A Mother's Final Journey

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 23, 2005

LAUREN MARTIN

There is little comfort for those facing death, but personal tragedies can tell a bigger story, writes LAUREN MARTIN.

Rowing Without Oars

By Ulla-Carin Lindquist

John Murray, 196pp, $21.95

There are memoirs, and then there are memoirs of a moment - those metaphorical moments, generally found around birth, death or Oprah Winfrey - that clarify what life's all about.

The tear-teasing blurb on the European bestseller, Rowing Without Oars, promises the wisdom of children, the perspicacity of impending death and a swish of Swedish celebrity (well, Ulla-Carin Lindquist was a television newsreader): "Mummy, every second is a life," Gustaf says gently.

"What did you say?"

"Every second is a life."

"Where have you heard that?"

"Nowhere. I made it up now." And he carries on, "You have hundreds of thousands of lives left, Mummy."

Oh, I'm in. I'm going with Gustaf and his mummy, even if it means into terminal illness. He's an innocent savant, clearly. She's got a motor neurone disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), for her 50th birthday.

This is the same curse that took down the beloved American baseball legend Lou Gehrig and a certain Brandeis University professor whose "learning to die" famously taught a ratbag journalist how to live during Tuesdays With Morrie. Sure, that book's pocket-sized piquancy teetered towards Chicken Soup for the Soul That's Shuffling Off. But it had vivid and razor-sharp writing. It had Morrie Schwartz, too, an old sociologist who cut quite a character, talking the sense of the ages. Everyone felt they knew him, and liked him. Similarly, a neurotic, former alcoholic, Californian single mum, Anne Lamott, seemed to become one of my best friends when I first read her 1993 book Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year. I had no child then, nor any interest in having one. Still, Lamott's genre-generating "mommy memoir" put me in the middle of the action, which was profound, with just enough detail and more laughs than a good girls' night.

So here's Lindquist: "A year ago I was a full-time TV reporter. Today I cannot eat without help, walk or wash myself."

Her story - which she admits is "more like a diary of thoughts and quick plunges into my memory" - begins with her strangely unable to row a boat. Her husband seems a bit snarky about it. Next "chapter" she can't grip the clothes pegs.

She's got two grown girls, two young boys and the big news gig. It's a tough life: supermum, surgeon's wife, studio star. From the dawn hair service ("it has to look perfect"), to the "Iron Lady" editor's screams of "You've got no balls. Rewrite it!"

"We need [the intimidating language] in the buzz of news," says Lindquist, "where torture victims, war-wounded and the homeless are mixed with bribery, economic scandals and Questions to the House."

Yet when faced with a neurological time-bomb of her own, Lindquist often minces words. She wanders from place to place, memory to present, platitude to preachers' words, without it all falling into place for the reader (perhaps this is because it is not, understandably, making sense in her own mind).

It feels unfair to be tough on someone's dying memoirs, but I found some passages hard to endure. Not the details of her body's degeneration - such as the time she fell off a bedside chair while trying to pee on a nappy during the night. She shattered a vase which splintered into her bare bottom - but since her tongue was paralysed, her surgeon husband slept on and didn't stitch it until daybreak.

That was sort of riveting, heart-breaking and funny. But that passage finishes with "Laughter is a release. Laughter keeps away the pain. Black humour has saved many." And so on. Those are the bits that might have benefited from that Iron Lady in the newsroom. My own best editors repeat that you have to show, not tell - especially where laughter is concerned.

ALS took Lindquist too young and it hurts to read her weighing up funeral arrangements, wondering what will make it easiest for Gustaf and his brother. But, in the end, Lindquist never reveals herself as a character for me - something she needn't have worried about in Sweden, where she was well-known enough to have many sneak-grieving fans as readers. I still can't work out if her mostly absent husband comes out of it well or not.

It is Gustaf who stays with me. I hope he's OK without his mum, making the most of his own hundreds of thousands of lives.

Lauren Martin is a Herald journalist.

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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