{"id":2909,"date":"2021-02-15T07:20:57","date_gmt":"2021-02-15T12:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/?p=2909"},"modified":"2021-02-16T08:28:22","modified_gmt":"2021-02-16T13:28:22","slug":"duetting-memoir-55","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/duetting-memoir-55\/","title":{"rendered":"Duetting: Memoir 55"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Duetting:<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

People always tell me what I want to do is impossible. And I have to wonder, what do they see when they look at me? Do I look so inept? How many times on this Australia trip have I been told I wouldn\u2019t be able to do something? To walk to Bells Beach, to get to Port Campbell on a Tuesday, to travel without a car, … to spread ashes in the ocean without drowning myself.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cImpossible,\u201d I\u2019d also heard back home, coming upon the first anniversary of Marika\u2019s death, \u201cYou can\u2019t keep a relationship with someone who is dead.\u201d But I was talking with my dead daughter every day and every night. Speaking to her came naturally to me after she died. How could something so comforting be impossible?<\/span><\/p>\n

Sadly, watching the twilight turn to night over Two Mile Bay, I regret how often I, myself, have similarly, close-mindedly shot down other\u2019s ideas. I recall a time years ago, in the middle of winter when my father had taken my sisters, and me, and my children on a vacation to a Caribbean Island. Arriving on a balmy night, the sisters and children immediately headed for the beach where we kicked off our shoes and danced in the starry dark. Until my father, flustered on the boardwalk, said, \u201cYou can\u2019t be on the beach at night,\u201d and then I, myself, ruined the joyful moment saying, \u201cOkay, everybody to bed now.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cImpossible. No way,\u201d I\u2019d decreed when sixteen-year old Marika begged to go off on road trips with friends. To young Marika on the edge of our pond or hanging out in the surf with her boogey board, I would holler, \u201cDon\u2019t fall in\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t go out too far\u201d and \u201cYou wanna do WHAT?\u201d Objections. Directives. Were those my only songs all those years? So much negativity, controlling, and prejudging. This dragged up a deep sadness, because there were few relaxed, neutral communications with my daughter that I could remember.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMom, I wanna duet. Let\u2019s do Chopsticks,\u201d Marika used to beg me as a kid. When I could put it off no longer, we sat close on the piano bench and she\u2019d begin plunking keys. To duet is to take part in an activity with another in a way that achieves a harmonious effect. A unity, of sorts. But for me, keeping in sync with someone else was like trying to catch the first step on a fast-moving escalator.<\/span>
\n\u201cI can\u2019t,\u201d I\u2019d say and give up. She asked me to play only a few times more before she gave up as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

In early spring of 2012, my daughter\u2019s been dead a whole year, and suddenly I need to duet with her. Not just our everyday exchanges where I\u2019d sing, \u201cDon\u2019t do this\u201d and \u201cYou can\u2019t do that,\u201d and she\u2019d follow with her refrains, \u201cMom, what the\u2014\u201d and \u201cGet a life, Mom.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t have a duet with a dead person,\u201d a friend insists. And I know it\u2019s too late to have the conversations and exchanges Marika and I should have had. But, reading Marika\u2019s poems aloud, I hear her voice. Her songs swish around in my head. Now she\u2019s daring me to have a duet and it\u2019s impossible to ignore. So for hours every day and into the night I read and echo her words, and scribble out my own. It\u2019s like when we used to fight. We were mostly saying the same thing but we were bouncing against one another from two opposite planets. And now she is saying, \u201cI will not follow you. You will have to follow me.\u201d So I do, recognizing that we are each of us stubbornly strong women. Beautiful trouble, I used to call Marika. I had never before considered myself strong or beautiful. But something is growing in me. Something\u2019s shifted. Somehow our relationship is changing and it\u2019s like I\u2019ve finally grown up. She\u2019s grown up. And we\u2019ve melted into one. I follow Marika\u2019s words to find her, to find myself. To find us: who are we now, and what we could possibly carry on together as time goes on.<\/span><\/p>\n

Line by line, I read her poems and responded. It felt like duetting. As if we were playing an elaborate game of checkers or tic-tac-toe that depended on each other\u2019s moves. Marika\u2019s words. My words. Marika\u2019s. Mine. Before leaving for Australia, I pasted our words together on paper. And then I shared them aloud at the last Feed and Read, enlisting my friend Paula\u2019s help for Marika\u2019s part. A duet with my daughter who died. Not only was it not impossible; for me it was like delivering a divine opus.<\/span><\/p>\n

So here, on my last night on the Great Ocean Road, I know, when one is doing something, doing anything to climb up out of a rut, anything\u2019s possible. I understand now that to squash a person\u2019s efforts may be to shoot the very thing that keeps her breathing. I\u2019ve learned that anything\u2019s possible with people cheering you on. And that getting from Port Campbell to Melbourne before dark on a Monday, a day when the buses are running, has to be possible. With all the connections between buses and trains, I could travel all day and still not see Melbourne until nightfall. By car, it\u2019s only a four-hour ride. So Eleanor at the Loch Ard Motor Inn operates on the computer and on the phone. She finally shouts out from the front door and manages to arrange a ride to Melbourne for me with her son\u2019s friend, Cannonball.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the morning, I am packed and ready to move on. Locking the little room with the bay view for the last time, I count my resources: the rolling suitcase; the pack with Puppy and the last quarter of Marika\u2019s ashes; and the iPad, my link to friends and family back home who have faith by this point that I might really pull this mission off. And now I have Cannonball.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe he\u2019s named for his gut, barely hidden under a soiled tee shirt that says QUIRKS three times in large letters. He has a long black ponytail, no front teeth, orange fingernail polish, and a car with bald tires that is packed to the gills. He tells me, as we drive off, that first we have to stop at the pub.<\/span><\/p>\n

Uh, what? The pub? You wanna WHAT? I\u2019m suddenly seriously nauseous, and kicking myself for being, once more, in some weird stranger\u2019s car. Until, half-listening to his words, I realize I\u2019m shutting my mind and prejudging again. Turns out, it\u2019s Cannonball\u2019s moving day so he\u2019s driving the \u201cdog\u201d of his fleet of cars. He\u2019s returning to his kids in Melbourne after working many months at a good job on the coast. His teeth got totaled just days ago in a car accident involving tourists driving on the wrong side of the road. And he has to return the keys and pay the last of his rent at the pub before leaving Port Campbell for good. There\u2019s still no accounting for his orange nail polish but the tiny details don\u2019t matter once I warm to his generosity and kindness. He does most of the talking during the long drive, pointing out various sights along the way, and finally drops me off in Melbourne, in sunlight, near my hotel. An engineer, well paid and compensated for his travel, Cannonball won\u2019t take money from me. I shake his hand gratefully, because anything\u2019s possible, and that could\u2019ve easily turned out any-other-which way than it did.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People always tell me what I want to do is impossible. And I have to wonder, what do they see when they look at me? Do I look so inept? How many times on this Australia trip have I been told I wouldn’t be able to do something? To walk to Bells Beach, to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2172],"tags":[313,494,1853,1521,2016,2200,1202,64,2044,2195,2126,2196],"class_list":["post-2909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2172","tag-bereavement","tag-child-loss","tag-continuing-a-relationship-after-death","tag-continuing-bonds","tag-duetting","tag-duetting-memoir-55","tag-grief-journey","tag-healing-from-loss","tag-mother-daughter-relationship","tag-nothing-is-impossible","tag-parenting-a-young-cancer-patient","tag-prejudging-people"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}