At the time of the accident, I had just flown the coop of my small city life and was four weeks into a journey to Europe I fully intended never to come back from. In an internet cafe in Rome, my mother made me hand the phone to my boyfriend for him to first receive the news that my sister had been given 48 hours to live. But en route back to Australia, the heavy grief I had been living with for those awful hours suddenly lifted and I knew she would live.
I was there, with my brother Chris, when she awoke from her coma and had to clumsily write her first words, which, hideously I cannot now recall, with tears streaming down her cheeks, and thick tubes shoved down her throat. I want to remember that she wrote, I love you. But it could just as well have been, what the fuck just happened?
In her comatose state, my sister did not experience nothingness. Instead she felt herself mentally tortured and finally given the option by some unseen overlord, to live like that forever or to choose to die. She chose death. And then she woke-up, returning to the ICU and me and her brother and a little town called Nambour on the Sunshine Coast.
She chose to die, and woke-up here on Earth. What's that all about?
During that time I had two songs going through my head almost constantly. One:
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.
Two:
Say, its only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me.
These memories of this time nearly 11 years ago come to me suddenly and unexpectedly today. But then, maybe not so unexpectedly.
I am currently having a crisis of faith, I suppose it is called, although it feels more like an opportunity than crisis. I no longer know what I believe in. The words of the two songs above eloquently capture where I am at, although my thinking and feeling is still in its early stages. To believe or not to believe?
The rest is still forming. But it feels good. In fact it feels like freedom. I'll keep you posted.
No comments:
Post a Comment