. The shabby old car was as radiant as a bride. And now the sun was out and the wind was warm, I could smell the wisteria. Or perhaps it was the jasmine, which was along the front fence, just out of sight. My sense of smell was becoming muffled.

      What is it about mauve and purple flowers? I remembered now that Mr Eliot (my high school English teacher always referred to him with respect) also had a thing about them – lilacs and hyacinths – but for me it was wisteria, and now irises. Archie planted irises in an old concrete laundry tub he’d turned into a pond, and each year they were more crowded and abundant. I’d been watching them over the past week or two. Their great long spears. The subtle swell of the buds on the stems. On the way back from the chicken shed, I noticed that the first one was out. It was bent over – perhaps the rain earlier was stronger than I thought – but the bloom was unharmed. I cut it and placed it in a vase on the kitchen bench. It was beautiful in a frankly genital way. Dark purple with a lick of yellow up each petal. And no scent at all. I think the scent of lilacs would make me retch now.

      I’d always thought that this soft margin between winter and summer could never be cruel. But here, although the hemisphere is inverted, I was as bitten by cruelty as the poet was. Spring is the time of hope. Of inspiring songs and rousing actions. Of possibility, of anticipation, of plans. People emerge from winter, after tolerating autumn’s capricious start to the season, and know that if spring has arrived then summer isn’t far away. Every spring our local community has a picnic in the park nearby. Children have outdoor birthday parties. Spring is the time of action, of cleaning, of revolution.

      Revolution. I thought a lot about the precise meaning of words now. And their sounds. Revolution is like the word revulsion. Disgust. Rejection. This morning I hadn’t yet faced breakfast, which would only be half a slice of toast, no butter, (there was no question of eating one of those eggs in my pocket). The poets were right about one thing, ripeness is all, but I’d like to tell Mr T.S. Eliot at least that his spring represented an insipid kind of cruelty, compared to mine. A laughable cruelty. It didn’t get more cruel than this: the season of expectation, of hope, of growth; the season of the future, when there was none at all.

      It was spring when I’d had the first operation, giving me just long enough to recover by the end of the year and face my Christmas responsibilities, instead of languishing in bed as I’d have liked. Spring again when I discovered the operation hadn’t arrested the cancer. Further removal of body parts and intensive chemical treatment represented a Scylla and Charybdis between which I was pounded for another six months or so. Really, I would have preferred to row backwards, but Archie begged me to keep trying, my mother persuaded me, the fact of my two young daughters reproached me, and so I pushed on. And up until the last operation, when my body was sliced, sawn and prised open (the head this time), I still retained a scrap of hope.

      But now the cruellest season had arrived again with an unmistakable finality. At least Mr Eliot had his dry stones and handful of dust to look forward to.