The Believer, page 10
“If I can’t talk,” Katrina says, pausing briefly to consider the scenario, “I’d probably want to make sure that my mouth’s moist and that I’ve got some oxygen. Okay, next?”
“Well, that’s basically it,” Annie laughs, and everyone joins in.
Advance care directives comprise two parts: an instructional directive, which is legally binding, and a values section, which is not, but which functions as a guide. In Annie’s experience, those who could benefit most from such a document either do not know it exists or do not know how it works, so she is always keen to talk to community groups about it.
This is what she is doing today, alongside a bearded representative from the Public Advocate’s office and a Buddhist monk, at the Springvale Neighborhood House. The attendees sitting in rows have each received one mandarin and a stack of reading material, including the Take Control booklet. You would not know from looking at her—glowing and swathed in black-and-red fabric—that Annie saw the doctor two days ago for the dull pain that is still radiating around her kidney.
The representative from the Public Advocate’s office answers a question about how binding the document is. Individuals who are competent, the man replies, are considered autonomous beings that can create their own destiny. This oracular wisdom is what I’ll remember later as I look at Annie’s advance care directive—which she keeps at the ready on a hook by her front door in a clearly labeled plastic pocket.
Because it is a masterclass in the level of detail and consideration that should go into such documents, she shows it to clients. Because it is a masterclass in Annie, here is what she has written, in her neat and funky all-caps handwriting, under the values section:
What matters most in my life:
To be able to verbally communicate. The ability to care for myself, physically and intellectually. My family. My animals. Quality of life—nature, walking. My Buddhist (Tibetan) teachings. To live an independent life.
What worries me most about my future:
That I need to be fed, washed and moved when I cannot do them myself. That I won’t be able to continue my Tibetan Buddhist practice. Dying in emergency or among strangers. Not be allowed to refuse fluid and food.
For me, unacceptable outcomes of medical treatment after illness or injury are:
Loss of independence. High-level care and inability to recognize and communicate with people. Being dependent on others for washing, feeding and dressing.
Other things I would like known are:
I don’t like to sleep on a pillow. I am vegetarian. I don’t like milk. I am a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. I am a body donor. I am comfortable about death conversations. I need certain times for meditation practice with no interruptions. I am allergic to broccoli. I love my animals. I love massage.
Other people I would like involved in discussions about my care:
[Blank]
If I am nearing death the following things would be important to me:
Natural light if possible. Nature. Quiet. Tibetan monk/s chanting. No crying out loud. Readings from the Kalachakra, teachings. Harp music.
Here is what it says in the instructional directive, the legally binding part:
I consent to the following medical treatment:
Pain control. Sedation only if pain not controlled. Palliative care: ASAP if required. Honest, clear medical communication at all times, even if I am unconscious. Life prolonging treatment if outcome considered highly possible with good outcome that matches my values statement.
I refuse the following medical treatment:
If not expected to live for up to a year, I refuse peg feedings, dialysis, any life-prolonging treatment, CPR, intubation (unless for organ harvesting). If I have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, dementia, or neurological disease do no life-prolonging, colostomy, artificial respiration.
Elevated train tracks bisect the window through which light pours and pools in Annie’s glasses as she explains that when we are reasonably healthy, it’s hard to imagine and plan for when we are not. Still, it’s important to do so and to revisit that plan every couple of years. This is a situation where one would benefit from strong convictions, lightly held. She’s seen enough cases of people suddenly revising what they had previously considered unimaginable erosions of their quality of life once confronted with the alternative. The Jehovah’s Witness at the last moment accepting treatment though it meant excommunication. The athlete accepting a colostomy bag. Knowing yourself is important, she says, but so too is flexibility. We are dynamic creatures, changing with time. Her voice is briefly muffled by a train passing, then another. For one moment, as they barrel down their tracks in opposite directions, they look like one train, expanding. Annie exhorts everyone to have these difficult conversations, not leave them too late: no one expects to be the forty-year-old with brain cancer.
I have trouble writing this in my notebook, trouble typing it now. I open the Take Control booklet, consider the questions for myself, something I should have done—I now realize—much sooner, given my immersion in Annie’s story, her work. I make myself breathe as the woman beside me eats her mandarin, making a pile of peel and pith. Talking about death hasn’t killed anyone yet, Annie smiles. The next morning, she will be loaded into the back of an ambulance, gripping Khedup’s hand, crying with pain.
17
Paranormal
Rob
At first, it surprised me to learn that Rob can clear a haunted house without physically being there. That, if needed, he could clear my house in Melbourne from his house in Sydney.
“There’s no boundary in time or space if you’re psychic,” he explains to the workshop. “It’s just as easy to see what’s going on in the house next door as it is to see something five thousand kilometers away.”
Here’s how it works: first, Rob psychically locates the client by remembering their voice. The bad spooks, eager to be seen, then pop into view. He calls on the good spooks, directing them to the location, often by way of passing on the street address. The ideal time for doing this is in the wee hours, since Rob finds that the psychokinetic energy used for psychic healing is quite high between midnight and about four in the morning.
Someone asks if Rob ever feels scared. The answer is no. The closest he has come to feeling frightened was one time on a possess-ion job for a nice young man. “There’s not much literature on possession cases,” he mentions, as an aside. “Dr. Edith Fiore and Dr. Adam Crabtree have written books on it—both say that the possessing entity is invariably a deceased blood relative.” Holding eye contact with the man, Rob saw his eyes change. “Suddenly someone else was in his body looking at me, and I thought, ‘Whoa, this is bad. Is this young Dan or is this the spook?’” Still, the fear was at arm’s length. “I always feel really well protected at all times,” he explains.
For instance, one day in 1972, Rob was in his lounge room in Bondi when he was informed by a spook that he would have a very bad car accident in two days’ time but not to worry because he would be completely unharmed. He considered not getting in a car for the duration of the relevant period, but he was twenty-two years old, which meant that he ended up getting in his crazy mate’s Mini Cooper and driving down to Adelaide for a wine festival. His friend fell asleep at the wheel, drifted onto the wrong side of the road and rolled the car into a sandbank. Rob emerged to find that the car no longer had wheels or windows, their luggage had been scattered all over the road and the glass from the shattered windscreen had left his mate bleeding. Not a scratch on Rob.
“I’ve had this sort of charmed life,” he laughs, wheezily.
One aspect of this protection is that sometimes the spooks won’t let him do a job. If it’s not for him, no matter how keen he is to get amongst it, they simply won’t respond. He understands this silence as them saying, “Nah, Robbo, you’re wasting your time, mate. Wasting your time.”
“It can get pretty complicated and a bit frightening, so if this stuff scares you, don’t get involved, all right? ’Cause if you show fear, that’s what the bad spooks want. Once you’re frightened, you’re easy to manipulate.”
For the purposes of qualitatively evaluating his efficacy, Rob has distributed to clients over the past year a ten-page questionnaire headed AIPR Survey—Haunt and Poltergeist Clearing in Australian Residences, to be filled out when the job is done. The questions relate to the clients’ personal circumstances, as well as their assessment of his labors.
“Have you seen any mystical beings such as angels or demons?” Rob reads out to the group from the survey after putting on his glasses. “Have you seen elves, fairies or other types of little people? Have you seen objects floating in the air? Apparitions of deceased entities you do not know? Apparitions of deceased entities that you do know?”
Also: objects being moved or thrown; opening and closing of doors and/or drawers; lights switching on and off by their own volition; animals shying away from specific areas; unpleasant smell of body odor or tobacco; unusual tastes; a mysterious sense of a cold spot.
“What else we got here?” he says, perusing the document. “Knocking? Tapping? Scratching sounds? Doorbell ringing—that’s a very common one. Music? Anybody here have a case of music being played?”
One of the women says, “Yup,” and explains that she’s had radios come on. Another says she frequently hears faint music. Lee says that when they have the SB-11 going (a “spirit box” that sweeps AM/FM radio stations), he’s heard “very old music” on that.
Rob explains that this survey was formulated with a fellow AIPR member who works in the psychology department of a university and has certain psychological tests embedded in the questions. I bear this in mind as I answer the true or false section in my head. Certain propositions I wholly disagree with (e.g., Horoscopes are right too often for it to be a coincidence). Some I greatly wish I found true (e.g., My thoughts have sometimes come so quickly that I couldn’t write them all down fast enough). And there are many propositions with which I wholly agree (e.g., I am fascinated by new ideas, whether or not they have a practical value; It is sometimes possible for me to be completely immersed in nature or in art and to feel as if my whole state of consciousness has somehow been temporarily altered; At times I somehow feel the presence of someone who is not physically there).
Most interesting, to me at least, are the four questions in the final section:
Thinking about your own life and personal circumstances, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole?
How satisfied are you with your standard of living?
How satisfied are you with your health?
How satisfied are you with what you are achieving in life?
Rob continues reading aloud: “Experience of my physical body floating in the air . . . Nobody’s been levitated?” he asks, looking around the circle over his glasses. “Nobody’s been possessed?”
One of the women, a medium, mentions that as part of her practice she occasionally allows spirits into her body so that they can communicate with their family.
Rob advises her against such trance-mediumship. “I wouldn’t do it,” he says. “There’s only one person who can be in this body and it’s me!” He gives a chuckle but the instant return of his face, the set of his eyes, shows he is dead serious.
He continues. “Do you normally have psychic experiences? They all tick that box. We know from this survey that everybody that reports haunted houses is psychic,” he says. If you’re not psychic, Rob explains, you can walk into a haunted house and find it completely unremarkable. Anyone, however, can improve their psychic abilities, open up at least a little bit more. “The people that are having psychic experiences have access to the spiritual dimensions of consciousness, they have an extrasensory perception, get more information,” he says.
“But how do you get that way?” Lee asks, plaintively.
“By being curious about it,” Rob replies. “Psychic people are endlessly curious. They’re always thinking, ‘How does that work?,’ ‘Is God real?,’ ‘What happens when we die?’ If you’re thinking about that all the time, then that curiosity will get you there. It’s about the evolution of consciousness. In the same way that intelligence is a potential—there’s no limit to how intelligent we can become.”
The second, and only other, time my phone has refused to work was the day after I left the conference at the Convent. I was again in my car, and chatting hands-free with my friend Kris. Immediately after I told her I was at a ghostbusting demonstration on Friday night, the call cut out. I called back and we laughed about it.
Before I got out of the car, I turned my phone off to reboot it. When I switched it back on a moment later, a song from my iTunes library that I had not chosen, from an album I had not played recently or indeed ever, flooded through the speakers. Fleetwood Mac’s “My Little Demon.”
“Sounds like you might’ve picked something up on Friday night,” Rob said when I rang him later that week, mentioning the incident. He said he’d take care of it from where he was. This comforted me. It genuinely comforted me.
18
The Death Doula
Annie & Katrina
The morning after her advance care directive talk, Annie lay on a stretcher in her driveway, Khedup squeezing her hand before paramedics wheeled her into an ambulance. He looked into her eyes and reminded her to open up, to not go small but to think of her own pain as connected with all the suffering of the world. This helped somewhat, she reports; the morphine helped mostly.
She stayed overnight in the hospital where the doctor told her that the pain—which would later require the removal of her gallbladder—was merely muscular. Though she felt this to be wrong, the doctor had her discharged. Of the nurses and doctors standing around outside her room, no one offered to help carry her bag. No one directed her where to go. They simply stood there looking at her as she left. Her voice was very fast and very small as she told me these things.
Katrina is coming off her last round of chemotherapy. She’s been in treatment for five years. It’s enough now, she’s given it her best, she says, but it was eroding the quality of the time she has left with no discernible benefit. It is true that her illness has magnified the importance of every remaining moment, but it strikes me, again, that the directness with which Katrina speaks is not new. It feels not just as if she is comfortable in this straightforward mode, but that it is one she has long chosen as a matter of principle. She speaks with the directness of someone who at one time needed to find, then claim, her voice and will not be returning to her former state.
On our first meeting, I have only one question for her: she seems stronger than most people in good health. How is that?
“Because I’ve worked with people all my life,” she replies immediately. It will not be until after she dies that I understand what she meant by this.
Not exactly that “shit happens,” nor that escorting others through the fire gives you a muscle memory you can use later for yourself. It’s more that one goes into the devastating work to which Katrina devoted her life for highly specific reasons, and that if this work is genuinely done with “excruciating vulnerability,” one is also inexorably tending to the old wounds in oneself. In a culture where the only socially palatable coping mechanisms are to look on the bright side or drink something or buy something or hit refresh forevermore, this type of strength—perhaps the only true strength—is often mistaken for its opposite.
For twenty years, Katrina worked as a sexual assault counselor at the Women’s Hospital. She completed a masters in social policy on sexual assault in the Catholic Church, knocking on doors, collecting stories, listening. She advocated for women in the workplace, worked with victims of crime. She has listened to those raped in church, those nearly murdered at home, and those whose loved ones were simply walking in the city when they were mown down and killed by twenty-nine-year-old James Gargasoulas, driving a stolen car. She is an encyclopedia of human trust—in parents, priests, the universe—betrayed.
“The heart of all that is, when you do face-to-face work with people, you have to be authentic,” she says. “You’re looking at them in the eye, they’re looking at you, telling you—often for the first time—their horrendous trauma and their horrendous childhood.” She starts to tear up.
“Most women—and men—aren’t just abused once, most are abused multiple times. Indigenous victims you could multiply that by four. But the one gift I could give them was authenticity.” She is weeping now.
“So I would go to therapy. I would climb mountains. I would keep fit. I would eat well. I would not come in hungover, okay occasionally I would, but not much,” she smiles. “And I’d be able to just sit with them and see what happens.”
Across from her, Annie nods. I can see her breathing deliberately, expanding her abdomen, her rib cage, her back into the space behind her.
Some people would come to see Katrina only once, tell their story in vague outline and say fuck it. But a lot of them came back. A police officer who had investigated a pedophile ring, crippled with rage. Victims pouring themselves into statements for cases that never made it through the system.
Katrina’s uncle was Father Kevin O’Donnell of Oakleigh Parish, one of Australia’s most notorious child sexual abusers, a man who offended prolifically and whose repeat victims included a preschooler. She breaks down remembering the faces of his victims, many of whom she worked with. It is as though her face has cracked open, so violent is her sobbing. She mentions survivor guilt, her hatred of the Catholic Church, her shame at being related to “this bastard.” They are here, now, in the room—the betrayal and shame and rage, the great teachers one is forced to share the world with.
