On Mark and A Season of Death

Excerpt from A Season of Death:

Page 239-241

I am a dreamer, a luftmensch with my head in the clouds, antagonising powerful people with my political antics. Johnny, by contrast, always knew how to win people over. Perhaps these parallel and divergent paths are the deeper structures that make up my story. In authorial terms, they take on an omniscient or third-person perspective, for my role has not been forged by my own wilful intentions. My mother is the main protagonist, pulling the strings that make up her sons’ psychological attributes, drawing two brothers into close but duelling protagonists. ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys’, we were called in an article in the Jewish press. And for our last act, horrifically unpredictable but consistent with a prewritten script, our lives have merged: as in the beginning, I am following him to his grave. We both have been stricken by upper gastrointestinal cancers. We are dying at exactly the same age. When I hear myself laughing, I hear his voice. It is as though I have embodied his flesh. He has become my dybbuk, the spirit that lies inside me, speaking through me, determining the length of my prognosis, two sons merging into one, over which my mother can no longer imagine a life beyond. …

How can I determine the truth of my story? I am like a book by William S Burroughs. My life can be cut into pieces and assembled in different ways, or is like a pack of cards that I can see my father shuffling before randomly dealing them out. A full house looks different each time. There is no linear story, or discrete chapters. There is no Before or After. There is only the projection of what was and what might have been: memory fickle, pliant, circular, fragmentary.

My beginning is my end. A child as an adult. An adult as a child. Riding the circle game until I am gone, leaving the detritus of my life to be picked up and told, and retold, by those who summon up my name. Dust to ashes. Ashes to dust.

That is why I have asked my family to etch a particular image onto my tombstone. It is the clock that sits on the belfry of the oldest synagogue in Prague, appropriately known as the AltNeu Shul—the Old–New Synagogue. The Hebrew letters from one to twelve mark out time. They have been inscribed backwards, so that one o’clock is eleven o’clock. Or perhaps, because Hebrew script is read from right to left, the hands of time tick anticlockwise. Even to one versed in the Hebrew alphabet, the Prague clock is disorientating, Kafkaesque, even though it was installed a thousand years before the birth of the modernist writer.

My children have told me they will also tattoo this image onto their bodies after I am gone. If my blood platelets weren’t low, I would do the same now.

The clock is ticking, forwards and backwards. Soon, time will stop for me and the putrid water from which I was formed will merge with the worms and maggots in my grave. I will be the one person at my burial who doesn’t hear the thud of earth landing on the coffin or note who was present (and absent) from the funeral of the late Mark Baker, to which he added the middle name Raphael, after his oldest ancestor and the angel of healing.

END OF EXCERPT

Who is Mark Raphael Baker?

We entered our worst nightmare when Mark was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – terminal cancer. Our daughter Melila was just shy of eight months, a big auntie to twin nephews and a niece, babies all around us. We mistakenly thought that we were a family blossoming with happiness and regeneration. We had entered a stage we had naively hoped would be one of renewal and light after scars of death and illness had afflicted the Baker family – Kerryn, Johnny, Yossl and Sylvia.

It is impossible to explain the depths of the sadness and shock of learning of, and then trying to absorb, Mark’s diagnosis. A world shattered; a future disappearing before our eyes. The difficulty for the heart to carry such devastation makes one dizzy:  the heart tempts the mind to devise methods of turning away in order to cope. There was black humour. There were fantasies of miracles. If anyone can defy the odds it is Marky Baker with his uncanny ability to make life good.

“Everything he touched turned to gold,” one obituary marvelled and lamented in one and the same breath. But these illusory thoughts were only fleeting reprieves from the unsteadying darkness of a world closing in. Watching the person whom I love the most dying before me, and the person that we created together who will soon be robbed of knowing the love of her father.

On Mark’s first night in hospital, before the official diagnosis had been confirmed – but we knew that things were bad, very bad – Mark did two things. In a shared room in a hospital that was all too familiar from the heartbreaking trajectories of Kerryn and Johnny’s illnesses, he managed to cut through the fear and bewilderment of what he knew awaited him.

He put on his headphones to listen to Bach and started typing his memoir on his laptop. It might sound romantic, perhaps even a touch pretentious. But it was not. He was terribly sick. In excruciating pain. Overwhelmed by sadness. His instinctive response to his hellish new reality was, in its own quiet way, awe-inspiring. I often reflect upon how Mark managed to find within himself the strength, love, calm and discipline to write.

He was not tempted by alluring distractions and coping mechanisms that might assuage, moment by moment, the cruelty with which life now confronted him. It speaks to his enormous capacity and courage. Capacity to create, to inspire, to connect and to love. Courage to try to face death truthfully. In this act of writing at such a moment he was so very Mark Baker.

Even the tone in which he wrote about his first night in hospital evokes a mix of light and dark, humour and sober self-reflection, but never self-pity: “I ended up in a double room with an old priest who farted all night. It didn’t bother me. I had speakers covering my ears channelling Bach and I’d already cocooned myself in an alternative world conjured by Mozart’s Requiem.”

Every day of his 13 months of illness Mark wrote his memoir. No matter his fatigue or his pain or his weary spirits. In the middle of the night when sleep escaped him because of the steroid medication from chemo or the pain from cancer, he opened his laptop to write. Four days before he died, when he was in hospital and we were, in our different ways, preparing for his imminent yet incomprehensible death, he was writing emails thanking Anita Lester for her stunning cover for the memoir and putting feelers out to secure a publisher.

He gave our personal tragedy a touch of gold by writing this memoir. The beauty of his writing which moves between and often within the lyrical and poetic, the heartfelt and the open, the honest and devastatingly real, the philosophical and religious, the sadness and grief, the comedic and self-deprecating. Always, always full of love. Love of the world, love of life and most importantly love of his family – his four children, his mother and me. This was his gift to us.

My year of avelut – mourning – was spent working on Mark’s memoir with Rai. Another gift he gave me. The process was at times addictive. I could hear his voice. I could be close to him. It was as though he was still here with me. Yet he was describing his dying. I know how the story ends. I am living it. But being in it through his words was a form of escape from the world in which he is no longer.

Our almost three-year-old daughter talks about her dadda every single day. She longs for him, she cries for him, she misses him. She has strong and vivid memories of him. She knows Dadda died but the mystery of death has a prescience when it comes in the form of questions from an innocent toddler desperately trying to grapple with the unthinkable: Why did Dadda die?

Why did his body stop working? Why didn’t he take his phone with him when he died? I want to send a video to where Dadda died. I want my Dadda. Did he go on a holiday when he died? When is he going to stop dying? I want to die so I can be with Dadda. The depths of her aching pain that spill out from moments of utter joy and delight and happiness is excruciating and surreal. I find comfort in two precious gifts he gave me: our beautiful daughter and the memoir through which she will come to know her father and his love for her.

Excerpt from A Season of Death:

Page 228:

What will be the last word that I will hear?

MammaDadda.

There is a time for everything. A time for life and nurturing. Ours has been a season of death punctuated by glimpses of profound fecundity. A family whose head and soul has been lacerated. The Bekiermaszyn and Krochmal clan from Poland and Ukraine.

If I could film the last seven years my life, I would call it Four Funerals and a Wedding. My marriage to Michelle has transcended all of these deaths, stood outside of them, but was also framed by them through an act of pure love. Love of Michelle and of the baby we created, a love which will soon be snatched from us by a fifth funeral.

Who will narrate this new script after I am gone? I wonder how long before Melila will realise Dadda isn’t in the bedroom and call out for Mamma only, and experiment with ways to tell the story of her missing father.

MammaDadda. Dadda. Dadda. Mamma.

Mamma.

Once upon a time …

A Season of Death will be published on October 22 (MUP)

This article is a reprint of the speech given at Melbourne Jewish Book Week.