Notes From Energetic Spaces - Where Our Lives & Our Choices Intersect
Observing our minute-to-minute choices in life - especially around sadness and loss
Short on reading time? Then listen along instead, as I do the reading for you!
My topics for this post, of sadness and loss and how we make our minute-to-minute choices in life, may at first seem like odd subject areas for something called Bright Side Writings. Until you embrace that BSW is pretty much ALL about ‘odd subject areas.’ Because that’s precisely where one might stumble across nuggety little gifts like ‘valuable insights’ and ‘unexpected outcomes.’
Now. Today’s ‘nugget treasure hunt’ may require a bit of map reading on your behalf – so I apologise in advance for the tatty state of the map – in parts it’s quite creased and worn. But somehow, together, I promise we’ll get to wherever this map is taking us.
The direction I’m heading off in, is towards an event from our recent trip – an Adelaide lunch meeting that my husband Mart and I shared with my old dance school friend Roz who, although terminally ill, exuded the power and brilliance of a bright star whose light has been illuminating my way ever since. But to get to telling that story, I first need to scribble a few other stories onto our map.
So… way back in the last quarter of the twentieth century I spent two years full time studying classical ballet and modern dance, at the Centre for Performing Arts in Adelaide, South Australia. Although a bonafide dance school, this was not quite the Kirov or Bolshoi in terms of size - at my graduation we were all of eight students. I’ve remained close friends with two of them ever since: Michael Whaites and Roz Hervey, who together are also very close. In the intervening years, Michael and I have had geographical luck on our side - we’ve seen each other frequently in both New York and Amsterdam. Not so much of the geo-luck though, for Roz and me. She’s been in Sydney when I’ve been elsewhere, and most of this time she’s lived in Adelaide which I’ve only returned to twice in forty years. Fortunately though we have many friends and colleagues in common, so our lives have still felt interconnected.
Now, to connect dots to another part of Roz’s story, I need to time jump us to November 2022 when I, sorta’ suddenly, needed to visit Australia. My then 91 year-old Mum had been diagnosed with dementia and moved into an aged care residence, and apparently, was going down fast. So I made a decision. Before she no longer recognises me, I must see her in person to i) wish her goodbye, ii) thank her (again) for being a wonderful mother, and iii) give her permission to - without feeling she has to stick around on my behalf - leave us whenever she wants, if she should so desire.
So I went on a short visit, clutching my hastily-scribbled map, but with no real ‘actual’ plan. That said, over the course of a few days, I did actually manage to say all I wanted to say. Which means we both cried, and laughed, and hugged. A lot. In the midst of it all, I also explained to Mum that in my belief, talking about death doesn’t make it happen - would it be okay to talk about her death? Did she have any particular wishes or desires around it? Would she like to be alone, or with family or others around her? In a split-second she reduced (or perhaps summed up?!) everything into, “I think I’d like to just vaporise.”
Which is when I knew that this had been the right choice: to come and visit.* Confirmed even further when one day she smiled and said, “Actually, it’s good to talk about death!”
*(So… Yay for me! I do believe we should acknowledge these kinds of successes, because they’ve often come about as a result of ticking a ‘Most difficult’ choice box.)
When I said my final goodbye, thinking that in all probability I would never see my mother again, I felt a distinct sense of relief combined with completeness, all intermingled with tears. Now no matter what might happen to her, I felt safe in the knowledge that Mum and I had both fully expressed ourselves, and would never have to regret NOT saying we loved each other, or NOT saying goodbye in time. When geographic luck of this kind occurs, I say grab it!
Once through this period of farewell, I chose to give myself a buffer of sorts between all of that and my long flight back to Amsterdam. So I booked a room in a cool Sydney hotel with a great rooftop pool, and planned catchups with various friends. The sun was shining and Sydney was sparkling in her glorious way.
Until the sparkles suddenly vanished.
This happened when two pieces of news radically altered my buffer plans. The first was an emailed invitation from Mo, to the funeral of her wife Anita. WTF?! This hit me with the weight of a heavy physical blow. And that same day or the next one, Roz emailed her news: that she’d been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. (In most cases meaning: no cure, and roughly two years to live.)
Now I needed air, a lot of air.
But firstly: Anita. Before the wretched few years of pandemic-induced social dislocations, Anita and I had been good friends. How on earth could she suddenly be dead? And if she had been ill, how could I not have known? The funeral celebration was too soon for me to make it back to Amsterdam in time, but fortunately it would be streamed live so I’d be able to attend virtually.
Anita and I had met and befriended one another while both attending the five month Script Editor’s programme of Amsterdam’s Binger Filmlab. In this setting, Anita shed any last vestiges of ugly duckling feathers and blossomed into her full potential as a smart and knowledgeable, highly respected and liked, international creative force in the film world. But in particular, we bonded through comedy. We both loved to laugh - pretty much the sillier the joke the better. And in the midst of the seriously arty and film-y Binger, we declared our unabashed love of the TV series Will & Grace.
Later, we also bonded through sadness after hearing that our incredible Binger instructor from Germany, Dagmar Benke had taken ill shortly after our five month course finished, and then died a few months later, of stomach cancer. Feeling devastated, Anita and I both travelled to Berlin to meet Dagmar’s family and friends we’d never met before, to try and share with them how much Dagmar was loved in her professional circles.
And now I was sitting alone in a hotel room in Sydney, sobbing while watching I think one of the most beautiful memorial/celebrations I’ve ever witnessed. Anita’s.
Anita and Mo shared an extraordinary love. While Anita was heading home from drinks with film world friends, happy and tipsy, some years ago, she managed to fall off her bicycle. (Trust me, it can happen to the best of us!) As she used to tell it, “There I am on the ground, covered in blood, looking up into the glare of a streetlight and this angel is bending down, reaching out her hand and saying, ‘You look like you need help.’” This was the meet cute of Anita and Mo. That moment turned into many years.
At the time, Mo had a business partnership with her sister, catering food to film casts and crews on set. Hard work and brutally long hours. But Mo really wanted to become a photographer, and in the years that followed, after studying at Amsterdam’s prestigious Fotoacademie, what a photographer she has indeed become. Her latest international award(s) feature regularly in my Facebook feed.
Case in point, the following image of Anita, that earned Silver in the category Fine Art / Nude, at the 2023 Tokyo International Foto Awards.
So - no surprises really - the funeral featured many photos. But, um, not really ‘faded and over-exposed Kodak family snaps’ here. More in the calibre of ‘heart-searing portraits of love, bliss, illness and departure.’ For, in the days between the email and the funeral I recovered some breadcrumbs. Anita had been diagnosed with cancer a few years previously, around the time we’d both tried, numerous times, to meet for a coffee, but then she or I had had to cancel. And then came the pandemic lockdowns, during which Anita had kept her diagnosis private, only wanting to tell friends in person. But our geo-luck never granted us an opportunity. And now it was too late.
It felt surreal to be watching, from Sydney, as friends, colleagues and familiar faces quietly filed into a theatre of Amsterdam’s Eye Film Museum. People had been asked to bring a flower, which, as they entered, was placed on or just next to Anita’s coffin, front and centre beneath the screen, such that, by the time all were seated, the coffin had become a beautiful riot of colour. The stories that people proceeded to tell were moving, and funny, and insightful, and poignant, and all the while these gorgeous images of Anita kept shining and fading, in and out of the darkness.
I was pretty much keeping it together until our friend Daan’s story happened to mention me by name, in the context of, “…and during Anita’s time at the Binger when she made international friends like Matthew and…” Suddenly I no longer felt completely silent and invisible on the other side of the world. I had been included by being placed, verbally, into that theatre, and was totally surprised by the gratitude that engulfed me. I guess because I was feeling so guilty for not trying harder to reschedule those coffee appointments. Guilty for not finding out about the illness, from mutual friends. Guilty for not telling Anita I loved her and for not saying goodbye, in time. (I’ve said these things to the universe multiple times since then.)
Fortunately though, the largest thing that now remains is gratitude. How lucky am I to have shared friendship and companionship with such a remarkable person during the times we spent together?
I guess one of the things I’m trying to write about today is the idea that all of us have access to a startling array of choices, at every moment of our lives - and yet many of us become very good at convincing ourselves of the exact opposite. “Oh I couldn’t possibly! Because of this, that and this other thing.” Meanwhile, there’s all manner of “COULD possibly” reasons staring us right in the face. But somehow we become unable to see those choices, or we forget to look, or it’s just easier to choose the thing we chose last time.
As something of a coda to this section, to demonstrate to you a bit more of how remarkable Anita was, Mo has since filled me in on a few details about the funeral celebration, that were creative, original, unusual choices that Anita made, only during the very closing moments of her life. Anita chose that her CELEBRATION (definitely not funeral) should be held in the Eye Film Museum, for symbolic and film world colleague/friend reasons, but also just because it’s wonderfully theatrical! She also chose all the music for the day, including which version of which song, and the running order. Anita also placed calls to all who spoke, to both personally invite them, and give them tips on what they should talk about!
As Mo told me in an email: “She wanted no ugly funeral flowers and no bad coffee with cake, but champagne and croquettes instead. The coffin was handmade out of recycled wood by a retired carpenter lady. And we crossed Het IJ (Amsterdam city’s harbour) on the ferry with an old funeral transport bike. That was such a special moment, you then suddenly understand these Greek stories so deeply.”
To find out more about Mo, you can follow her analog photography on Instagram @moverlaan. Visual poetry depicting the process of grief and loss.
Back in Sydney though, back in 2022 (your assigned task was ‘map reading’ - remember?!) I was now a heaving puddle of emotions, having watched the live stream of the entire celebration. Thankfully however, the sunshine hadn’t totally disappeared. So I got to go for walks in beautiful parks with dear friends, to talk and laugh and try and straighten out my head a little.
Turned out I would need this brain space for Roz’s email that began with:
Hello Friends, Families and Colleagues,
I am writing to let you know I have been diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
Bummer!!!!
…and then went on to explain in beautifully straightforward language that there is no cure, and that she and her family would be coping in particular, strategic ways, and when and how she would welcome what kinds of contact… All in all, a stunningly pragmatic letter that also managed to convey the shock and surprise and sadness that must come hand in hand with a terminal diagnosis.
Over the next few days I composed what I could of a response, and I’m including a snippet here, that kindof speaks to the paper our treasure map is drawn upon.
“I’m sure it’s going to be tough for all of you, but going into it the way you are, with such clarity and positivity, I KNOW you are also going to experience much laughter, and many moments of outstanding beauty and freedom as well. Because these are the rewards to be reaped from embracing the fact that sadness and pain are not enemies, they are simply part of life.”
It’s taken me many years of living to try and get to this place. And it’s taken me many years of loss. One of my best friends in high school, Mark Sowell, died at only 17, when he was hit by a train at a level crossing in the middle of nowhere in the Australian outback. I had a boyfriend, and other friends who died of AIDS before they were 30. And cancer and other kinds of deaths took friends before they reached 40.
What I’m trying to get at in the title to this post is that, in this moment right now, each and every one of us are this amazing combination - of everything in our lives that has brought us to this moment PLUS the most dazzling array of choices we have available to us in the split-second to split-second nowness of now. So, one choice in that nowness is to scream and rage and go “No! No! I don’t want any more pain or sadness! I can’t take them any more!” Which, trust me, can get pretty exhausting.
A different, but also freely available choice is to take a deep breath and say, “And this,” as Pain comes blasting through your door. And another deep breath, “And this,” as Sadness steals its way in, through a cracked-open window. And another deep breath, “And this,” as Loss takes away yet another person you have loved, into the quiet, dark night. And then yet another deep breath, “And this.”
All of which is to say, when we accept that pain, sadness and loss are not enemies, or foreigners to our lives, when we re-frame them as actually being inevitable and even INTEGRAL to ‘a life fully lived,’ we then become able to give them different colours. We can soften them, and allow them in by simply opening the door, so they don’t have to blast their way through. It doesn’t mean we go out looking for them, or that we welcome them - it simply means we know who they are. So why not just let them in? Otherwise, they WILL eventually bust through your barricades. And hey, where I live, barricades have gotten damn expensive these days!
I’m almost back to this year’s lunch meeting X spot on the map - just one quick mountain range to show you first.
I guess some of the thoughts in this post come from simply ‘who I am,’ others are things I’ve learned, and many come from an extraordinary New Yorker I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Cy (Cynthia) O’Neal, who together with film & theater world powerhouse Mike Nichols, founded Friends In Deed, a centre for drop-in counselling and support - initially for terminal AIDS patients and their families / carers, these days for cancer as well.
I got to know Cy when my roomate and best friend of many years, Chad Courtney was dying. And then subsequently I continued to see Cy, both in the context of Friends In Deed support groups, and privately for lunches and dinners. Cy taught me the, “And this,” which I believe she credits to Ram Dass. The thing I perhaps most learned from Cy is to just say it. Stop skirting around the edges. None of us have time for that. Speak the truth, whenever you possibly can.
Case in point. A year or more after Chad died, my friend Lieke happened to send me a photo she’d taken quite some years previously, that actually, I’d never seen until that moment. And to my surprise, it completely undid me. It’s the photo below - Chad to my left, deceased, and to my right our friend Michael Fisher, also deceased about six months prior to Chad, killed outright on his roller blades, at a Manhattan intersection.
The following day at a Friends In Deed Big Group, I told this story to Cy, while adding, “But I don’t get it. I thought I’d processed these losses. I thought they didn’t have the power to undo me any more. So why did I turn into a jibbering basket case?”
Cy’s eyes, usually so calm and wise, glinted with a hint of mischief. “You actually DO know the answer to this, don’t you?”
“Then why would I have come all this way to Big Group to ask you? No! I do not!”
Then all she said was:
“You’re next.”
An ice cold shower can take your breath away. But afterwards, you feel great.
Time jump time again. Now it’s March of 2024. Mart and I are planning a trip to Australia because… I have new great nieces and nephews to meet, it’s been eons since Mart’s seen my family, my Mum is miraculously still alive and… given Roz’s diagnosis, and timelines and everything well, yeah, our plans, without question, have to include a visit to Adelaide to give her a hug. But Australia’s a very large place and Adelaide’s a long way from most of it… somehow we will make it work.
I’ll be honest - it was a mixed feelings visit to see my Mum, because I quickly got the feeling she would have preferred to vaporise already years ago. She still recognises us, which is wonderful, but she also still has dementia so is only worse, not better than before. In the photo below, I parked her for a moment during a walk, saying I wanted to take a photo of two beautiful and majestic old things. She was happy to comply.
Via some delightful family visits in NSW, we eventually flew to Adelaide, where it wasn’t much of a hardship to stay with my very dear old friend, the good Doctor James Muecke and his lovely wife Mena. We took beautiful walks, and talked and laughed incessantly. In a comforting commingling of timelines (songlines perhaps?) James & Mena now live literally around the corner from the place I used to live forty years ago (that James still remembers visiting), that I now revisited for a street view.
It was the home of a winemaker named Ian Wilson - an exceptionally kind, gentle, and sexy man who I saw, got to know, fell in love with, and then moved in with. But after a year we broke up, only really because our geo-luck changed - I needed to go travelling internationally, and he needed to stay for his business. But in subsequent years we still saw each other and continued to love each other - in Melbourne and Sydney and Tokyo. Until one day while performing in Columbus, Ohio, I got a phone call that Ian had died. Of AIDS. He had told barely a soul that he was ill - it was in the early ‘90s days when people died quickly. It cuts me to the core to think of how lonely his dying must have been, and it took me a long time to let go of my anger. By withholding his diagnosis, Ian had robbed me of any possible opportunity to help him or provide comfort. But knowing that such anger only spirals into bitterness, eventually I gave it to the wild winds of grief and replaced it with gratitude. For the love and laughter we shared. And the tears as well.
Tears which still happened when we made a point of visiting Maria in Lucia’s at the Central Market - the site of Ian’s and my courtship all those years ago. (In today’s parlance, okay, I might have “stalked” him over a period of months. But hey! I was besotted - and eventually it paid off!) Maria had witnessed the whole thing, and had also adored Ian. Our eyes well up pretty much the moment we see each other - from many wonderful memories.
From James & Mena’s place, Mart and I finally fixed a date and time to meet Roz for lunch. But in the days leading up to this I started to get anxious. Somewhere in my tummy area. And I was struggling to figure out why because I was SO looking forward to seeing her! Why on earth should I be anxious? Strangely, it’s taken me all this time until now to figure out what it was.
Embedded in the idea of meeting with Roz was the vision, the premonition, of ‘future sadness and pain.’ This person is going to be another person I lose. This love will become a loss. Which, given my history I guess is fair - I’ve been around ‘future loss’ before. But as I write this, it also strikes me as being so absurd. We are all dying! In our own way, at our own speed! And yet somehow, things change, energetically, around a person who has been given a medically-calculated time of, “You have so and so many weeks, months, years left to live.” And my ragged theory around this goes back to my title, and where I was a few paragraphs back.
People who’ve been given a timeline diagnosis realise that, when it comes down to the split-second nowness, they’re going to make different choices because now they know time is limited. They don’t have time for wishy washy choices, so they opt for the ones they know will deliver. And, as disempowered as they might have been by their diagnosis, they’ve also been granted access to a whole new level of power. (Mind that I said ‘granted’ access. It doesn’t always mean they choose for it.)
The moment I saw Roz zooming her way towards us wearing her Tom Ford specs and the brightest imaginable pink and orange sweater, commanding her way down the footpath on the zippiest, most sleek and compact, silently electric motorized wheelchair scooter thingy I’ve ever seen - in that moment my anxiety flew away. And the moment we hugged and couldn’t let go, my heart filled and overflowed with love. Could a star this radiant actually be dying?
Over the kind of deliciously-healthy-without-being-boring-for-a-second, sidewalk café lunch that Australia can do so well, we learned that the answer is yes. Not today, not tomorrow, but yes this person/star is dying. And we learned this because we talked about, in short, absolutely everything. No topic was off the table or, “Oops, awkward! Wish we hadn’t brought THAT up!” because you know what? There wasn’t any spare time for that kind of carrying on, because the only time was NOW. In response to her diagnosis, Roz - I have to say with the unwavering support of her husband and two grown-up children - made a brave decision, to simply embrace everything coming at her, with clear eyes and the purity of intention of living the best version of herself, for her remaining time on this planet. And that, she and her family are most definitely doing. To the degree that sometimes I find the energy being transmitted via her Insta, borderline exhausting! Where on earth does she find the energy for so many activities, play dates, pub nights, family trips, movie nights, and performances? While also still working as a creative producer with Restless Dance Theatre, a company that works with people with and without disability.
And yet, of course I can guess an answer to, “Where on earth…?” Energy shifts when time speeds up. And for Roz, enough signs are already there. It’s only taken 18 months for her condition to affect her muscles to such a degree that she now needs motorized assistance. We talked about the fact that this disease is effectively, only a downwards slope. There might be occasional plateaus, but no rewinding back up a few levels to a previous, better version of her physical self. Given all of that, Roz is certainly grateful that assisted dying has now become possible in South Australia, and is already signed up to take advantage of the scheme. Her biggest question is simply, “Exactly when will be the ‘right’ moment to do that?” As yet, she doesn’t have a precise answer.
For the entire lunch, I noticed Mart being somewhat slack-jawed in the presence of Roz. Amongst many reasons why I married this man, one of the main ones is that he is, consistently and without a doubt, the happiest person I’ve ever met. And while he understands depression theoretically - because he sees how deeply it can affect people, on occasion including me - he has zero, nil experience of it himself. And yet even Mart, this relentlessly upbeat and positive person, observed to me afterwards, “Wow. Roz’s energy is so powerful and amazing. I could learn a lot from her.”
When lunch was over, we walked Roz - her zipping on her zippy thing - back to work at the Restless Dance Theatre studios, a few blocks away. There we met a few of the dancers and ran into our old friend Larissa who’s an associate artist there at present. It helped, to see some of the people who work with Roz, who so clearly adore her. She’s in good hands. As are they, in hers. Finally, it really became time to say goodbye. Which meant we needed to hug again, for the umpteenth time. But this time I added: “I’m saying a final goodbye, because I doubt we’ll ever see each other again.” Roz’s simple reply: “You’re probably right about that.”
And then outside and out of sight I fell to pieces. Thankfully Mart was there to catch me. In a later phone conversation Roz admitted that once she could get to the privacy of a bathroom, she did pretty much the same. And that’s okay for both of us. That’s just real and what is.
And then a few days later Roz engineered something into her Insta that caught me by delightful surprise. Photos I’ve never seen before. Evidently, of a surprise 18th birthday party we threw for Roz, eons ago in Adelaide. But I guess I was failing brilliantly in my efforts to light all the candles?! Thank you dear Roz. For everything.
I believe I’ve brought us as far as this particular treasure map is capable of bringing us, except for one last contemplation you’ll find after this, in the form of a video. It’s a poem of mine I’ve set to a visual of stars wheeling through the sky. And yes there’s a word in there I had no problem borrowing from Mum. This poem, entitled Alter the Frequency, was also published by the literary journal Blue Pepper, and you can read that here. I won’t say anything about the poem’s contents other than I’m pretty sure you’ll understand why it’s included with this particular post.
I spoke of friends not making it to 20, or 40. Today, Saturday the 15th of June, I’ve just made it to 60. I dedicate this post to those who didn’t make it this far. I know you are all still ‘with me’, but I wish you were still alive today, so you could see what I can see.
The view looks wonderful from here.
Love and light,
Matthew.
Happy 60th Birthday Matthew. I loved the between and around and among and within in this post. You are your mother's beautiful son.
Dear Matthew -- your every post is JIT. Just In Time. At the outset, may I say simply, 'Energetic Spaces' is beautifully written. It is JIT for me as last night, having put off as long as I could, I opened a very big box sent to me by my now widowed sister-in-law. The box was filled w/ childhood memorabilia my recently deceased brother had cherished over the last 70 years of his life. Therein, pictures of the younger him, the younger me and all us young siblings, often trying to kill one another, but truly loving one another unto death. Only two of us left now and we are well aware of where we are headed and how much time may be left to get there.
And so --- Just this, and Just in Time. Thank you dear friend, and well done you.