1.             Loss

Singapore

My son Robin drowned in 2006. Stunned. Unbelieving. Then shock, denial and confusion: all and more. Noreen and Allison needed each other. It was a time of unreality. I felt that Robin would ring or walk through the door; that this was all some sick, surreal fantasy.

The day he died, I was in hospital in Singapore having the rods in my spine replaced. I was expecting a two-week recuperation. My phone rang. It was an Australian Government employee in Canberra.

‘Your son is missing in East Timor’, intoned the functionary.

‘What do you mean, missing?’ I asked.

‘All I can say is that he is missing.’

I rang Robin’s mobile. His partner, Bree, answered. They had been free diving off Cristo Rei beach east of Dili. A huge statue of Jesus — a gift from Indonesia during its brutal occupation of that benighted country — stands on the point overlooking the Wetar Deep where they were diving. Fat lot of good that. Robin simply went diving. By himself. How foolish. How irresponsible. How Robin.

They found his body next day. I had visited Robin and his partner a month earlier and taken him — at his request — a pair of outsized flippers. Yellow. Those poked out of the silt on the seabed. These the searchers saw.

We greeted the hundreds who turned up at his memorial on Beto Tasi beach near the Dili airport. I remember what Noreen said at the ceremony.

‘Far be it from me to feel distraught at the loss of my son’, and she paused and looked at the Timorese standing round on the grass under the trees as the beautiful yet demonic ocean that had claimed Robin clawed at the beach behind her. ‘You have suffered far more than I have. I know countless women here have lost their children. You understand loss far better than I.’

It was a selfless comment and one which made me realise that, had things been different, what we once found in each other was still there, albeit irrecoverable. My own words were far more mundane.

‘When Robin visited me when I lived in Dili, he was known as my son. Now I come back and I am known as Robin’s father. That makes me immensely proud.’

Allison sang a Gaelic song at the edge of the great sea that had taken Robin. Noreen sobbed on my shoulder. I stared beyond the sea and wished things had been different: all things. It is not for me to speak for them; but we put rancour to one side, for in that tragic event, we recognised what really mattered: Robin

After the memorial, I returned to Singapore and went straight back to the surgeon’s rooms in the hospital. The sister came over to me.

‘How are, Mr. Lansell?’ she asked kindly, well aware of what had happened.

I burst into tears. She fetched me some tea and I sat down, still sobbing. Sitting next to me was a plump, middling aged, bejewelled and multi-bangled Chinese Indonesian lady.

She leaned over and said: ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. Is everything all right? What happened?’

‘My son died last week’, I said.

She nodded, and settled back into the sofa. ‘I know exactly what you are going through. My little doggie died on Wednesday.’

Shakespeare: ‘Methinks thy face could be improved by the application of my fist.’ I looked at her, bewildered. Then I realised that she was being genuine. Perhaps her pets were her life. I understood that. I acknowledged her words. I smiled — I hope sincerely — and she reached over and patted my hand.

People try to show they care, and the attempt is what I learned to appreciate, regardless of what I see — rightly or wrongly — as the often clumsy, perhaps foreign or sometimes formulaic manner of their words.

Robin was 29 years and two months when he drowned. Is that relevant when one loses a child? No. My nephew, Matthew, lost an infant son the same week Robin died. One of Robin’s schoolmates lost a child two weeks earlier. Both came to see me when I returned to Australia. 29 years, 29 days or 29 minutes: it makes no difference: no matter how long we live or what we do or do not achieve is irrelevant: loss is loss.

Ten years on. Other emotions have taken over. New ones replaced the old: anger, guilt, regret, loneliness, despair — the journey never ends. I moved on, but I never moved far enough away. When you lose a child you never get over it; you work through it. For ever.

‘Let him go!’ intoned a friend.

‘When he lets me go,’ I replied.

Caucasians or Asians: who deals with grief better? Like faith, like life: we differ. My Caucasian friends were gentle, talking things through. My Asian friends hardly mentioned a thing.

Westerners grieve openly and more noisily with words and hugs and tears. Asians focus on their essentially personal loss, then turn to share on-going life with their friends who gather to discuss not what happened, but what is happening now and tomorrow. Is it a case of one being better equipped than the other? Who is right? It is not a competition. What we are sets the parameters for how we think, act and react.

We end up analyzing endlessly; questioning a blind and deaf spirit. I went through an endless list of questions: If only. What if I had…? Did he understand how much I loved him? Did I love him enough?

Was it somehow my fault? I could never escape the feeling that had I not been to Dili, Robin would have never gone there. Had he not gone there, he would not have died. I tried to resolve it. I still have not succeeded.

After his death, it was hard to imagine ever smiling, laughing or finding joy again.  Over time, I saw that grief was an ongoing, long journey. In time, the pain softened. I shifted my focus away from his death toward his life. Others kept him alive. I learned to do the same.

My cousin, Fran, planted a grove of native trees as a memorial to him in Dilkisha: a forest she tends in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. She named it Robin’s grove. I planted some trees there. They now grow tall and proud, each evening facing the setting sun. I visit them when I return to Australia and I remember Robin.

I met complete strangers who knew him. They admired him. I smiled. I knew that they spoke the truth. I read tributes on the net. Robin contributed so much. I am proud. What he did lives and matters.

A few weeks after Robin’s death, I visited Helensburgh — a town in which I once lived. All smiles, a friend there — Nick — who knew Robin, greeted me.

‘How’s Robin,’ he asked.

‘He’s dead,’ I replied.

Nick reeled backwards as if I had hit him with a hammer. ‘How can you say that?’ he stuttered.

Why do people prefer anything but the words ‘died’ or ‘dead’ or ‘drowned’. I fail to see how using gentler words changes things. Had I said — ’He has shuffled off this mortal coil’ — what difference would that make? Can masking death with flowery verbiage make it less tragic?

With my Asian friends, one simply said — ’He is dead,’ — and they nodded. At first, I found it uncaring, I soon realised it had its merits because its focus was: it has happened: now move on. Everyone reacts according to who they are: their religion, culture, their philosophy. I valued each and every comment. The important issues were that it was about Robin and that it was sincere.  

Who understands death? I have seen it ‘as an observer’ in many countries: Pakistan, Indonesia, East Timor. Hundreds of bodies: eviscerated children, decapitated adults, women with their babies ripped from their wombs, men blown apart by rockets, teenagers lying on a slab looking as though they were asleep; most in the West find it too hard to comprehend.

For the East Timorese, it happened daily. Their lives became a morass of unending grief from which it was difficult to rise. I understood? I wonder. Detachment is easy when it is not your own who has died.

I have moved on. I have accepted. I now smile. I laugh. I love. I live. Sometimes I still cry. Grief still lies in wait in a vision; in an experience; in a fleeting image; in a memory. I might see someone in a shopping center or on a train, holding their child to them. I can sense the love; and happiness from a lost life floods back.

I see my Robin as a boy with his blue suit and his red hat kicking his tiny feet whilst sitting in his baby carrier. I see him as a teenager performing in a school play. I see him as a grown man critiquing my work. I see Robin: his forthright stare; his insight: his standards: his anger: his intelligence: his love. I see him.

Except for one three letter word in verse 8, Wordsworth almost had it right in his Ode to Immortality:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting

The soul that rises with us, our star,

Hath elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison house begin to close

Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away

And fade into the light of common day.

I have long since stopped asking the gods: why did I stop asking? Because there is no god apart from the one we create for ourselves.

People ask now how many children I have. I reply: ‘Two. My son and my daughter.’