Keeping vigil

06 April 2020

‘Are you alright?’ The text message comes in late at night at the very end of the decade. I don’t understand my friend’s concern until I recall telling her our campervan road trip plan. For the Christmas break we were heading to Wangaratta, Corryong, Canberra and back home via the coast. Now, apart from Wangaratta, every destination in our plan is either on fire or surrounded by it. We turn tail and head back to Melbourne.

Hours after we arrive home a call comes in. My 94-year-old mother has had a major stroke. There’s a long evening in Emergency at Box Hill Hospital and after midnight we sleep in a nearby street in the campervan.

That night curtained off from the street, I enter the cocooned time of vigil where nothing else matters and everything matters.

The following day the medical staff tell me that my mother will not recover. Her Advanced Care Plan is our guide, for she can longer speak or move the right side of her body. In the instance of brain damage, my mother has documented that the only intervention she would want is pain relief. The staff assume she can hear and speak to her with quiet respect, explaining each small action and intention.

While I stay by my mother, I glean only the edges of the news; already the horror of the fires has been at full stretch. In the quiet room where my mother lies, I think of people trying to sleep in unfamiliar environments, refugees from the fires.

'In this age of the Anthropocene, she urges us not to look away but to tell the stories of the creatures who are disappearing.'

When we were on the road we’d been checking with friends in areas under threat. One loses her house in Mallacoota, another finds thousands of dead birds on the beach at Lake Tyers. An extended family member is in the Rural Fire Service in New South Wales. We don’t try to contact him except to cancel our plans to visit.

I spend long hours sitting with my mother. While she sleeps I try to rest. Periodically I check the numerous messages on my phone. When I gaze out of the window, there is smoke across the horizon.

I think of the people who will be in burns units, the agony of the fires written into their flesh. I imagine the ones who will be speechless having witnessed

ARTS AND CULTURE

Keeping vigil

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