Post One Hundred and Twenty Six: Perspective - The Ball Breaker.

I'm having a hard time. Being honest with yourself is a real b*stard of an experience really isn't it?.

This last week in particular has been challenging. I'm heartbroken. I'm miserable. I feel like crawling away into a cavern for a few months, letting my underarm hairs dread and my tear ducts open and stream continuously until my body is a withered empty and indecipherable membrane. A hairy one at that. Do we have caverns in Brisbane? Surely.

And then I stop and look at what is happening around me, in my hands and at my side. I'm not dead. My friends on my table most certainly are. They've had car accidents, heart attacks, cancers and strokes and all I have is a bruised and tender ego. Woe is NOT me.

The perspective I get as a mortician is a unique and precious job perk. I guess police and emergency service people would understand it too. Even when I'm sad, other people are much much sadder with due reason. I am not as lost as I feel.

Peace and love (and a promise for something uplifting next time),
S.

Post One Hundred and Twenty Five: Three Hundred and Sixty Five.

A year of death and a year of thoughts and reflections as a chain reaction. You like?

Today is this here blogs birthday. Hip hip hoorah!

I've matured just a little bit this year because of the blog. I think. Weird huh.

I have a more responsive emotional acknowledgment of death. I still don't get it though. As such I have comprehended this much: We live, and then we die, and we generally have at least one person that cares about the fact that we do. I will review this lesson in another 365 days.

Anyway, I've shared more about my thoughts and feelings to a wider audience than I ever thought possible. My CEO recently told me that he reads my entries (Hi Boss, thanks for being open minded enough to give me the green light to write what I do, gracias!).

Good times. I've travelled, I've met great people, I've cried alot, and I've opened my heart.

I'm going to celebrate feeling so exposed. It's a very beneficial thing. Come party with me tonight, 7PM at the Beetle Bar in Brisbane. It's also my friends birthday so it'll be fun times all round. Bands, beer and probably a few sets of boobs.

Peace and love until it does indeed kill me,
S.

Post One Hundred and Twenty Four: I Went There.

I think I was kicked in the back by a ghost. Seriously. Kicked or pushed. Either way, I was moved forward with unexplainable force. It's serious X-Files shit.

I stacked it in the fridge pretty badly really. It makes no sense, but I'm sure that the full house of 20 odd corpses were laughing in their not yet buried bones. It would've been a sight to behold, (if ghosts continue to possess that ability). Knees cracking to the cold concrete, arms flailing, I had my first official 'fall' as a sober adult and feel very much like an idiot. Story checks out that you can be shamed by the dead.

The next few weeks are going to be a challenge with a smashed knee, messed up hip and gammy arm. I'm a hodgepodge of pain. It's not like I have to move dead weight around constantly, right? Or, at least I'm not actually dead.

Still, FAIL.

Post One Hundred and Twenty-Three: The Act of Giving and Receiving.

I want to believe that we had a ghost in the mortuary today.

I'm usually skeptical, but I like to imagine that he held a voice of reason. The stereo in the embalming room kept dropping out of signal and the volume jumping wildly. Interestingly, we had a young guy in our care and I think he just wanted to mess around with the tunes and show off his casper skills.

As I worked around him, I wondered if he could give me any advice. I'm peculiar. I'd never ask a stranger that was alive for tips on my personal quandaries. I questioned, in his short life what did he learn about love? What did he share with his closest companies?

What does it mean to connect with someone? And does it necessarily mean anything if we do?

I realised something pretty lousy about my own experience. I don't understand love. I don't understand the sustainability of intimacy in one relationship if culture promotes living in truth and freedom. One in every three marriages end in divorce, so why do so many people do it? Is it stability? Is it comfort? Is it settlement? Is it fantasy? Is it real?

I want to believe in love. I'm usually skeptical.

S.

Post One Hundred and Twenty-Two: Dear S.

I'm in a mind pickle. As kids are seemingly growing up quicker these days, is the 'mid-life crisis' phenomena coming earlier by a couple of decades? Or, in a fatalist approach, is my lifespan destined to be short, thus drawing my particular freak out nearer than usual? I'm at a crossroads. A pickle crossroads.

Perhaps my anxieties of late are born from a cumulation of pressures from my job. That's what my reasonable mind suggests. It sucks, but I am feeling a little down lately about, well, about grief. I'm grieving about grief. The mind of a mortician seems to be a murky place.

On the weekend I attended the Brisbane excursion for the Melbourne-based Women of Letters event. I don't know why I hadn't heard of it sooner, as I've been known to fancy the odd pen pal correspondence in the not too distant past. That, and I fancy the co-curator Marieke Hardy. What self-honest individual (male or female) doesn't.

Anyway, the event brings together writers, comedians, musicians, pollies and generally awesome women to share happy/funny/sad/inspiring stories and celebrate writing. It's a fucking brilliant idea, and one that makes me happy that I have a brain and a heartbeat. Story telling in a relaxed, supportive and creative network. Check out the link anyway, the more people who attend and love it will balance out the dicks in the country (Dicks of the personality type, not the sexual organ. Men are cordially invited to be in the audience too).

http://womenofletters.com.au/

Event details aside, I've been inspired to write myself a short letter. Forgive me for the self indulgence. To myself, whose heart and mind seem to be having trouble communicating with each other:

Dear Sarah,

Wassup! Really, what is up?

As yourself, to yourself, you really need to take some McCain advertising advice and look after yourself. Eat more fruit, you love it but you're lazy and just because it perishes it doesn't excuse you from not eating it more regularly. Quit the whining about register lines in the supermarket too. You're being a troll. Quit that and the road rage. You drive slower than most people anyway so you're a laughable contradiction.

As such, chill the f*ck out. I am proud of what you do for others, you are proud of you, but don't take on more than you need to. You understand what death is, and just because you touch cancer and illness and injury, it doesn't mean that you are on the table or suffer from these things right now. It will happen, in some way, but not now and probably not soon. Do not live in fear. You can, but you don't need to and things will be much more fun if you understand this. Also, you might make them look alive, but you can't bring them back. Don't say sorry to them. You are an observer and you offer a ridiculously odd customer service. As always, observe your feelings but don't let them rule you without reason.

To prevent an early demise of yourself, stop wasting your money on gin and goon. If you want travel and it's associated lessons, you can't have an open pocket for beer either. It's that simple. Also, you do make an idiot of yourself when you pass out at parties now. You are getting older and you look less attractive munted. Trust yourself.

Go to London, study freedom and excess. Go to America and study even more excess. Then go and help more people. Anywhere. I think this is what you want to do and, like science, it is the best tentative plan.

Forgive those that didn't give you a good chance early on, and appreciate those who give you a chance now. Also, eat more cheese. And learn the piano. Together, at once.

You are your own, in a group of others. Find diversity.

Peace and love,
S.

(I feel much better, thank you).

Post One Hundred and Twenty One: We Totally Greened.

Something quite extraordinary is going to happen in the funeral business. A new and exciting frontier that is close to becoming a reality. IT'S BIO-CREMATION TIME YO!

You say "Wha???"

Bio-cremation is an environmentally focused “end of life” option for people choosing cremation over burial. I heard about this technology at a funeral industry convention, and during the presentation I had to restrain from jumping up on the table in wild and uncontrolled enthusiasm...I don't know why but something about this process feels inherently right. Maybe it's the fact that our traditionally sleepy industry is moving ahead alongside other industry initiatives and accepting the fact that we need to consider the Earth instead of trashing and rampaging it.

As far as I can tell, this technology is globally lead and trademarked to Matthews International Cremation Division, an American company that has had success within various U.S. state legislations to allow the process to be practised. It's an eye opening scientific process that will surely raise a few eyebrows, but all drastic change ruffles feathers, right?

Now forgive me, I am not great with scientific explanations but I'll give the concept a go. Cremation by definition is reducing the body to its basic elements of bone fragments through the use of heat. The Bio Cremation technology replaces the use of flame with the utilisation of water, blended with an alkali solution of potassium hydroxide. I know right! The steps involved are technical but not too overwhelming when explained well. I'll pop up a link and if you're interested and read all about it (I highly recommend you do!).

http://biocremationinfo.com/WhatisBioCremation.aspx

Anyway, this process is so environmentally-friendly because there are almost zero air emissions admitted into the atmosphere. The by-product (effluent) from is sent to water recycling where it is filtered, purified and recycled back to earth. Basically, our body is recycled and without harm to the environment. We return turn to the earth through a cycle of life, feeding trees and making stuff greener.

Hoorah! Oh, and there are you tube clips too, so you can learn just as much as I know. I wouldn't mind heading to the states and bringing the technology back to Australia, anyone feel like sponsoring??? I can only dream.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MatthewsCremation

Peace. x

Post One Hundred and Twenty: I, From You.

As a child I loved the movie The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy Gaaaaaaale.

Most girls born in the 80's (and surrounding decades for that matter) probably shared this fascination. I loved it because it scared the crap out of me, and I loved how perfect Dorothy's braids were, how degraded the lollypop kids seemed, and how the wicked witch melts so theatrically in the end. Between about 1989 and 1993 I can honestly say that I attempted to watch it every single day after kindy and then school. Even today if I watch it I fall into a subconcious time warp and can recite each line without exerting any cognitive effort.

You can imagine how stoked I was when I learned that my nannas name wasn't actually nanna, but it was Dorothy. Dorothy Veitch, of Sunbury Victoria. Wifey to George and mother to a bazillion.

My grandpa George was amazing, and one of the few relatives that I really understood as a child. We shared a pretty amazing bond for people generations apart in age, states apart in distance, yet so similar in heart and mind. I was devastated when he died in about 1995. Maybe it was 1996?. He was fishing around Lake Eppalock in Victoria when his line got snagged. Appararently he threw off his clothes, jumped in to save his stash and either had a heart attack or drowned because he was pretty darn old. (mental note to self: Why don't I know the actual story?). At some stage in my angsty teens I think I even believed he had killed himself to escape our clan, because at that stage I was engrossed in bitterness and I thought he must have been too.

I really do need to ask my mum how he died, but back then all I was told was that pa 'went to heaven' doing something that he really loved. Still, it's a big bummer that he's gone and an even bigger bummer for me that I still haven't learnt very much about his life. I remember watching MASH together, reading Graeme Base books together, laughing and lamenting about how ridiculously crazy our family was. I hate the word cherish, but its a description that lamely springs to mind when I think about him in his scungy blue workmans overalls that his wardrobe practically wholly consisted of.

Anyway, back to his wife. Ol' Dot.

She scared me just as much as the crazy flying monkeys did in the Wizard of Oz. I don't really know why. Probably because Pa made fun of her and her big bum. You see, nan was a fairly large lady in her mothering and grandmothering years, and I remember thinking that she could sit on me by accident on the couch and I'd squash like a ribena berry. She made peas so soggy that they looked like something I'd see in the mortuary, and as I child I thought her house smelt not dissimilar to a corspe either.

All this aside, I've grown up and I'm now looking back. I'm hungry to see out of these eyes that I have inherited. I want to understand my genes, and learn how to win the winnings and leave the losings.

I went to see Nan when I was in Melbourne last week. Back in Sunbury, I felt guilt and regret for not returning sooner. The last time I was in the locality it was easy for me to drop into Nan's Barkly Street house. All her children grew up there, the extensive majority of her days started and finished there, and all my memories of Pa were there.

Nan is now in a nursing home, a no-frills one near to the cemetery where pa is buried. She has reasonably bad dementia, but when I sat beside her she grabbed my hand fiercely and studied my face for an eternity. Eyes darting back and forth, she knew that I was from her, but not how I had come to be beside her.

It was amazing. After a while, she knew who I was and told me that she always had loved me. I thought that was odd, because I was really a little shit growing up, but it was a touching moment none the less. We talked about how she felt trapped and bored, but that she was accepting of ageing and the fact that life is unrefutedly dictated by the clock.

I said goodbye, feeling odd that in that very half an hour we'd become closer together than in any other time in the twenty six years that I've been around. We were both scared and confused, but wanted to be together more than we could comprehend. Both of us trying to remember past days that were too few and are too far gone.

I don't want her to die before I know what she's all about. That would be a bummer. Also, she thinks I'm a nurse for some reason and I'm just going to let that white lie be.

Peace.