Elegy for a friend

I belong to several writing groups in Auckland and sometimes I receive invitations to visit the groups that form at the conclusion of my life writing and memoir courses. Recently one group set a writing exercise ‘Life Writing is…’ On the day before the meeting I sat down and wrote for twenty minutes beginning with the statement ‘Life Writing is…’ Very rapidly the writing developed into an elegy for my friend and a disquisition on a grieving process. This is something I have observed in my teaching, that a writer will always use the writing prompt to explore the matters closest to her heart.
 
Life writing is for me my confidante and friend and teacher. It is my solace and consolation offering a pause in the swirl of a busy life to go down to the blue pool by the river and sit under the green willows to ponder and reflect and discover what is going on inside my head and heart. The practice of life writing provides me with a method to record the simple things that arrive each day like a gift from the heavens, and to remember people, and sometimes to write through a pain, or a depression, or through a grief, which is what I must do today.
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Elegy for Anne Ruthe
1 January 1942 — 9 September 2015

She phoned at the beginning of August when I was immersed in a writing project and said ‘I would really like to see you again.’ The bright chatter stopped and I thought ‘that’s odd, of course you will see me again.’ And so I suggested ‘Why don't you come to tea when I’ve met my deadline.’ I noticed her hesitation, ‘I’d rather you come here,’ she replied. And so it was left like that with me intending to phone when the workload lifted but the assignments didn’t abate, they stretched out and piled up and I got increasingly lost in the tangle.
 
A month later the phone rang. It was my friend’s son, Lee. Why? I hadn’t seen him for years, not since he was a teenager. Now he’s a man with a partner and two daughters, Ruby six and Isobel four, the joy and the light in my friend’s life. “No,” I cried sinking onto the seat in the window. “Yes, I’m sorry Deborah.” The garden, the hellebores spinning, sliding, falling. “No, Lee. Please no.” And he said, “Yes Deborah I’m sorry. My mother died last Thursday.” Ohhh. The air sucking out, the sea draining, stones turning and clattering, a horrible noise, and then the wave rolling in. “It was cancer,” he said “and very rapid.” Just nine days following her admission to hospital. “But I had promised her I would visit,” I cried. “Deborah she didn’t want visitors, not even her sister,” he said.
 
And now Anne is gone and with her our conversations about the roses and the writing, about love and poetry and children, about puddings and graveyards and stone angels, about literary women and feminist trail blazers, about death and sensuality. Forever. This leaves a very deep mark on my soul. 
 
Over the following weeks she visits me. Sometimes when I want to, I can’t always visualise a person. Sometimes I can’t quite remember what my husband looks like but Anne is appearing as a vision before me, vivid. I hear her voice, her laugh. I see her deep brown eyes those pools of wisdom, the dark edges revealing secrets kept and a childhood of pain and also a deep knowing. I find myself talking to her in my head. I say, ‘Anne I cannot believe we will never walk around our gardens again discussing the plants as though they are each a beloved child. And Anne that we will never again pick flowers together, or discuss the merits of certain vases.’ Anne once told me that she has the flower arrangment before she will buy a new vase. For the tall ming blue glass vase she visualised white daises, for the beaten silver teapot she saw roses, the full blooms of the antique tea roses, for the crackle-glazed bud vase, white anemones. Over the years she bought me gifts, vases found in thrift shops: a rare Crown Lynn handcrafted vase coloured oxblood red to add to my collection of eggshell blues and soft greens, a white and blue cylindrical vessel with faded willow patterns, a turquoise ginger jar.  There were books as well, one on flower arranging by Tricia Guild, that I love for its photographs of flowers wild, exuberant and trailing, the colours from an Impressionist palette.
 
I met Anne twenty-five years ago at a creative writing summer school. She arrived in my life just as my dear grandmother departed, the Danish one with the pale soft skin and mineral blue eyes, and bearing the same unconditional love. When I was with Anne I felt, at times, like a child again on my grandmother’s knee, resting my head on her chest and floating there as she rocked me back and forth, to the rhythmic sound of her voice, saying, “Ah ha, ah ha.” And now they are both of them gone and I wish to roll back the clock and respond to Anne’s request and go.
 
My friend did not want a funeral. As the days passed I continued to feel lost, adrift, unable to grasp the reality of her passing. I needed to do something to celebrate my friend's life and so I decided to invite Lee and his family to afternoon tea and to see Anne’s roses blooming in my garden — the magenta blue ‘Dark Lady’ with her heavy ruffle of petals like an Elizabethan collar, the dashing ‘General Gallieni’ and its apricot, terracotta blooms that Anne said ‘fade to parchment’, the dusky pink blooms of ‘Jean du Cher,’ a constant companion throughout the year in a shady place in my sub-tropical garden and the ‘Comtesse du Cayla,’ a recent arrival, her buds of apricot silk emerging shyly from their green calyx, just days after news of Anne’s death filling me with a bittersweet feeling of gladness and deep loss.
 
Two little girls, bright as buttons. Two sets of dark brown eyes shining, at my door. “You must be Ruby and you must be Isobel,” I say as they swirl like fireflies through the hall and round into the lounge creating a rush of air. Then they stop in their tracks, transfixed by the pool, “Can we go in?” they cry rushing towards the terrace and halting again because they have found a bird floating dead, beside the filter, the first bird ever to drown in our turquoise pool. We’ve seen a kingfisher dive in there and out again but this young starling, its soft fawn feathers pulled up like pleats, hasn't made it out. “Have you got a box?” asks Ruby, “because we need to study the bird.” Their mother Marina takes my spade and carries the creature into the garden. “No, Ruby, we need to respect the bird and bury it.”
 
My mother told me that when my father died, I developed a phobia of water. I refused to sit on the long drop toilet at our home at Diamond Harbour, and screamed when my mother tried to take me into the sea. ‘No, no, no,’ beside myself. ‘I don’t want to die.’ She said the fear developed after my father’s death. Another child came running into the house shouting, ‘There’s a DEAD WATER rat in the creek.’ The grownups said, “Sshh,” covering my ears. And that’s all it took for a little girl, searching for her lost father to get her wires crossed and associate water with death.
 
Anne’s granddaughters are more robust. Right now they are jumping up and down and pulling off their clothes.  “I’ll get some towels,’ I say as two naked girls, with a whirr of wings, follow me  though the house.
 
In the quiet of the kitchen preparing the herbal tea and cake — it is a layer cake with custard cream, strawberries and sponge to remember Anne the great pudding maker — Lee talks about his mother’s illness. “Do you think she knew?” I ask. “She was in terrible pain and being treated with antibiotics,” he replies. “We were puzzled as to why the antibiotics weren’t working.” In retrospect, he thought that when he told her, ‘they’ve found cancer’ his mother didn’t seem surprised. “She was still drowsy from the general anaesthetic, just waking up and she closed her eyes again and let it sink in for a minute and then she said, ‘I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want it to take a long time.’” We are both very glad she got her wish.

“She was really happy, Deborah, with her home and garden and her grandchildren, happier than she’d ever been,'  I'd observed this pleasure. In fact I'd watched her creating a garden that grew and grew into a small park. There is something else Lee is telling me. 'Her sister was with her when she died,' he says. 'But I thought...' He smiles gently. 'Right at the very end my aunt came and sat with her. She said Anne was very peaceful and completely calm.' 
 
Out on the terrace Isobel and Ruby are sitting across from me at the table eating cake when Ruby, dark eyes penetrating, asks, “Are you sad my Nana has died?”  Tell her the truth. “Yes very much, I loved her.” And Ruby smiling back at me says, “It’s alright. Nana is with us now. She was with us when we were playing in the pool. She’s here having cake with us.”
 
After they had gone, with a bunch of sweet peas from the garden tied with a turquoise ribbon for Ruby and a pink ribbon for Isobel, “to go in Nana’s vase,” I thought, ‘Anne would have loved all that.’ She’d have smiled at the children and their nude antics in the pool. Oh but why didn’t I hear the plea in her words because now there is nothing I can do to bring her back, nothing I can do to salve my sense of guilt, no comforting thoughts to soothe the bitter sense of abandoning a friend in her time of need at the end.
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This feels very hard and unmanageable and like uncharted territory though a voice in my head says that the grieving will unfold at its own unhurried pace and that I must go with the process, slowly, gently, floating on the quiet current. Having Anne’s family here this day was a bend in the river, the children Anne’s avatar bringing her closer. Hosting a Christmas lunch for the writing group left behind and sharing the sadness with them will be another sweep in the river. And there is something more I can do to help ease the pain. When I first learned of Anne’s death I cried to my daughter in London and she said, ‘Mama you need to go and pick Anne’s roses and put them in a vase on your table beside a candle that you will light for Anne.’ Out in the garden, I remember thinking ‘I’m surrounded by her flowers. They’re everywhere. And I’m not sure I can bear this. My garden will be, always, a reminder of her death.’ But as time has passed my feelings have changed. I now see the roses as a connection to my friend and am glad to have her presence with me in this way.
 
As Lee was leaving he handed me a book of roses from his mother’s bookshelves. “I think she would have liked you to have this,” he said and I was wholly touched by his gesture given in the tradition of his gentle mother. The book fell open to a chart of rose names and there I found, in Anne’s own handwriting, our roses ‘General Gallieni,’ ‘Comtesse du Cayla,’ Jean du Cher,’ and then some more: ‘Albertine,’ Buff Beauty,’ ‘Crepuscule’ meaning twilight.  I knew then that I would respond to the message in her handwriting. Already I am visualising the places in the garden where the plants will thrive. They will need light and air and space to move. So ‘Buff Beauty,’ two plants, will go amongst the fern plantings and the ‘moon glow’ flowers of the clivia in a light well in the native garden. The lovely dusky peach Albertine needs to scramble over something big so it will go against the pergola in the kitchen garden. Crepuscule likes to climb as well and will have a high place in the top garden where it can reach up the wire fence to be nearer to the sky at twilight. The roses have been ordered from the plant nursery in Tasman Bay, set to arrive next July, 2016 as sticks, in a box labelled ‘Live Plants Handle with Care.’ They will go into the ground in the gloom of winter and come late Spring the first blooms will appear and in that moment I will feel the spirit of Anne with me still.

Anne Ruthe

Dark lady