Category: Memoir

Today’s ABC Radio National Essay

On September 23, 2015

Hospital is Another Country

My 83-year-old mother is in hospital. I sat in the front seat of the ambulance, Mum’s handbag and a pair of slippers in my lap. This is it, I thought. This is the day it will happen. This is the day my mother will die.

What did we talk about when I saw her yesterday? Did we argue? Oh yeah, she’d told me to make sure I wore a greeny-browny silk scarf to the gig I was doing that night, and I’d suggested back that she stop telling me how to dress given I was over fifty now. Then she’d said that at my age I should always wear a nice scarf because your neck will always give you away no matter how well you take care of yourself.

The ambulance driver tried making conversation with me but all I could hear was the other ambo in the back with Mum.

‘Can you hear me love?’ he asks her.

‘Does she speak English?’ he asks me.

‘Yes. Very well.’ I tell him. ‘Her English is better than mine. She corrects my grammar and she reads voraciously and she was an English teacher and she’s very smart and independent and…’

It must have been her Italian surname.

‘We’re taking you to the hospital now love. Your daughter’s here.’

‘Mum? I’ve got your bag.’ Like she cares about her bag.

I’d expected to sit in the back of the ambulance with her. You know, holding her hand reassuringly. But they don’t let you do that in real life apparently. So I’m sitting up front and the driver is asking me something again but I can’t make out what she’s saying.

This is one bumpy, noisy and fast ride. I realize I’ve brought the wrong slippers; these ones ‘have had it’ she reckons.

When I’d gone to Mum’s yesterday to pick her up for our daily walk in the Botanic Gardens she’d said she felt too tired to walk. I’d tried to cajole her into getting dressed. Sometimes one of us is too tired or too low so one usually convinces the other to snap out of it.

‘Everything always feels better after a walk,’ I’d said to her yesterday. ‘Come on, the blossoms out. Get off your bum.’

I spend the next 12 hours with Mum in the Emergency department of a large regional hospital. At one point, about 3 hours into the wait for triage, she and two other elderly lady-ducks are all lined up on their trolleys against the wall in the corridor like, well, ducks, all flying high with delirium.

Mum tells me to put a clean singlet on my sister who’d be in her late 40s, if she were still alive that is. I offer some water to another woman, who takes the paper cup in her paper-white hand and calls me Patrick.

My mother is staring up at me and I have never seen this expression in her eyes before; startled, unrecognizing, blazing.

‘Does she know who I am?’ I ask the ambo who’s been waiting with me all this time.

‘Love?’ he almost shouts at her. But then it’s so noisy in Emergency – all the beeping and buzzing, talking and dashing about that maybe she just couldn’t hear me earlier when I’d been holding her hand and stroking her feathery silver hair.

‘Love? Do you know who this is?’ he’s ushering to me to come closer now. Mum appears to nod and tries to speak but nothing comes out.

My friend is with me and she stays a long time. She must have followed the ambulance in the car but I hadn’t really noticed her until now.

Eventually we get moving. Mum is wheeled into a small area behind a blue curtain and it’s hard to stay close to her because so many people are around her now asking questions, speaking about things I don’t understand.

She has a temperature of 105 and is muttering all kinds of crazy stuff. Every so often she tries to leap off the trolley, so I hold her, steady her, cradle her in my arms to prevent her falling off the narrow wheelie bed and onto the hospital floor, ripping at all the tubes and leads.

During the course of the night I drink cups of tea and eat white bread sandwiches from those plastic triangle shaped boxes. I wander the ward and over-hear all sorts of things that ought be private. Sick people, exposed people, doctors, nurses, cleaners, families, friends, we are all here: compressed humanity up close and personal.

Hospital is another country and I have been living the hospital life for the past twenty-two days now. But although I am l beginning to learn the language and to eat the food of my new country, I will never be accepted as a local. I will always be that middle-aged daughter who comes to see her sick mum every day, asks too many questions and doesn’t stop tidying up and rearranging her bedding and flowers.

She’s like her mother isn’t she, I imagine the nursing staff saying, she really speaks her mind and is so bossy.

On good days Mum and I talk and gossip and on bad days she just lies there quietly furious and shocked with her recent and uncharacteristic decent into indignity and powerlessness. Handing over is not in Mum’s DNA, neither is being cared for.

This large regional public hospital never stops. It seethes and functions like one massive sighing, grieving, struggling, sucking, weeping, eating and purging single organism.

The hospital is under staffed, there are not enough beds, the food is awful, the air is too warm, the nurses are efficient, their use of language often more pre-school teacher than medical professional, the doctors are either inexperienced and tentative or less entertaining versions of Doc Martin. Although some are so wonderful and kind you can’t help falling in love with them just a little bit. Everyone is this place is run off their feet and working like dogs.

In her recent Quarterly Essay, ‘Dear Life: On caring for the elderly’, writer and Dr. Karen Hitchcock observes: ‘All general medical departments are under enormous pressure to treat and discharge patients as soon as possible. They have such a large number of patients that extending each patient’s stay by even a single day would cause emergency departments to choke up. However, elderly patients are complex and time is needed to offer them the care they need, to talk to them about their wishes, listen to their experiences of their illnesses, and together forge ways to make their lives bearable. To do well, patients need to eat, move and remain mentally active in hospital – three things the hospital environment specifically hinders’.

Mum is being discharged next week, they say, and will be able to go back to her home. But it remains unclear how will she be changed and how she will re-adapt. She is scared stiff. So am I.

Today she talked her head off about politics and our recent change of leadership.

‘You watch’, she said. ‘Shorten will step up now. You just wait and see.’

Then she demanded I take her credit card and go pay her rates, wash her nighties, and buy myself a decent set of saucepans and a new greeny-browny Italian silk scarf.

My Days of Abandonment for ABC RN ‘Life Matters’

By ellyvarrenti

On March 29, 2015

In Grief, Memoir, Relationships

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/elly-varrenti/6352336

By ellyvarrenti

On January 26, 2015

In Books, Memoir

Confessions of a Middle-Aged Binge Eater – The Australian Women’s Weekly February 2015

By ellyvarrenti

On January 22, 2015

In Grief, Memoir, Parenting, Relationships

I’ve just eaten a litre of vanilla ice cream, a packet of chocolate biscuits, a frozen cheesecake and seven dried figs in less than forty minutes.

But what’s triggered this lack of control, this most recent escape into such short-lived anaesthesia? Well, my laptop suddenly gobbled up the two thousand words I’d just written for this article and emotional eating has been a big part of my life for the past 35 years. Given this article’s subject matter, though, I’m more amused than ashamed; an emotion that usually engulfs me halfway though and directly following a binge, and that most likely sent me fleeing to food in the first place. There is something particularly abject about chomping down into a frozen Sarah Lee past its use-by date.

BED (Binge Eating Disorder), the most common of eating disorders in Australia and more prevalent than Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, affects almost as many men as it does women of all shapes and sizes, incomes and ethnicities, and its occurrence in the over-forties-demographic has doubled in the past decade. Most people still assume this kind of crazy eating is for teenage girls or celebrities, whose every visible rib, baby bump and puckered thigh are exploited for all they’re worth and for all of us ordinary peeps to perve at.

But I’m not a celebrity or a mid-lifer in denial of the ageing process and seeking love and acceptance from a vanilla slice. I’m an educated, middle-aged, middle-class-feminist. So why can’t I stop eating compulsively and start relating to food like a ‘normal’ person.

In her book Midlife Eating Disorder, Cynthia M. Bulik, Ph.D., points out how recently BED in older people has been acknowledged as a serious illness and that “in the medical field, typecasting eating disorders as teen disorders poses dangerous challenges for adult women and men seeking care.”

My love-hate-but-mostly-hate relationship with food started when I was a teenager and my girlfriends and I would loll about at school talking diets, food, fat and calories and how great it would be if only we were perfect. None of us was over-weight but that’s not the point. I was already hiding food from Mum, shoplifting Tim Tams and not eating in front of boys. When I left home at eighteen to go to University I lived in a share-house and survived on take-away kebabs and jam doughnuts one of my housemates routinely brought home from working at his dad’s doughnut van at the Vic Market. I’d binge and starve, eat and fast, diet and exercise and in between it all, and if I had the time and energy, go to university and waitress at a local café.

It was around this time and after a ten-day fast of cappuccinos and menthol cigarettes that I attended my first therapy session and the physiologist gave me a little book called “Fat is a Feminist Issue” by Susie Orbach. Orbach’s take on the female body and self-esteem issues from a feminist perspective was a revelation and that she suggested giving up dieting, and eating what I liked and when I wanted, was welcome relief.

For a time. I binge when in extremis – extremely bored, sad, pathetic, in-love, self-hating, procrastinating, anxious, frightened, rejected, drunk, happy, sexually frustrated … I binge when my twelve-year-old son is asleep. I eat in bed while I’m reading. I consume calories like the Cookie Monster when I’m watching television and I can devour the pantry while on the phone, as long as the other person does most of the talking.

I fret I am not a good role model for my son, that I am projecting onto him my own disordered thinking and that he has inherited the same binge-eating schema. Sometimes I’m grateful I don’t have a live-in partner because my BED is plain embarrassing and I’m too old and self-aware to be so out of control and focussed on food when there’s still so much else to do like trying to keep kids out of barbed wire enclosures for one thing.

Maybe it’s because of my disorder I don’t live with a significant other. Or maybe I don’t want one and I keep a hold of my ‘issues’ as a form of self-sabotage. ‘Partners and children suffer when adult women and men are afflicted’, writes Bulik. ‘The cost of treatment renders families destitute and destroys relationships. Intimacy is crushed by body image concerns. Trust in relationships is shattered as women and men desperately try to hide their illness from others’.

I dissemble around my relationship with food. I cancel social occasions and work commitments. I hide at home. I make pretend excuses as to why I’m not eating at a dinner party because on the way there I’d actually stopped off at a 7-Eleven and gobbled up enough junk food for an end-of-season footy bash. It’s hard navigating intimate relationships at any time let alone when an eating disorder can dictate how you feel and think about your body. And by extension, how you feel about someone else touching it, looking at it and planning on enjoying it.

I love to cook for friends and family but how can I do this when I’m ‘in the food’ as the OA (Overeaters Anonymous) 12-Steppers would say. ‘In the food’ means being in the zone that is the binger’s private’s hell. In 2012, BED was added to the DSM-5 (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and now has its own set of criteria as distinct from the other more widely known eating disorders. According to the DSM-5 to be diagnosed as having Binge Eating Disorder is characterized by: “Recurring episodes of eating significantly more food in a short period of time than most people would eat under similar circumstances, with episodes marked by feelings of lack of control.”

Some days I wake up with a major food hangover and the nausea, fatigue, anxiety, fuzzy thinking, irritable bowl syndrome and depression are debilitating. Living with an eating disorder when you’re a grown-up with kids, a mortgage, an 82-year-old mother who knows you inside out, and a job, is both harder to hide because of all the responsibility but often easier to get away with too. If I want to drive to the shop, come home and consume a $50 fix in my bedroom I can. I do. BED can be an expensive habit.

My BED has waxed and waned over the years. For weeks and months, I’d be fine, in control, my illness manageable, and then wham! One emotional trigger and I’m off again and gorging. When my sister died four years ago my BED was triggered big time and I also took up running. A lot. In fact I couldn’t stop moving. I began training for the half-marathon. My grief had turned my life onto high flame and I was in psychic-free-fall and as I fell I began to drink and to take Valium to help me sleep. Within six months I had become a bingeing, alcoholic, grief-stricken, drug addicted, promiscuous, marathon runner.

These days I still run but far less obsessively, drink only occasionally because the alcohol can trigger a binge, and listen to book readings on a podcast instead of downing Valium to get me to sleep at night. Food is the “good girl’s drug” as Sunny Seagold describes in her book “How to Stop Using Food to Control your Feelings”. I’ve used benzodiazepines, alcohol and tobacco occasionally but food remains my drug of choice.

The grief is still there, that will never go away, and when I do have sex, I make it free of mind-altering substances as possible. It’s sexier that way Obesity and eating disorders are a capitalistic dream but we are forever blaming the individual instead of the food and those who are financially invested in our consuming it. “Because who should be shamed are the food companies that are producing foodstuffs that aren’t even food,” writes Susie Orbach. “Who should be shamed are the corporate structures not the individuals.”

When the man with whom I was having a relationship decided – around the same time I was retrenched from my long-term tertiary teaching position early this year – that it was easier to pay me to go away for a week to a health retreat than to commit to me, I was thrown into a bubble of boundary controls and extreme sports. I stopped bingeing and gave myself over wholeheartedly to the control of a suite of clean-living life-coaches and organic chefs, naturopaths and flower readers. I felt great after that week at detox-boot-camp but it’s impossible to maintain that kind of regime in one’s own environment.

After three weeks at home, with my relationship in disarray and my finances too, I began to retreat back into the food and the whole awful cycle began again. BED does not just screw with your brain it can stuff up your body too. Bulik again: “Some, but not all, of the complications associated with BED are secondary to obesity, such as Type 2 diabetes, gallstone, high blood pressure, stroke, digestive problems and high cholesterol.”

Going through menopause has also contributed to my renewed ‘enthusiasm’ for bingeing. While my hormones rage and I do too, I use food as company when I’m not up to any other kind. But it’s the regular exercise, the healthy eating, in between the less frequent binges these days, and the therapy that has all kept me from going completely nuts.

And being honest. Writing and talking about my condition has been a way to cope, although my mother is appalled I would go public yet again with another of my lamentations. I used to hide food from Mum and my illness from everyone else but no more hiding.

As the analyst Winnicott said, “It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.”

Published in ‘The Big Issue’ Sept 26

By ellyvarrenti

On September 29, 2014

In Grief, Memoir, Parenting

Still Waters…

Walking with her mother, Elly Varrenti reflects upon family and loss.

I wait for my mother in our usual place at the Botanical Gardens. There’s a lake and ducks, a kids’ playground, oaks and elms.

My 82-year-old mother and I meet most mornings for a half-hour walk. She usually sets the pace, although sometimes we do get out of sync. Once I was so excited telling her about my latest relationship disaster our walking got faster and faster.

“Can you believe he actually said that, Mum? I mean can you believe it?”

“Slow down! I’ll have a heart attack if we keep up this pace. He’s not worth losing your mother over, is he?”

And there was that time we had to stop walking altogether because we were laughing about those pictures of Treasurer Joe Hockey sucking on a fat cigar shortly before he announced the budget cuts.

“Come on,” she said. “Hurry up before it rains.”

This morning I watch as Mum manoeuvres her small silver car up to the curb, and when she gets out I notice she is wearing a new brown felt hat.

“Very becoming, Mum.”

“Got it from Vinnies. You should go there. Stop wasting your money.”

“They got any nice jumpers?” My 12-year-old son is as tall as I am now.

“They’ve got everything. Good quality, too.

“Okay. I’ll go today.”

“The leaves are all wet on this path,” Mum says. “I can’t afford to fall over again.”

“You can hold on to my arm if that helps,” I suggest.

“No, thanks. I’m not a complete geriatric yet.”

My mother doesn’t like me writing about her because she always comes across as tough and pragmatic.

“I feel things, too, you know. Just because I don’t talk about everything.”

I routinely defend my right to tell the truth as I see it, and she remains suspicious of my need to share.

“It’s indecent the way your generation just lets it all hang out,” she says.

I’m just fiercely grateful she’s still around to talk books and politics, cooking and kids, and to argue about all the rest of it.

These days I watch her rearing her late-daughter’s five-year-old son, and I can sense in my mother’s small body the quiet agony of grief. It’s not toughness I see, but long-learned self-protectiveness. For people like Mum, exposing one’s vulnerability, asking for help, is not so easily done.

***

My sister took her own life four years ago.

Took her own life. Somehow it doesn’t sound as shocking as ‘suicide’.

There were those who suggested Mum have my sister’s baby fostered. “Never!” Mum said. “I’ll look after him. It’s not a choice.”

Mine is a political family legacy. Single-minded commitment goes way back. Both my parents were ‘Persons of Interest’ to ASIO during the 1950s, and Mum’s Italian migrant parents were dogged if not disorganised anti-fascists.

My sister, fired with the same Bolshie gene, was an activist from her early teens. Later on, during her medical training, she pursued life with the sharp and scary focus of a revolutionary, travelling and volunteering in Chile, Nicaragua and, later, East Timor.

Her son has his father’s eyes, his grandmother’s empathy and his mother’s mischievous intellect. And her mouth. He definitely has my sister’s mouth.

On weekends my nephew stays with his dad, an Iraqi Kurd who spent five years in detention before my sister managed to help get him out. He is now an Australian citizen and has little to do with his countrymen. The post-traumatic stress disorder has made sure he is not very sociable. He is politely suspicious of the world and has never missed a weekend with his son. Not once in four years.

Mental illness is not like in the movies. It’s not like in The United States of Tara or Girl, Interrupted or Silver Linings Playbook. In real life, severe mental illness is not fun or zany or interesting or sexy.

In real life, my mother cared for her deteriorating daughter without conditions or limitations. I did what I could, responded to the calls at all hours and was at her hospital bed after her first two attempts. But, mostly, I watched on helplessly as Mum did battle for her gifted, troubled daughter.

I hated how much our lives had become all about my sister’s illness. I hated her illness. I did not fulfil my role of the unconditionally supportive big sister. I tried, but often I failed. I missed her. I wanted her back the way she used to be.

***

“How long have we been walking?” I ask Mum.

“It hasn’t even been 20 minutes yet.”

“The lake looks beautiful, doesn’t it?” I say. “All misty.”

“It does. Like from a children’s fairytale.”

It’s my mother’s patience, her gentle guidance and a teacher’s attention to the minutiae of her grandson’s development that strikes me when I am with them. She can’t play ball with him, but she can read and talk to him and she can fret about his monkish diet of rice, cucumber and mandarins. She can painstakingly connect the lines from one generation to the next.

Since her daughter’s death, my mother has changed. Everything is different now. Mum hates getting old and is worried about what will happen to her grandson when she dies.

“I just want to hang in there until he’s seven. Like the Jesuits say, give me the child until he is seven et cetera.”

In that small child we see all that we have lost, but all that we have found, too. And it is beautiful. My late sister’s child is beautiful.

“We’ve walked for half an hour, Mum. You want to go have coffee or something?”

“Not yet,” she says. “Let’s go around the lake just one more time.”

FALL (Radio National Life Matters)

By ellyvarrenti

On August 4, 2014

In Memoir, Parenting

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/elly-varrenti3a-fall/5641956

MOVING HOUSE (2006)

By ellyvarrenti

On July 14, 2014

In Memoir

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2006/05/bdn_20060520.mp3

An audio piece I did for the late, the marvellous and much-missed ALAN SAUNDERS in 2006 for ‘By Design’, ABC radio – it starts at approx. 15mins into the podcast.

Piece for The Age Daily Life

By ellyvarrenti

On December 22, 2013

In Memoir, Relationships

http://www.dailylife.com.au/life-and-love/real-life/when-christmas-is-unbearably-sad-20131219-2zmkg.html

Lonely People Are Other People (Mamamia column)

By ellyvarrenti

On September 9, 2013

In Grief, Memoir, Relationships

http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/dealing-with-being-lonely/

My latest ABC Life Matters column: Are you lonesome tonight?

By ellyvarrenti

On September 1, 2013

In Memoir

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/loneliness/4915170

latest column: missing mozart

By ellyvarrenti

On June 16, 2013

In Grief, Memoir

http://www.mamamia.com.au/health-wellbeing/how-long-is-it-too-long-to-grieve/

Health Retreat

By ellyvarrenti

On April 24, 2013

In Memoir

Health Retreat

The best thing about spending 7 days at a health retreat in a sub-tropical rainforest with 25 strangers is that I learnt how to Salsa. I was rubbish, but I loved it.

The worst thing about living in a hermetically sealed wellness universe for a week with 25 strangers is that some of what this universe accepts as given truths are not always so universal.

Not all of us believe in guardian angels or alternative therapies lock, stock and barrel. Not all of us buy the Positive Psychology model as the superior path to happiness and self-fulfillment. Not all of us consider wearing a name tag day in day out normal.

But then what’s normal about chunking-up my mortgage to pay for a week’s holiday (first in 10 years) to some place where I wake up at sunrise for Tai Chi? What’s so great about sustaining a 2-day caffeine-withdrawal headache and enduring the daily torture of something called a spin class? Why chose to be on intimate terms with mosquitos that think they’re fighter-bombers?

Before I paid for this health retreat that promised to coach me into submission with a personalized ‘wellness vision’, have me living outside my comfort zone and without virgin olive oil, I figured out that my repayments were about the equivalent of 3 lattes and 2 sav blancs a week.

I can do that. Not a biggie when I put it like that. I deserve a break. My stress levels are off the radar. I’m self-medicating with booze and carbs like a wharfie on a busman’s holiday. My family and work commitments are overwhelming and my love life is … well…complicated.

On arrival at our health retreat we all stand about self-consciously, summing up the other in a glance. She’s looks like a pain. He’s a fitness freak bozo. Those two in charge are just too perky-positive to be real.

I am wondering if it’s too late to ask for my money back. This place looks like an upmarket school camp but without any of the sugar highs or sexual experimentation to look forward to.

As the day progresses my initial defensiveness dissolves into surrender, although I do maintain a pretty active bullshit-metre throughout the stay. Initially I leaven it with humor and self-deprecation and then gradually give up the performing for the more serious stuff like learning how to breathe. Apparently I haven’t been breathing properly for 50 years.

Sometimes the daily discussions and workshops about exercise, diet and the latest in neuroscience and mindfulness training really get to me.

First-world worries! I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t had a special price on offer. Everyone from the psychic flower reader to the life coach with a PhD in chutzpah thinks he’s a shrink. This is a kibbutz but with less concern for the community good and way better bathrooms. A massive share-house for rich people with nothing better to do than talk about gluten intolerance and strengthening their cores.

Other times, like when I’m striding and sweating up and down mountain-sides, the local fauna scuttling up the forest trees, the air clean, damp and smelling of frangipani, and all the while chatting intensely with a couple of my new best friends about everything from kids to kayaks, I feel the best I have in ages.

As we talk and walk, every day a barrier down, a revelation shared, I am blown away by these women. By day 2 we are laughing and crying like adolescent girls on a night out.

We are 20 women and 5 men; the usual gender ratio at this place apparently. There is a husband and wife team too and I just can’t imagine coming to such a place as a couple. I don’t know why exactly but it just seems to defeat the purpose or something. The men are blokey-jokey and we are most of us probably over 40 and at one of life’s crossroads.

I don’t avoid the blokes but the subtle peculiarity of group dynamics means that I end up spending most of my time with 4 women, in particular.

I am alone in my real life quite a bit but there’s always a distraction at hand. Here in this technology-free-capsule I am alone in my room by 7.30pm and it’s just me and my little fast-detoxing brain. I am not used to this kind of silence and it’s confronting. My leg muscles are burning. I can hear my heart beat.

Is it possible to make substantial changes to the way I am living my life after only a week here? They say it takes 21 days to change a habit. But there’s no denying the power of hanging out with a bunch of people who are all trying to be better, let alone absorbing the palpable goodwill and positive vibes.

By day 4, I have done 16 hours exercise, had 2 massages, 1 facial and participated in over 10 workshops about love and intimacy to navigating the hormone highway. The one about stress, cancer and heart disease scares the bejeezas out of me.

But it’s the dance classes where I really let myself go and forget to be embarrassed. I haven’t danced in years and it feels fantastic!

The chef is a fat-free, sugar-free genius and living without alcohol, coffee and chronic negativity is a welcome change to my usual routine back home.

A member of staff here is one of the funniest and inspiring people I have ever met. Another is more inappropriately flirtatious than my car mechanic.

Some people snuck food in. One burly fella had a secret stow of protein shakes. Another, the token husband, becomes the skinny, hungry guy I give my desert and mid-afternoon snack to. One woman confesses she’d panicked and secreted an empty tuna can in her room-safe after a late night binge.

I never thought I’d like yoga. I always reckoned meditation was for other people. I’d never really savored food without oil, tea without caffeine, and sharing 3 meals a day with people I had little in common with. I never thought I’d keep a straight face in a steam room full of naked people.

It was my sister’s birthday while I was away – it’s over 2 years now – and the retreat’s head gardener suggests we plant a frangipani for her on the day. He tells me he’ll look after it and send me a photo when it flowers after giving me a quick hug and leaving me with my plant. They’d be red flowers, he tells me.

I wonder what my sister would have made of this place.

“Jesus El! You would have been better off giving your money to asylum seekers or something! But if it makes you feel better and, you know, more able to cope with me being gone now and everything…. Oh, and by the way, I saw you doing The Salsa. Don’t give up ya day job, will ya?”

By day 6 most of us have become sufficiently institutionalized to be apprehensive about re-entering our former lives. I want to take home the funny and inspiring staff member to keep me on the right track and off the beaten one.

What’s not to like about a week of company, community and conversation? What’s not to feel grateful for after a week of pampering, positivity and papaya fruit?

Back home now and my real-world first-world problems are all still here. There’s been an initial exchange of mutually encouraging txts with my new best friends –

How you handling it? Have re-toxed already. You go girl!

But they have stopped now.

And it feels a bit weird and lonely all of a sudden. It’s like the end of an affair you both knew had no future but was gorgeous while it lasted.

Me and the Health Retreat

By ellyvarrenti

On April 24, 2013

In Memoir

Me and the Health Retreat

The Man in a Suit on his Bum on the Footpath

By ellyvarrenti

On March 12, 2013

In Memoir

I am driving along my usual route to visit a friend in Melbourne when I see something.

A man is shuffling, no hoisting, no dragging himself along the footpath on his bum. I pull up next to him. His suit is dusty from the street and he is wincing and straining as he tries to lug his body along the ground in the direction of the train station. It’s maybe 100 meters away only, but he is like the snail committed to doing the length of his leaf by nightfall and travelling very slowly. It must hurt. So I pull over and unwind the passenger window.

You okay there, mate? I never call anyone mate but what can I say? Are you okay there, Sir? Mister? Mate just seems right.

Yeah. Nah. Not really, he says.

I can see his face more easily now and he is younger than I had first thought.

I’m going to the train station. Want to get home, he says.

Where’s home? I ask. He tells me and it’s a suburb not far away and I used to live in it. I am thinking I’ll run him back and that it won’t take long.

You need a hand? I could drive you there.

Then a white station wagon stops too and there’s a bloke with a beard and his family in the car – teenage son in the passenger seat and mother and daughter in the back. I get out of my car and walk over to his window.

Hi, I say. Thanks for stopping. Are you busy for the next half hour? Do you mind following me while I take this bloke home?

Sure. That’s all he says. We both know what we need to do and nothing else needs to be said.

Somehow I get the bloke on the footpath into my passenger seat and he even manages to belt himself in. Which seems a bit perverse given the risks he’s already taking with his personal safety.

I can smell the alcohol and desperation. I can see the fall from grace.

The bloke with the beard in the station wagon is following close behind.

So what’s going on? I ask the man sitting next to me now. Why don’t you use a wheel chair? That’d be easier, wouldn’t it?

Yeah. No. Not really. Tried that but it’s harder, not easier. He isn’t slurring exactly, but he is paying extral attention to how he forms the words in his mouth before allowing them to fall out for my benefit.

He tells me some stuff that doesn’t make sense and other stuff that is crystal clear and has the effect of both reducing and summing up a life in a few short sentences.

I was an accountant. Had my own firm. The wife’s gone. Don’t see my kids. Nah, don’t see my kids. They’re both in their 30’s now. I don’t see my kids. They won’t let me see them. They don’t wanna see me. Had my own firm.

By now we are in the suburb where he reckons he lives but he can’t give me a street name, let alone a number. So we start driving around and around the place searching for something that might jog his memory.

He looks out his window for some point of reference. I am starting to get a bit nervous by now. I am not scared but I am feeling a bit silly. The bloke in the station wagon is still following me on this joy ride;we have both been at it for a good 45 minutes by now.

There, over there! He calls out. That park! That park looks familiar. I am starting to get a sinking feeling that maybe his home is a nice little split level park bench.

Over there! he calls out again. That street! It’s a home. You know a residence for men. I’m not a drunk. I’m not a deadbeat drunk or anything. I was an accountant. I’m good with numbers.

Finally we pull up at a corner that is right opposite where I’d lived 15 years ago with Mum for a while after a bad relationship break-up.

The man in the suit refuses my help getting out of the car but he does let the family-man with the beard help him to the front door of what looks like a fairly respectable looking rooming house.

Hey! Ya dick head! Where ya been? There’s a bloke calling out of an upstairs balcony down to my man in his dusty suit.

This lass drove me back from the station, he calls back, nodding in my direction. She’s got a boy 11 year old.

It’s all he’d asked me during our 45 minutes together: You got any kids? That’s all he’d wanted to know.

The man in the beard sees him to his front door and the man in the suit waves at us both and almost falls over. When we get back to the family-man’s station wagon he says,

My name’s John. This is my family.

They all smile at me one by one. I was right about the seating arrangements.

Hi, I’m Elly. Thanks. Thanks for that. We shake hands and he heads off.

I’m not some no-hoper drunk, the man in the dusty suit had said to me.

I know you’re not mate. I know you’re not.