Oh No Please Not This Again.

"I dreamt that one of your legs - I think it was your right - was burning in the firebox in my house and I was so excited calling everybody around to take a look. 

"You guys! My brothers leg is in here! Come and have a look my brothers leg is on fire!" 

Nobody wanted to look. 

I was the only one looking at your burning leg because it was the last time any incarnation of you would be in this world and at this point I'm grabbing at straws holding on to crumbs and letters and mugs and any fucking remnants of you I need to have and I am So. Sick. Of this. Shit. 

So I have decided .. I am done with the grieving now.  Nobody wants to watch a mans leg burn in a fire I mean I didn't want to see it either but I loved you so hard I had to look it was my duty because I was older than you and older sisters are supposed to care for the ones that come after.

I don't have to kill myself anymore. You did it for the both of us."



This was filmed in 2014, almost a year after my brother Cam left. I was sitting in the exact same place he sat with me for four hours on stupid fucking fathers day. My ex got pissed off so drove down to our (his) beach house while Cam and I talked and talked and talked and he left and the next time I saw him he was in the morgue all spongey. 

Today is 31st August 2017 - the last day of winter, I haven't noticed winter much because one of my best mates Dan died suddenly four months ago and the weather means nothing in Grieftown. Do you know Grieftown, probably. We all know it some much more than others. I know it like the back of my weathered winter hands. I've cried lately (just the once, Ede?) so I get out my handy-dandy Crybook to pinpoint the cry ahhh that's it - step right up soon to birthdays and death anniversaries and another year clocked up since I seen Cam and surely I'd be over this now? (No. And don't call me Shirley.) You never get over grieving it gets woven encompasses embedded into the fabric of who you are. All the things of who you are - you're more than your grief but sometimes you are your grief. Makes no sense to some, makes dollars to others.

This piece of here writing is a mash-up of stuff I've written before but it's still applicable. The death of somebody you love is always applicable. Tick. I miss my confidante. I can't be who I was with my brother to anybody else in the whole world. I miss how he made me feel. I miss who he could have been. Most of all I just miss who he was. I used to perform Camerons autopsy to find the cause of death SCALPEL over and over and over again. And over. And over. I don't even get paid for this shit. Grieving is all-encompassing. It is exhausting. And I am tired. So are my sons. We are hurting and we are tired from this. My brain will not stop its futile search and rescue operation.

"He should have gotten help he never got help why didn't he get help? The help probably wouldn't have done much anyway why couldn't he just have kept going? I kept going? Why do I keep going? There is no point in keeping going. Life is meaningless. He should have kept living anyway nothing means anything Cam where are you?"

And my Cam is nowhere to be found. My Cam is gone. I was standing very close to him when he departed so I've been hit pretty badly by the shrapnel. I was complicit in his death, see. He begged me on the phone, a few weeks before he died. I have talked him away from death so many times in our lives, so many times. I would tell him how suicidal I was too. And I was, am. I'm all suicidy and I can't wash it off. Please god higher power nature do not let my sons feel this. Other things .. but not this.

I feel like I aided and abetted his suicide, because I understood so well why he would want to go. He struggled with this whole "life" business, so hard. It's a hard life, I look at my children and I just think oh you guys, I'm so sorry I brought you into such a crappy world. They have no idea how hideous and intense and awful the world can make a person feel. No idea.

I have a feeling of a tidal wave forming, of a richer and more substantial dialogue on suicide. Which is great! But too late, for my brother. I see a video of beautifully groomed celebrities talking about how we must just hold on I want to reach through my screen and muss up their hair, swear at them a bit. Unless you have personal experience of suicide, you do not get to speak for me. I've been called "the suicide expert" by somebody online being nasty, who didn't mean it in a nice way. I happen to agree with you, motherfucker. I AM a suicide expert!

I told my therapist that the only, ONLY times I have felt any semblance of feeling ok about my brother not being in the world anymore is when I'm driving in my car next to some railway tracks and there's a coal train travelling in the same direction as me. Then it happened and I just exhaled for the first time since that awful Tuesday and for 0.04 of a second I was ok with my brothers death. It's happened a few times since, and I've felt that same teeny, tiny smidge of peace.

Once it happened with Max next to me in the car so I asked him to take a photo and he didn't even ask why. We are kindreds. 

There are trees that exist in the Scottish highlands that are balanced precariously on the edges of cliffs and all they need is a few drops, a few centimetres of water each year to survive. Gimme a smidgen of hope and I can make it last for weeks, months, years. I read recently that "strong storms make oak trees dig their roots in further." (Roots lol)

The thing that confuses me the most is that I am alive and my brother is dead and we were both so similar. He wrote in his suicide note to me: "Eden you're the strongest one out of all of us!"

I highly disagree, it's just - maybe I dug my roots in further? Cam told me in the last year of his life that he'd like to build his own house one day and now I think what an utter tragedy it is that he can never build his own house. He didn't know how to lay the foundations. He tried. But nobody taught him properly, he couldn't teach himself he was so arrogant, stubborn and now dead. Will never realise his potential.

My therapist and I could not quite work out why I feel a sliver of peace when I drive in the same direction as a coal train. Maybe it's because I used to read a big purple hardcover book by Richard Scarry called "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go" to my brother so often when he was little that the cover almost wore off. Everybody was always so BUSY, in that book. They had places to go, people to see. They had PURPOSE. And Goldbug would be hiding on every page and before I even turned the page my little brother, my little blonde-haired delightful guy who I now see in my children .... he'd sit there waiting with his finger pointed, ready to find Goldbug before I did.

I always let him find Goldbug first. I always gave him the prawns from my fried rice. I always listened to him, always tried to make him feel worthwhile and valued and important and beautiful and clever because it was all true. It was all true.

Buddy Wakefield says that the moon does not have to be full for us to love it. Cam, you did not have to be whole for us to love you! You didn't have to be anything other than who you were. You didn't like who you were. I wish you knew you were enough. I wish you kept going - for YOU, not for me or for anybody else. I wish you weren't in so much pain. I wish I wasn't in so much pain. I understand why you left. I hope that when you spoke to me on those last phone calls, my understanding and empathy of where you were and how you felt - bro I hope it gave you comfort. But god help me I wish you knew how much I didn't want you to go. I'm so sorry my Bam-Bam. I fucked up. I would've done it all differently I DEMAND a do-over you would still be alive and be able to grow and evolve and know that you are enough and worth enough, to stay.

He made me promise that if he did it I was to fight anyone who tried to hold a funeral for him and he did it so I made sure there was no funeral. But we all needed your funeral, brother. And it's too late for you to realise that this wasn't just about you. Shrapnel got a lot us over here.

I wished I'd done more, told you I needed you more, fixed you more but it's really really hard to fix somebody. Especially when you are actually legit a bit broken yourself.

"We cannot save people. We can only love them."

Young Women - Stop Cutting Your Flaps Off!

Labia Minora have rights too!! Tell your girlfriends, daughters, nieces, sisters that we don't want a flapless society .. we need vulvas of a different variety.

(And if anyone mocks your vag tell them to go buy one of those new $10k sex dolls that are basically bendable corpses that don't talk because it's all about the holes amirite? Or a warm apple pie.)

Remember Barbie's mons pubis? That mound always so round? Neat. Nuh. Embrace our delicately different flower openings. Embrace vulva diversity.

Here's me a few years ago talking about my own vaginal fears which I have since gotten over in the past few years.

Embrace the flap.


.

Hey - Remember The People In Your Neighbourhood?

What must it be like, to feel invisible in the world?

 

This was Mary and her niece, begging for money on the streets of downtown Manhattan. Pretty sure they don't like begging. I like their painted toes.

Steve is one of the critters who come out at night. Scavenging through the hundreds of dumpsters that line New York City.

At 5c a bottle, he can make $80 a day. He said he's happy. He lied.

Steve lives in a flat over in the Bronx, barely affording rent and food. "I'm my own boss ... if I need a day off I take it. I gotta listen to my body. It's hard work."

He knows he's doing an important job. "People don't care. They don't recycle." We shook elbows. Later I lay awake in my hotel bed with garbage air in my lungs. Thinking.

I loved that Dan was reading a book. A western. "It's a true story 'bout the Indians and how they got slaughtered. It's pretty sad." He isn't scared of living on the streets. Says the shelters are disgusting. "Full of crazy people!"

I said man, I wish I could do something for you Dan. He looked me square in the eyes.

"Take me with you back to Australia."

I wished I'd asked him back to our hotel room for a shower. Instead I ran back to give him more money. As I threw the second twenty in his cup, he didn't even care. Looked up briefly from his book with a "Thanks babe."

I like that he called me babe. With a shower, good feed, and a sleep? Homeless Dan could start reaching some of his potential. Get a job, probably pull some chicks. He has a spark, you know?

One night in Times Square we came across a guy taking a breather, sweat riveting down his face. I paid him for a photo and asked him not to pull his headpiece down. It's a "thing" for people to dress up in cheap polyester character costumes and pose for photos with tourists.

                    A picture really CAN speak a thousand words.

Maybe it's because I've walked around in such profound deep emotional pain for the past few weeks, or maybe it's just the travelling making me notice things more .... but man the invisible people were in rich abundance.

A dazed chick in a bikini top with her sign just saying "hungry" ...  would've been safer in a brothel.

The old guy outside our hotel every night. Every time he'd split the money with the person next to him. The attendant in Balthazar who wakes up every morning, puts on her uniform, and goes to work. In a toilet. Handing people paper towel, wiping their skid marks for the chance of a dollar.

Last night we walked past a tittie bar and this really angry, young drunk guy was refused entry and shouting at nobody. He was FURIOUS and I wondered if this is how mass-murderers are made, isolated and ignored.

This is Gloria. She cleaned our hotel room every day.

Gloria is from Jamaica. She's been a maid at that hotel for 24 years. If there's a power outage in the city, she walks from her place in Brooklyn to work midtown and back. She told Dave and I to have safe travels home. To keep talking to people. She said that some people were so lonely in the world with nobody to talk to, and I said I know, Gloria. I know.

"My sister - she die. My brother die ... and then my uncle? He die. They all die in the past few weeks."

We said we were sorry. That my dad died a few weeks ago, and then our dog died. Straight away she nods.

"Yes. When a dog dies in a family, it is to help guide the dead person across the way."

We walked off and had to put our sunglasses on quickly. When I get home I'll sign up to some kind of community thing to visit people. The people who have no people ... I'll take my boys in and watch strangers faces light up and Rocco will careen down the hallways and Max will sit and soak it all in.

This one person did me undone ... I didn't catch her name. Just walked passed her in the high end of town. Her hand was in a splint, sat there with a puny sign saying "Every little bit helps." Her face was stony. It only changed when she realised it wasn't one dollar I pressed into her hand, but twenty.

"Oh my god thank you so much, oh thank you." She cried from relief and I cried from something else. Told her to take care, told her that people care.

I walked off and imagined a tidal wave of water suddenly cascading through all the streets and fancy shops, sending clothes and shiny stuff swirling.

Cardboard signs getting ripped from grubby hands. Chanel earrings getting ripped from ears.

(This entry was first written in New York, August 2012.)

"The Power of Me."

"So I’m walking around Westmead by myself at 12am sorry mum and dad). As I was standing outside I saw two young men walking towards me and me being the scaredy cat I am ran towards the hospital back dock crouching behind a van and the first thing I though was “please God don’t let me be raped tonight my asshole couldn’t handle something like that”. I shit you not that was my first thought because that’s the first thing on my mind living with Crohn’s, whether my poor asshole could handle anymore trauma 😂"

Check out my cousin Morgans brand spanking new site.

"The Power of Me,"

"My name is Morgan Taylor I'm 20 and I've been suffering from Crohn's disease since I was 12 years old. Ive decided to start writing my story because there isn't very much support for people out there living with ibd. I'm going to be open and raw with my writtng and tell the truth about what it's like living with this disease. I hope to break some boundaries and get people to talk about these kind of topics becasue let's face it, it's a part of life. I hope you stick around."

I'm so, so proud of my girl. So proud. We talk a lot about both physical and mental illnesses and the similarities between the two - especially when what you're battling is invisible. Morgs just got out of hospital (again) and sent me through her first blog post to check out.

Oh. My. God.

Laughing and crying in one paragraph, I read it and was so blown away I was speechless. "MORGIE IT IS INCREDIBLE YOU ARE INCREDIBLE." And I wasn't just saying that because she's my cousin I'm saying it because what this human has gone through is too much, not fair, ongoing .. and the way she handles it with extraordinary humour and grace. Rocco recently asked Morgan if he could see her bag? (Of course he did.) And Morgie showed him without hesitating. He was fascinated as she explained how an oestomy bag works. Maybe one day in the future he'll meet an amazing chick who happens to have a poo bag. And he really, really won't give a shit.