Some days are better than others

I used to dread ageing. When I was in my teens, I joked that I didn’t really want to live beyond thirty-five or so. Old age (or even middle age) seemed like a life sentence: I’m not sure what I thought my mind would be like in my later years, but I remember thinking my body would be tired and breaking down. Ageing seemed to me to be a drawn out unpleasantness of increasing degree.

At thirty-seven (already two years past my use by date, if my teenage self is to be believed), I look forward to becoming older. I’m just old enough to feel the beginnings of the physical breakdown I so feared: I have early osteoarthritis in my spine, and mild arthritis in some of my finger and toe joints. My hair is almost entirely grey, though I don’t mind that. I don’t mind wrinkles either; but function matters to me a great deal and there are some tiny, cumulative griefs in my joints already.

Having spent the last eighteen months or so morphing into a recreational athlete, I have become much more invested in my long term wellbeing. I’ve begun to learn that although some change in function is inevitable, there’s also an argument to be made that the human body doesn’t stop working due to age – as long as you keep moving.

One of the yudansha in my dojo is an older woman, and she is older in the best way possible. She’s bright and articulate and lively, and I love watching her roll and breakfall and throw other students. I watch her and see a world of possibility: I want to reach retirement age and be able to throw students to the mat, and leap over an obstacle into a quick-sure forward roll.

That I feel strong and well contributes to this desire for a long and active life: it feels possible in a way that is new and exhilarating to me. I have come to realise though that there is another, maybe even more significant reason that I have aspirations and goals for my sixties and seventies and eighties and beyond.

The link between physical health and mental health is a complex link and not one we understand well on a conscious level, but on a more visceral level the connection is very clear. The effect that physical health has on my affect is clear and immediate: if I spend enough time in each week training for strength, I am calm and resilient, and my day to day existence is smooth enough that I can move through it confidently.

More profound though is the realisation that I now think about the future at all. I think about times a long way ahead of me, and my contented place in them. And this, this is something. I spent many years looking no further forward than a week or a day.

There were times when the black dog placed his heavy paws on my chest, and breathed hot and claustrophobic over my shoulder, and then life was a matter of minutes: just one, then another, then another. But those are not the times I’m thinking of: I’m thinking of the expanse of years, the decade or even two where I forgot how to dream. Life wasn’t bad or even particularly sad: it just didn’t have a permanent sort of texture, and I didn’t grip it firmly enough to climb.

This is what excites me about getting old: that I care enough to want it. I see a long and vibrant future, and I am there in every moment.

I think I’m getting better at Christmas. For many years, it’s felt so bleak.

I know I’m not alone in this. For every person who loves this time of year, there’s another person for whom the festive season is filled with holes: gaps where people should be. Despite the breadth of this shared experience, it’s a strangely isolating feeling. About ten years ago, I spent a Christmas entirely alone, because that hurt least. I think I had gin and television, and a couple of people dropped by to check in on me anyway.

It’s not quite true that kids make Christmas, but they do offer a different perspective on things. My son is excited about Christmas, and his joy is infectious. The ghosts take their seats quietly in the corner of the room instead of pulling up a chair at the table. I can still see their shadows out of the corner of my eye, but if I blink and look back at the festivities they fade away for a while.

Now and then I turn to face the shadows, and it can feel a little overwhelming. There are so many of them. People who never age. People who would have spent Christmas with us, playing on the floor with my son and telling terrible jokes from Christmas crackers just to make him laugh. People who he will never know except through stories – their shadows are paler for him, so thin as to be almost invisible.

There are other shadows, too: people who are celebrating Christmases this year, somewhere else. Families which are not really families any more. I’m not even sure what I miss there, any more: perhaps it’s a sense of how things could have been different, had people been less wounded or unbending.

But this year, we have a Christmas tree in our house. It’s an actual tree, not a compromise. There is a steadily growing pile of presents beneath it: some wrapped in simple paper, labelled with spidery calligraphy; some wrapped in bright colours with hot pink gift cards and felt tip scrawl. Hot pink is not a colour I’d usually associate with Christmas, but its incongruity tickles me. There is a delicate ornament hanging from the tree: a dove, given to me to remember my brother. My chest tightened as I hung it on my tree; but then I hung a red bauble above it. The red bauble has messy glitter designs glued to it, and my son gravely told me I should put it at the top of the tree, because he is my only child.

He is indeed, and so I laughed and hung the bauble (oversized and completely at odds with the smaller silver and gold ornaments placed so uniformly across the branches) up near the very peak of the tree, just underneath the glowing star.

We are spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with family. Not all of our family, but enough. It will be warm and festive, and there will be mangoes and punch. I’m looking forward to it at the same time as I am looking back to Christmases past. It feels like a good end to a good year.

I think my favourite place is the back steps. Almost everywhere I’ve lived has had a set of steps at the back door, and those steps have for some reason always been my special place.

When I was a kid, growing up in Roma, the back steps were one of the coolest places to sit during the long hot summers. They were four or five open wooden steps, old and repainted many times, so that the wood grain was wide and picked out in different colours where feet had worn through the paint. I’d sometimes hold the garden hose and water my feet while I sat there. When I was sad, I’d sit on those steps, because they were not inside the house, but I was still somewhere that felt like home. The cat and her kittens would troop past me, up and down the stairs. When I was a little older and I had menstrual cramps – I had a hard time with those as a teenager – I’d sit on the steps with my knees tucked up, waiting for the pain relief to kick in.

When I was first at university, I lived in a residential college in Toowoomba. I’d catch the bus down to Brisbane reasonably often to stay with my aunt and uncle and cousins. For a while there, their house was my second home. I spent a lot of time on their back steps, just hanging out and talking with my cousin. Those steps were two storeys high, and there was almost always a huge orb weaver spider next to the top landing hanging a web at eye height. I love heights, and I love spiders. I spent a lot of time staring out at those orb weavers, leaning out into midair to see them up close. When Emma, Rebecca, and Catherine’s car careened off the highway, I was at my aunt and uncle’s house. I spent a long time sitting on those back steps, listening to Tracey Chapman, sobbing quietly.

I moved out into a flat eventually, with Rachel. We spent a lot of time on our back steps, smoking cigarettes and drinking Dolcetto. We tried to quit smoking by making a rule that we could only smoke outside the house in winter. Neither of us quit, but we were often very, very cold.

I lived in a flat at Taringa about ten years ago. There were no back steps, and I tried sitting in the back doorway. It wasn’t quite right. That flat never really felt like home to me. It was a two storey townhouse, and I tried sitting on the internal stairs. They weren’t right either. I moved out of that flat into a dodgy old house in Highgate Hill with my girlfriend. I’d sit on the back steps when we fought, to clear my head. I sat on those steps and cried when she broke up with me, and I sat there to avoid her in the weeks afterward, before she moved out. Those three stairs were at the side of the house, next to the kitchen, and feral pumpkin vines curled around them.

When I spent some months housebound, because I was too anxious to go outside, I sat on the back stairs in my tiny old hobbit-hole flat. Those steps were cracked and they wobbled, but I could sit on the steps and be outdoors without panicking. I’d stare at the sky and the trees, or close my eyes and feel the breeze, and not feel quite so lonely.

I don’t often sit on my back stairs here. But when I do, they feel like home.

I have a Christmas bauble with your name on it
but this year I did not have a tree.

Last year
grief was fresh, and small remembrances
were a communion of sorts. Remembering
brought you closer again
in short, sharp pangs.

An aching year has lain down between us, and now
remembering is a slow infirmity. I would
hang your bauble on a tree, but my heart is too heavy
to lift it by its slender string.

I reach for my glass, the wine drawing me
into the pools of Mnemosyne.
I swim with my eyes closed, arms outstretched.

To Christmas, my brother. Our family
is as it ever has been,
so near,
so far.

To Christmas.