‘Time Passing’ exhibition 7-21 April.
Enza Gandolfo and my exhibition ‘Time Passing’ opens on Thursday 7th April at Queen Victoria Women’s Centre in Lonsdale St and we’ve got activities alongside:
Stitching workshops. Play, play, play, play, play!! On Sun 10th April 11am and Tuesday 19th 5pm.
'From Pram to Plath' readings and discussion on not having children Wed 13th 12pm
Enza and I made friends over 20 years’ ago, as writers at Varuna Writers’ Centre in the Blue Mountains. Perhaps it is part of the passing of time that our dialogues are rich in griefs and losses. Friends have died, family members are vulnerable, and we’ve been through Melbourne’s six lockdowns together.
Oh la la! 2020 lockdown. So in that space, we began our collaboration on the textile works that we’re exhibiting. Through the mail. I was gaining new skills in ecodyeing and Enza was doing small scale experiments too, solar dyeing her family linen in jars of leaves and iron mordant. Each of us was stitching. Like so many others we had ample time to upskill, drawing on our craft heritage.
Our Zoom stitching couldn’t have been more hilarious - for example when I tried to teach Enza a french knot. And it was also serious. I’m busy with a new manuscript Artworking - a resource for honouring traumatic loss. At times I felt I should just give it up. Enza encouraged me. ‘You’re writing on a really difficult topic. Maybe taking breaks is part of the process.’
‘The Bridge’ and ‘Death Matters’
You may have read Enza’s Stella shortlisted novel The Bridge (2018). At the time it was published I submitted an article to a journal which subsequently folded. So out of the bottom drawer, excerpts from this piece that touches on the book and ‘Death Matters’, a grief and loss training we were running at the time:
Enza Gandolfo’s The Bridge is an engrossing and compassionate novel. It's a book about my city, Melbourne, with its looming Westgate Bridge over the mouth of the Yarra River. The stories at its heart concern the young, the old and the middle aged, their dreams, bereavement, grief and loss. In this novel we see what happens when unanticipated death comes pounding into an individual or a couple or a family's life. Naturally they have not anticipated any such eventuality and are not in any way equipped to meet the situation.
I read The Bridge on the train on the way to "the west'' where its stories unfold. I travel there to run a workshop ‘Death Matters’ with colleagues in the Victims’ Assistance Program (VAP) at CoHealth, a Melbourne community health organisation. It's a full day training on death, grief and loss for professionals - family violence support workers, social workers, mental health, aged care and youth workers, all of whom are regularly in touch with clients dealing with the aftermath of situations like those that unfold in The Bridge.
In the novel, ordinary houses such as those I pass on the train are not only places but intimate characters. And the inside of home turns outward on the public spaces that I pass - the riverside, worksite and the road where tragedy can strike at any time. The cemetery makes its entry also, reverberating with the mystery and what might be seen as elements of superstition associated with loss and death. Gandolfo creates a most believable context for the ‘reactive agony’ of grief experienced by the characters, Antonello, a young rigger at the time of the collapse of the Westgate Bridge, and Jo a young P-plater whose all too believable self-absorption leads to fatal mistakes.
In Footscray, at the start of the ‘Death Matters’ workshop participants identify their learning needs. They want to know: ‘how to better support people with grief’; ‘how to talk to people about death, especially through traumatic circumstances’. They want to: 'feel more comfortable with death’; ‘prepare for conversations about death’; 'have meaningful conversations with clients about death of loved ones’; and 'feel more comfortable supporting people grieving a loved one’.
What is grief? The ‘reactive agony’ which happens to us after bereavement, says Attig. All the more so in traumatic bereavement as experienced by the afflicted Antonello and Jo. According to Attig ‘Grief can be viewed as a response involving choices and actively engaging in the grief work’. But how to engage in this work? Commonplace understandings are that grief is linear. In this now outmoded view, a person experiences a loss, grieves in the period that follows and over a period of time is supposed to have got over it.
In the The Bridge Gandolfo captures poignantly what it is like to live in a world where conversation and dialogue about death after traumatic loss are completely closed off. As Janoff Bulman noted in the 1990s, the assumptive world, previously seen as benevolent and meaningful is thrown, along with the belief that the self is worthy. Gandolfo casts a spell when she paints a picture of Antonello's earlier days of love, joy, and future dreams, and this makes the turmoil that follows even harder to bear.
When the psychological autopsy of ‘What if I hadn’t …? ‘Why didn’t I …’ ‘Why did I …?’ follows, the reader longs to tell him to stop punishing himself. Antonello has lost a key attachment figure who helped him learn the ropes nervous young worker. The hell of isolation, self-blame and desperation now mark his life, with ongoing ramifications for his family and the social domain he inhabits. This is a novel in which the author engages deeply with this reality, in such a way that the reader longs for help and resolution for the characters, even when we find ourself judging their actions. We can see how they are suffering going it alone.
The ‘Death Matters’ training was developed in response to workers’ experiences in the Victorian Government's Department of Justice's 'Victims’ Assistance Program' (VAP) who are practical grief care providers to victims of crime and traumatic events. The program makes support available to the immediate victims and related victims of traumatic events today. In the 1970s, in The Bridge, Antonello struggles on. In J. Shep Jeffries terms we are ‘exquisite witnesses’ to his long journey of grief.
Through the tragic events, historic and contemporary, in the novel, the reader's understanding matures along with the characters' experience. To be completely unprepared when death comes is to be at sea, simply unable to cope with life as it unfolds in the wake of events. This is life at its most uncomfortable. Nobody can say anything that makes a difference.
As designers and facilitators of the ‘Death Matters’ training, we draw on experience in assisting those who, like characters in The Bridge, have had their worldview turned upside down. It’s been so valuable for me to read this book. I love the way it took me to “the west” and gave me the opportunity to notice different times on a grief journey, and also to reflect on the difference we set out to make in ‘Death Matters’ by making workers more comfortable and capable in their professional interventions.