Twin States

Sometimes on these April mornings in Sydney I can lie in bed on a Saturday watching the sunlight on the sheets and trick myself into believing I've woken up in Missouri. There's a sense of letting go in the air, the same acquiesence to moderation. On days like today Sydney autumn and Missouri springtime are twin states.

So I was lying in bed this morning, thinking about this same Saturday last year when the 7am sky was exactly this still and blue and I had eased out of a dream wondering what side of the world I'd woken up on. This year, like last, I leapt out of bed threw on my robe tripped over the dog on the way down the stairs. This year the need to write was too urgent to stay in bed. Last year the urgency was to keep a promise to send my manuscript to my dying friend back home.

You know how they say it's never too late? Well sometimes, my friends, it really is too late. Melissa was gone forever before my email limped late and lame into her Gmail account.

So I've lived without my friend for a year now, which you wouldn't think would be that hard seeing as how I've lived much of the past 16 years without her anyway, here on the other side of the world where the weather only matches twice a year. But it is that hard. The depth and breadth and sheer staying power of my grief astonishes me still.

I know I loved that girl -- the most passionate girl I've ever known (part vixen part housewife part psychic) -- but I didn't know how much. I wish I could say that she knew how much I loved her, but I'm afraid maybe she didn't.

This week I was with another friend as she said goodbye to her baby boys. They were little caramel-coloured premies, together weighing less than a bag of flour, and they survived a bit over a week before slipping out of a world they weren't yet equipped to live in. I listened to Kelly sing to them and call them her beautiful boys, and watched as their father Paulo changed their nappies and washed their faces, his enormous black hands as careful and tender as a grandmother's.

Their short life, and they way the hovered there (not really of this world and not anywhere else either) in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Royal Hospital for Women makes me think of what Irving Yalom calls the "twin states" of pre-life and after-death. How weird is it that we have no fear of the former and yet such terror of the latter?

I don't believe in God, and I don't believe in life after death. Maybe that's why I've always imagined holding onto life by my fingernails, a big ABSOLUTELY FUCKING RESUCITATE sign hanging at the end of my hospital bed. But watching those babies slip away made me reconsider. They weren't afraid; they hadn't been around long enough to catch all our adult insecurities and foolishness. They just... died.

I'm sad for their family. I'm pissed off that my friends -- whose journeys both as individuals and as a couple have been far from easy -- couldn't have exactly what they hoped for. I'm disappointed that I won't see those little twin boys terrorise my cats when they come to the Busch-Catt house for a visit. But for those little guys, dying was better than the alternative.

I don't have anything profound to say except maybe that death leaves the living. Life goes on, except when it doesn't. Kelly's babies are gone and Melissa's babies have lived a year without their Mama. And I'm here weeping on my keyboard on a perfect Sydney autumn Missouri springtime morning.