MEMOIR
For Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying – and Flying
Ailsa Piper
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Grief moves slow and deep. The power of playwright and writer Ailsa Piper’s memoir, For Life, is that it does not deal only with the sudden death of her partner of 28 years in 2014, when Piper happened to be interstate. It carries the story forward through the COVID years when her father is approaching the end of his life in Western Australia and her ability to be with him is restricted. Seven, eight and nine years after her husband Peter Curtin’s death from a brain haemorrhage, her feelings have become, if anything, more complex and subtle. She shares this story with exquisite attention to both her inner and outer landscape.
Ailsa Piper speaks of not only trying to find how to live but also why to live.Credit: Nicholas Coghlan
The philosopher Simone Weil, who died in 1943 at the age of only 34, wrote profoundly about the practice not of paying attention but of enabling oneself to give attention. For her, this was at the heart of understanding affliction, which is part of what Piper gently attempts to do.
In a justly famous essay about education, for example, Weil wrote “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies”. By this, she does not mean the “muscular effort” that keeps a student chained to their books. She means allowing oneself to be so lost in wonder that one is “penetrated by the object”. Weil used to take her students outside in the hope that their attention would be simultaneously captured and liberated. She said “prayer consists of attention”.
For Life is not an overtly religious book and nor is Weil’s essay. Piper does salt her sorrow with spiritual longing and has a radically open heart, but the gift of this beautiful book is its ability to give attention. Piper assembles a number of still lifes from the hushed world around her. For example, we follow the story of a family of peregrine falcons perched high above Melbourne on the ledge of an office building. Piper attends to their familial strangeness, and barracks for the fledglings who struggle. Likewise, her attention is captured by seahorses and even by what it means to swim. “Learning to swim was relearning to breathe.”
Above all, she shares with her late husband, an actor, a fascination with words. He would study language every day and mark his latest discoveries in a dictionary. Piper often pauses her story to remark upon words, especially odd ones. We learn that a baby echidna is called a puggle and that ‘eustasy’ refers to a change in sea level. ‘Quotidian’ can mean commonplace or trivial. ‘Offing’ is the space between sea and sky. These words, and there are many, are set like jewels in the humdrum routines of grief’s daily grind.
Why should we fall in love? What of the coincidence that her husband’s name, Peter, means rock but can also mean to diminish or even to come to an end? Along the way, we learn about the couple’s “whirlwind” romance and deepening trust: Curtin suffered from anxiety and depression, neither of which he chose to display very much publicly.
There is a special resonance in the fact that a peregrine falcon shares its name with a word for pilgrim, from which we derive peregrination. Piper is certainly a pilgrim, and this book is unsettled by her movement between cities, trying to find a fresh place of belonging.
She has previously explored the pilgrim experience in her account of walking the Camino del Santiago, Sinning Across Spain, another tender book. In a postscript to that book, added after Curtin’s death, she says “walking is my great teacher”. It showed her “the biggest sin I could commit would be to close myself off from life”. In For Life, Piper speaks of not only trying to find how to live but also why to live. “Do seahorses and falcons feel hope?” she says.
Piper’s family is complex. Her father, who is the still point in the narrative, lost his mother and sister in a car accident when they were young. His first wife, Piper’s mother, left him. His second wife died of an aneurysm. He was never financially secure. Yet as he inexorably fades from life, he becomes a centre of love. His physical weakness seems to create a community of carers, relatives, fellow patients and friends that is rich in humanity and compassion. Piper records the minutiae of these days. “The lived experience is relief. There is some peace, dropping slow.” She concludes: “I don’t know what repair looks like, but something at the edge of my vision tells me Dad is teaching me about that too.”
Michael McGirr is the author of Ideas to Save Your Life (Text).
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