Twenty years on

Reading Speccy’s post about mothers, teeth, death and all that (and thanks to her for the way she has offered up my poem) has had me remembering all today that October 2012 is the twenty year anniversary of when my father died. My mother had died just six weeks before, her heart stopped, while Dad was in hospital. Then he died, he just stopped.

What with all the worries and other stuff going on, that October in 1992, feels like when mourning started for both of them – sometimes one, then the other, sometimes together. Just like they were for the last few years in and out of the hospitals, worrying about each other, and us, their three daughters, Darby and Joan style. Born 1909, met age 13, had on-off friendship through their 20′s, married in 1941, had three daughters, they were each 83 years old when they died.

Dad had been ‘semi-ill’ for some years, suffering balance/arthritis/stomach problems and general old age for a longish stretch – the contents of a chemists shop on the bedside table. He always thought ‘he would go first’. Then Mum had learnt only two years before that the breathlessness, suffered still playing golf, was because her heart needed a bypass operation. She was told to take it easy in preparation.

OOPs – no-one explained that this was a new concept.

They were both ‘well’ right up to death. Able to talk, engage with the ‘stuff’.

Weren’t we lucky really?

A lot to remember. So I left the computer and started to write, as usual, very surprised what came out – it is a very sad poem, there was too much to mourn in 1992. Perseverance, tenacity, endurance… grim stuff. For me, writing poetry is very like dreaming with its capacity to absorb sadnesses and re-create space for living.

Winter 1991- 92.

I remember the motorway
The rain on it
Driving to hospital
airport, in-laws,
home to parents' house,
back to Larne and Stranraer,
over and over
and again.

I remember 
remembering
journeys to Stranraer
the stories of a marriage.
Too much stuff in the car.
Boys singing, joking, yelling
eating, sleeping 
on the mattress in the back.
In the years before seat-belts 
tucked us all in safely.
Before the marriage buckled,
too much stuff.

In the years before 
twenty-four hour service stations,
Someone would not fill up
at Carlisle or Gretna Green.
I remember sleeping 
in a forecourt
somewhere near Castle Douglas
and another time
we made it to Newtonstewart,
or was it Gatehouse of Fleet,
before waiting in that forecourt
not speaking much
till opening time.
Long past sailing
Waiting on stand-by.

Now, I remember
another Christmas,
older boys abroad,
brought home,
to see grand-parents
to say good-bye
to grand-parents.
Their own parents
not too grand.
Recently separated,
the in-laws are ill, 
my parents are ill,
everyone has to be seen,
spoken to, comforted,
reassured, all will be well.

I remember, it rained.
I forgot to fill up
before Christmas morning.
That whole day
Smiling, driving,
exchanging gifts,
one eye open
for an open station.
Not one.
The needle stopped dropping
fixed itself below red.
For thirty miles of wet road
the empty car crawled home.

I am still wondering
how it is
that sometimes
when nothing is left
even a car just knows
it just has to keep going.

Unhappy People

Another event today where the awful side of chinese culture showed up [see an earlier post Feeling Political]. I was coming home about 4pm on the metro and just after I got on to a crowded train, standing room only, there was a disturbance about two doors along the carriage from where I stood and many people literally tumbled off their seats and ran and pushed past in a wave, running away from an emaciated and wildly gabbling young man who was staggering along the carriage in my direction. Goodness knows what the people running from him thought, but they were clearly really really terrified.

I didn’t know what was wrong with him (ill, drunk, sick, mentally ill, what??) but it was just too awful the way people were running so I headed the other direction shouting bang ta bang ta which is “help him, help him” and took his arm and just guided him on to the now totally vacant bench seat. I could see a lot of spit beginning to foam at his mouth, so I avoided any of that, and continued to say “bang ta”, and I think he was epileptic or in some kind of fit, but really I have no idea. Certainly although alarming, he was not dangerous, and my first thought that I might get vomited on was not going to happen. Fortunately other people now stopped running, a handful of tissue came from somewhere, and the poor man wiped his face and mouth, showing he was quite competent and not a drunk, even though he was still twitching and shaking. Then he began shouting wode bao wode bao [my bag], so I could tell he knew what he needed, and then a bag he had dropped further down the carriage was handed along. From it, still shaking and quivering all over, he took out a pill bottle, nearly spilled half of them and while he was trying to get one in his mouth another western woman appeared, grabbed a bottle of water from a chinese onlooker, and handed it to the man who then managed to get his pill swallowed. He got the water top back on, while this woman who spoke good chinese talked to him, and finally peace was more or less restored. I ended up with a seat opposite him, and others took the other vacated seats, beside and opposite, and although the poor guy was still distressed, they were no longer afraid of him.

The other western woman was from Slovakia, and her English was also extremely good [more thoughts about how dreadfully unilingual most of us English speakers are]. She and I talked until we reached her stop, and she translated some of what the unfortunate man was saying as he talked loudly to everyone, now without gabbling, but clearly wanting to explain himself. He was disturbed and disturbing – I would not query that, but who would not be if regularly so dreadfully rejected and feared? He told/shouted his story of abandonment by his parents and showed us his bag and his ‘hukou’ [identity papers] and told how he now lived as well as he could collecting plastic bottles, which were indeed the remaining contents of his bag.

I am left again thinking of how many unhappy people I have met here, though the surface and the ‘face’ is show happy at all costs, there is a very different story underneath. The inability to help others is just a symptom of something else, a paralysis of sorts maybe when the surface security is disturbed. There have been two horrible stories recently which reached newspapers [and many stories never do] of a child struck in the head by a football and left to die in a playground, and a toddler run over by a van, who was ignored by all passersby until run over a second time by a different vehicle. She also died. Her parents were migrant workers, a few yards away trying to sell their goods at their market stall.

My own much less important and more trivial anecdote is that when, on several different occasions, I was standing with a map in the middle of New York, I was offered immediate help by all sorts of people; but when similarly standing with a map in January in Guangzhou, and more recently in Shanghai, no-one even seemed to notice let alone offer to help, and when I stood right in front of someone whom I thought was a reasonable looking person, with a request, qing ni, please, I was shouldered out of her way! People here do not help, it may be can’t rather than won’t, but the effect is the same.

So, whatever you hear about China and its surging economy, the actuality seems to be that many people may not cope with the kinds of change they experience, or the pace of that change, and maybe for too many there is no change, just more hard life, unfairness, stress and distress.

Do not knock the achievements of the western life, although there is also massive unfairness there, and even while I write all this I am at heart with the protesters in London and Wall Street and very very glad that protest can happen. I know that in the west people can be disturbed or afraid of those mentally ill or disturbing in other ways, but I really do not think that there would be so many running away and I am still feeling agitated that in the first instance only me, a foreign granny, tried to help this unfortunate man!