Peacock Butterfly

walking beside the river this afternoon, i encountered this glorious Peacock butterfly, sunning itself on the dried mud.

DYING WELL OR DYING BADLY?

My dad, at ninety-seven, fervently wanted to get to a hundred.  Despite a body which was failing him in every way, and a mind that was increasingly hijacked by other realities, he would have been appalled had anyone suggested to him that he should 'go gently into that good night', deliberately assisted by medication.  Eventually he descended into a twilight of bizarre apparitions and increasingly frequent lung infections, and finally a few months before his ninety-eighth birthday, died of pneumonia. 

That's one way of doing it.  Despite the infirmities and indignities of his last year, my dad was lucky: he didn't die in pain.  He didn't need, and would never have asked for, my help in leaving this world.  Had he done so, I would have done all I could, but I doubt I'd have been able to get him to Switzerland: no plane company would have flown him at his age, in his state of health. 

Our laws are meant to be one-size-fits-all.  Of course, they don't: they fit nobody very well, and many people very badly.  But despite the fact that I support assisted dying, I don't see it as a solution which can be tailored to fit the majority: there are just too many variables.  The best we can hope for is to find a way of responding to those in the greatest need, and helping them in an ethical, transparent and principled way.  I think we are coming to the time when enough people (though not of course the most vociferous: the religiously indoctrinated) are beginning to realise that we must address this question, because otherwise, as the population ages (and becomes more infirm) there will increasingly be suffering on a scale which is unacceptable. We need to learn from Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the two states in the USA which have legalised assisted dying: learn from them, incorporate what they have worked out into our own legislation, and give ourselves a proper choice.

The choice is not between life and death, but between a good death or a bad death - this point is clearly made in Sir Terry Pratchett's excellent documentary, 'Choosing to Die'.  Furthermore, it should not be a choice forced upon anyone by anyone else, and it must be made only by someone of sound mind and sound intention.  Yet this very stipulation presents those with dementia with an impossible conundrum.  If they wish to end their lives before they become unrecognisable to themselves and to those who care for them, they have to do it before their condition has progressed beyond the point where they can no longer speak for themselves.  That is - they have to kill themselves prematurely, whilst their minds are still fully active.  This is appalling.  Somehow, if assisted dying is also to be made available to those with incurable, progressively debilitating dementia, this terrible Catch 22 must be addressed.

But in the present climate of religious intransigence and 'Doctor Death' scare-mongering (a tabloid spectre entirely suited to the comic book mentality of the hysterical masses) it is unlikely that we shall even get as far as framing legislation for those who need an alternative to dying in physical pain; we are more likely to get a law which will define flight paths for pigs over built up areas.

Legislating for legal euthanasia is probably the most fraught kind of legislation there is - more emotive than birth control, gay rights; just as burdened with a malignant history as genetic manipulation.  No thinking adult can really be emotionally indifferent to this subject - after all, we're all going to die.  At the moment, in the UK and almost everywhere else, we have few alternatives: we can let nature take its course, though sometimes horribly; we can commit suicide, but rarely in a way which constitutes a 'good death'; or we can rely on the health services to ease our way - but the reality is that these very services are going to be so overloaded that even present standards of palliative care are likely to be compromised.  If we have money (a spare ten thousand pounds or so) we can go to Dignitas, but for how much longer can this compassionate institution take on responsibilities which we ought to be shouldering, ourselves?

Yet although there's no easy answer to this problem, it doesn't mean there's no answer at all.  We need to open up the debate, address the issues in a very clear-minded way, force our irresponsible and cowardly politicians to realise that assisted dying is an issue they can no longer duck.  Of course it's a minefield of dangers. Of course laws must be made in such a way that they cannot be used to callously bump off the vulnerable.  Nevertheless - we cannot pretend that our present way of doing things, with its muddled fudging of legalities, is acceptable.  It may mean that old and ill people like my father can be reasonably sure that they won't be hurried to a premature death - but at the same time there are far too many people dying in pain, in chronic despair: pleading for help that cannot be given without covert or overt transgression of the law.  

If I become terminally ill, and see nothing ahead but suffering and a bad death - I would like to think I'd have an alternative.  Not an obligation to depart, not pressure to revalue my life in terms of the burden I might become - but a free and open choice: made in the reassuring knowledge that there were compassionate people who would help me depart at a time of my own choosing.  A truly civilised society must attend both to its beginnings and its endings.  What we have at the moment is a society bewitched by the fantasy of being eternally young - dying unpleasantly must not be allowed to spoil the dream.  This attitude is more than pitiful: it is criminally negligent of our human rights.  Yet it is a travesty we have lived with for so long that we no longer notice how ingrained it has become. 

It is time to grow up.

STORYBOARD

i've just started a new blog where i shall be posting my short stories:  it's called 'STORYBOARD'.
find it here: http://catherinemilne.blogspot.com/

THE FREEDOM TO CREATE

this was something i posted on a fine arts forum a while back, in a discussion about content in contemporary art.  coming across it accidentally today, i concluded that i have become less coherent on the subject, not more, in the years since i wrote it - and so i stand aside for my younger, and more articulate, self:


"i'm tempted to get on my very high horse (legs a mile long) and declaim that far too much work today (whether artist-led, in a gallery, or elsewhere) seems to have little content - or perhaps, very little experiencing, feeling, exploring and risking, in it.  but that kind of sweeping statement, whilst expressing my own frustration at the superficial bandwagonnism i currently perceive, isn't really very useful, since i'm sure it could've been said at any time over the last several centuries.  it's entirely subjective: which is where i'm coming from, all the time and unapologetically.  in other words, my reference points are personal and, like a mile-high horse, probably somewhat shaky when they come to be trotted out.  


however...  genuineness; authenticity: these concepts are useful currency of the imagination, because for some reason (perhaps a similar impulse to the religious one) we want to relate to art at more than eye-level.  is this something to do with allowing ourselves to be caught up, and transported?  something to do with venturing beyond the confinements and sufferings of mortality?  


at any rate, we must surely be distrustful of anything that is trying to take us for a ride, for dubious purposes of its own.  i think that there is something in us (at least, in many of us) which is searching for more than superficial answers.  something which is looking to be met, to be answered (though what is the question?) and to be transported.  the kind of art which has little to offer but a cynical take on modern life is not art but social commentary - interesting at that level, perhaps, but in terms of the search for meaning quite meaningless.  meaning of course is another word which rests on personal interpretation, so i'm not even going to try to explain what i mean by meaning.  maybe all i can say about it is that a work with meaning doesn't leave one feeling hollow and unengaged. 


the moment one starts to investigate such things as genuineness, integrity, authenticity, one begins to flounder in subjectivity.  these concepts cannot survive outside the story we are telling ourselves about being real.  no concept means more than it can deliver in terms of reality - and there's another impossible statement!  (yet take the road this points to, and it becomes the journey.)


so, is an artist genuine because their intention is genuine; fake because their intention is fake?  is an artist someone who is simply that much better than others at being life's representative?  its hands and voice and eyes?  is an artist someone with a philosophy to peddle, an angle to grind?  an obsessive driven by the need to define and recall?  ah - the questions are so much more interesting than whatever answers get thrown at them that we should really be trying to ask better questions and dismissing the answers as no more than temporary, disposable containers. 


as for the freedom to create...  there's another imponderable to ponder.  but my own response would be:  nobody else, and no circumstances, ever give you the freedom to create.  you take it upon yourself to be creative, and do it because you must - and if what you make then finds its way into the world, well, so be it.  but if it doesn't, it isn't any the less for that.  no gallery, no marketplace, no critic, no establishment, no expedient demand, no lucrative commission, no benign patron, can bestow the freedom to create; nor can any of these forbid it.  we must take that on ourselves, and if we fail to recognise our creativity, we risk living lives devoid of meaning - which is a much greater tragedy than failing to be successful in worldly terms."

THE BLUE POETRY ANIMAL

i've just opened a new blog for my poems, called  the blue poetry animal

i shall be adding poems regularly to this blog, rather than putting them on 'A Quiet Life'.


http://bluepoetryanimal.blogspot.com/

LIFE IS A WOBBLE BOARD

now and then one does the right thing for the right reason... last week i bought a 'wobble board'.

my wobble board is a sturdy, strong disc, 40 cm in diameter: flat above and tapering conically to 10 cm below - see the picture. when placed on the floor, it rests (and pivots) on its central apex; the whole thing is strong enough to take the weight of two of me.

its purpose is to develop the body's ability to balance. i like to think my balance is quite good, but my knees and ankles need strengthening and i've always hated going for walks. sadly, because i'd rather like it - i don't have a private skateboard park: if i did, i'd certainly get a skateboard.

but happily i had an Amazon gift voucher, so i decided to treat myself. my wobble board duly arrived, and took up what i now know to be its destined position: on the kitchen floor next to the sideboard where i make tea.

in time i hope to be able to make a cup of tea - and drink it - whilst balancing on my wobble board. at the moment i can just about stand on the thing for a few minutes without falling off. i have progressed from holding on for dear life to the edge of the sideboard, to nonchalently standing on the board with my hands clasped behind my back - all in three days! balancing on the board is just difficult enough to be an interesting challenge, but (like the best jigsaw puzzles) not so difficult that one gives up immediately.

until now the jigsaw puzzle has been one of my favourite metaphors for life, but the wobble board is emerging as an even better one. 'life is a wobble board...' (time to print the t-shirt.)

one of the first things i realised about being on a wobble board was: it's ok to wobble. this may seem absurdly obvious, until you realise that your ambition is to be able to stand perfectly still; which is not what happens - most of the time. just like life, a wobble one way leads to a compensating wobble the other way - and when you take into account the circular and pivoting nature of the wobble board (and life) wobbles can go every which way, and do. 

 so (exactly like life) it's not so much a matter of keeping still as of accepting the truly dynamic nature of staying in one place.  and yet... there was a moment yesterday when something different happened. i was lurching about, enjoying the wild ride, when... i suddenly folded into somewhere entirely present, and the wobble board came to rest... and there i was: upright, balanced, and perfectly still.

as soon as i thought about what was happening, i began lurching about again; but i could clearly recall that what came before that transcendent stillness was an instant of complete acceptance of the nature of the ride. i understood now why i'd bought the wobble board.

it wasn't to develop the strength in my knees and ankles. it was to locate the pivotal moment where everything comes to rest; balance is the key. instinctively i knew i wanted to learn something about being present; it had to be a whole-body experience, and it had to be something i hadn't done before. i find it very pleasing that a wobble board is circular: that the ride isn't linear but involves movement in all directions.

if i use that memory of perfect balance and stillness as a future objective... it won't happen again. it can only happen as a dynamic progression from movement to stillness; chaos to order. true to that process, and like a kid learning to ride a bike, i find that my body magically knows how to stay aloft.

... and it's ok to wobble - in fact it's essential.

Updating the Past

Eight days after I posted my last entry here, my father died. So... life changed, as it does when a parent dies, and I have since been trying to become familiar with the geography of this new landscape.

For ten years I was my dad's carer - though for only five and a half years of that did I actually care for him in his own home. But throughout the last decade he has been my central focus, my sole responsibility, and looking after him has been (any carer would identify with this) both tremendously difficult, and very rewarding. But being a carer is a tough call, and it comes without a handbook. You learn by doing, and you hope that your learning doesn't come at your loved-one's expense - but inevitably it does. This is where the guilt lingers, afterwards. All the things you got wrong: because of inexperience, because of self-protectiveness, because of exhaustion and depression, and sometimes because the system seemed to be stacked against you.

I really thought that, once it was all over, I would feel liberated and be able to return to the self I'd once been. Being a carer grinds you down - eroding your sense of self like nothing else, whilst replacing it with something initially unwelcome yet ultimately valuable. I wrongly imagined that this 'carer self' was a temporary me, one I could shed after my father had died (and he was in his nineties, so there was always the sense that this end might come at any time). But of course what happens is that any fundamental experience changes you forever. I was a self-reliant, self-serving, artist long before I became a carer. Now, like nested Russian dolls, my innermost core is still the painter, but accumulations since have added matronly layers of responsibility and compassion. I don't feel liberated; I feel as if I've been made redundant from a job which took many years to learn. As an ex-carer I feel, too, as if I've lost a social identity - one which many people seemed to find more acceptable than my identity as an artist.

In time I may sense that the whole experience has added to my sense of self; not stolen, as I feel at the moment, ten years of my life and turned me into something I never wished to be. That pessimistic reckoning is because grief is still uppermost. Grief which swoops like a predatory bird, out of nowhere. Grief which breaks like a huge devouring wave: all the cliches are true. But grief has its own rhythms, and it's becoming apparent to me that this time is, in its own way, a process of labour: of giving birth to whatever - whoever - comes next.

Meanwhile I find it hard to reassess myself as being out of the loop: not needed any longer; not consulted - for as a carer, you are not only where the buck stops, you are what the buck crashes into: the buffers at the end of the line. I was the advocate for my father; his nurse; his housekeeper; his cook; his provider; his financial organiser; his ally - and only, right at the very end of the list, his daughter. From the moment I stepped into the breach and tried to take the weight of his life on my shoulders, I ceased to be his child in all but name.

A very old and ill parent becomes the child; this is so much a truism it hardly bears repeating. What is not mentioned is that a child-parent relationship which becomes a carer-parent relationship is as hard for the parent as it is for the carer. Though it may seem the carer gives up so much - freedom of movement, freedom of choice, even the freedom not to care - this is always against a background of the many more profound losses experienced by the parent, losses which bite at every level: physical, social, intellectual, emotional. This, much more than the physical drudgery, is what makes caring for an elderly parent so grindingly difficult and heartbreaking. If one takes on the job out of love, it is love which suffers and is, in the end, either transformed or ground away to nothing.

But even now, long before I am ready to bring the whole picture into focus, I know that being a carer added a dimension to me which was missing. As simple as it sounds, it taught me to care... I observe with the painful clarity of hindsight how careless I was; how easily I shucked off responsibility; how little I knew of real suffering. But unless we find out by doing, we learn nothing of our limits when it comes to looking after those who are helpless and desperate. I truly never wanted to go there but I did go there, in good heart, and only kicking and struggling a little. From the fog of its aftermath, I would like to tell all those other carers trying to survive their own difficult undertaking, this one thing: refuse to let love be the casualty of caring. Getting that one thing right matters more than anything else. And if you hold onto the love, eventually it will be that love which remains behind to mend you and give you solace.