“Mother was the madding crowd. Besides, she detested camping. Considered anything beyond Melbourne’s city limits the Outback and not fit for human habitation.”
Gray and I would go up there several times a year, staying at a favorite secluded camping spot from which we hiked and backpacked in spring and early summer, and skied cross-country in winter. I didn’t share his attraction to the high plains. To me, they were bleak, barren and unwelcoming, a vast empty landscape. Fifty percent heath and scrub brush, twenty-five percent grasslands, scraggly trees here and there, the rest rocky outcroppings, I found them scruffy and desolate. I’ve always preferred mountains— admittedly, not abundant in Australia— and put our difference in landscape preferences down to my growing up in the Pacific Northwest with the Cascade peaks always in view. Gray thought it had more to do with our sun signs.
“You’re Capricorn,” he’d say. “Earth sign. The goat. So, yeah, you’re drawn to mountains. I’m Aquarius.”
“What’s Aquarius drawn to? Scrub brush?”
“Air sign”— and he’d raise his hands and eyes overhead— “Sky. Infinitude. The eternal.”
He’d been brought up in the Anglican Church, so he was not particularly religious. The high church tradition offered pomp and pageantry and exquisite liturgical music, but as to the human hunger for mystery and the mystical, Gray turned to what he called his “aboriginal roots,” the land.
He was staring again into the fire. “Maybe the indigenous people didn’t express it conceptually like we do, but they sensed it. I sense it.”
“Sense what?”
“These plains are haunted.”
By then, I’d heard the folklore that Cleve Cole’s restless spirit wandered this land. “You mean haunted as in ghosts?” I asked.
“I mean haunted as in holy.”
Every people, in every place, in every period of human history, have believed that certain locations— mountains and volcanoes, deserts, forests, springs and watering holes— were repositories of special energies, holding special powers. I remain a skeptic on the subject, intrigued, intellectually curious, but skeptical. Gray, however, was a believer. Though questioning, even cynical about so much else— politics, the law, his mother’s artificially youthful appearance— he was a believer in the sacredness of these plains.
“This is where I want my ashes spread,” he said on that occasion. “This is where I belong.”
He’d just been diagnosed that week with AIDS, and hearing his words unnerved me.
“We’ve got plenty of time to talk about that,” I said, and without commenting further, I returned to my book and he returned to his fire reveries. It turned out we had less time than we thought.
It was several weeks after arriving home that I began to have recurring dreams of the Bogong High Plains.
Friday, February 24, 1995
10:20 p.m.
Providence Hospital, Portland, Oregon
“I was hoping I might just sit with him. I realize he’s unconscious.”
The nurse is kind. “I’m afraid it’s not possible. He’s still in critical condition and being actively monitored. I’m sorry.”
She seems genuinely sorry, so I offer a smile. “Well, no harm in asking.”
She gives a warm smile in return. “No harm at all.”
I start to leave for the waiting room, then turn back. “It’s just that . . .” I’m struggling for words. “If he regains consciousness, even momentarily, it’s very important I speak with him. Very important, if only for a couple of minutes.” We have some unfinished business, I want to tell her. Business that needs to be finished before he . . .
“It’s really not my decision,” she says, “but I’ll see what I can do once he comes out of the recovery unit.”
“I would be ever so grateful.” It sounds strangely formal in a Jane Austen kind of way, but a simple Thank you doesn’t seem adequate for what I’m feeling.
I return to the empty waiting room, settling into one of the chairs, groggy and thick-headed, and glad Sandy went home to care for herself and Fernando. I would make miserable company tonight. By now, I’ve gone more than twenty hours without sleep and am badly in need of caffeine. Unfortunately, the hospital cafeteria is closed. There is vending machine coffee, but I’m not yet that desperate. My preferred sources of caffeine are Pepsi and Coke, I don’t care which— I always failed their taste tests— but the soda machine is out of order.
There was a time, back in Melbourne, when these vigils were happening with such regular frequency that I kept a daypack in my car with essential items. You never knew when you’d get the call. (“He went into the hospital, we think for the last time. Come if you can.”) By then, I had it down to a science: No-Doz tablets, thermos to fill and refill with strong black coffee, two novels (in case one was a dud), notebook and pen, change of shirt, toothbrush, toothpaste, razor (some vigils went on for days), energy bars, a couple of apples, extra tissues— not for me but for the others who would come by to sit a while and who needed to talk and maybe to cry— and finally the list of phone numbers when it came time to make “The Call,” notifying family and friends the vigil was over.
But this time I was caught unprepared. Rushing in from the airport, I don’t even have a book and am now left with nothing to read but old issues of Bon Appetit! on the waiting room table. Apparently, the selection of magazines depends on whatever the staff brings from home. So, I scrunch deeper into the chair, feeling bereft without my life support system and with only my memories to occupy myself.
I already know this vigil is going to be different. But then, they’re all different. Unlike the memorial services, which over the years begin to blend and blur together, merging into one montage of loss, the vigils remain distinct in my mind— this specific time, this specific place with its own emotional atmosphere, contoured to fit this individual now dying. Memorial services are communal events; vigils are deeply personal. Often, I’ve been left by myself, after family and friends depart, choosing to remain to keep what the writer Paul Monette called “the last watch of the night.”
No need for you to stay, a kindly nurse or hospice staff person will say. He doesn’t even know you’re here.
But I stay anyway. There’s this sense that much more than a life is ending. An entire world is coming to an end, a multitude of experiences, millions of moments and memories, hopes and goals and desires and dreams, all reduced to this: a biological organism slowly releasing its hold on life, a vast network of physiological processes gradually shutting down. Seems like someone should be here to witness it. You sense the presence that was this person has already departed, a presence no longer present, and not for the first time wonder who or what is actually dying.
With each vigil, a part of my soul died with that person. I seem to have less and less soul left. This vigil will be no different. I close my eyes and pray, Don’t let him die before we make peace, forgetting that I stopped praying years ago.
Chapter
