“This isn’t what I intended, this wasn’t how it’s supposed to be,” I said, driving home from Dad’s new retirement home, where Mum delivered him the news.
She responded with an Arabic proverb:
“لا تجري الرياح بما تشتهي السفن”
“The winds do not blow as the ships desire.”
The news being that doctors found a nodule on Mum’s lung. Suspected cancer. Consistently stoic for men of his age, Dad said little. He didn’t need to. His anguished brows were enough to convey a pained heart.
Mum had spent a month in hospital. A routine dialysis appointment morphed into a blocked artery that required a stent, then an infection caused by the various medications competing over her numerous co-morbidities. And finally, a CT scan of the chest, revealing the worst of them all.
Before we left the retirement home, I showed them a precious gift. After Dad moved a few weeks ago, I rummaged through old belongings that had survived years of house relocations, to uncover forgotten treasures. The dark corners of the closet revealed a 50-year-old Eumig Austrian projector and a single, worn reel. Within a week, I had what could be salvaged from the reel digitised.
“What’s this?” Mum said, drawn to the recognisable face on the screen. A younger, slender version of herself, in a white chiffon hat. It was her wedding day – June 27, 1977, inside a fourth-century Orthodox church overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in north Lebanon.
The footage switched to Dad’s village, where old faces and “happy memories” were revived. The setting was the makeshift courtyard in front of a flat-roofed, limestone dwelling. As far as living memory could recollect, family members have been living in this same home for seven generations – each generation gradually expanding the structure. Before that, who knows how long? Two branches of the family still call it home – the third, ours, in Australia.
“That’s my grandfather,” he said, pointing to an ageing man capped with a tarboosh – a red, cylindrical headdress typically worn by men of the Levant in the early 20th century. The camera took in the vines and an array of fruit trees that haphazardly skirted the courtyard’s perimeter. In its centre frame were the layers of the village – Dad’s extended family and households who have been neighbours for at least 170 years.
Economic reports would have considered these villagers poor. But there was no poverty on this screen, only an abundance of fellowship and laughter – from the most frail to the boisterous child. The tales of multiple generations woven together. It’s a great irony that, decades later, from the cold, sterile isolation of modern suburbia, it is this – the poor, ancient village with its vibrant pulse and social warmth – that we crave. Where loneliness is forbidden.
And it was this I had intended, just a morsel. That my parents would recede surrounded by their offspring, with enduring memories planted into the minds of their grandchildren. Even if their offspring were not on the same plot of land, but scattered across suburbs and states, the nearest a 45-minute drive. Even if their garden were not olive trees older than their flesh opening onto rolling green hills, but a courtyard sandwiched between bricked homes and concrete. Even if their dwelling were not historic and built by forebears, but a semi-detached weatherboard house owned by a bank that we must pay for life. Even if their neighbours were not kin of nearly two centuries (and likely more), but pale strangers who dare utter a greeting. Even if the constant hum of congestion drowned out the song of birds. Even if poisonous fumes smothered the fragrance of jasmine and orange blossom.
Even this, a fragment of their own childhoods, would not be theirs. Mum’s health didn’t stabilise as I had hoped. It deteriorated. My father’s ailments, too, came unexpectedly. His caring needs escalated, and with Mum unable to go a month without a hospital visit, and aged care support proving insufficient – courtesy of continued cuts by governments intent on making our lives worse – we surrendered to the one option we had long avoided. A retirement home for Dad.
***
“I’m too young for this,” Mum said, a day earlier. I had just arrived at her hospital room, late in the day, an hour after a visit from the doctor. I found her seated and forlorn beside the window.
“What did I do to deserve this?” she cried.
I sought to reassure her that the doctor said it looks like an early stage. But beneath my own attempted reassurance, I knew her co-morbidities posed a significant challenge.
I handed her a clear bag filled with a comforting green legume.
“Peas, from the garden.”
The seeds were the first on Mum’s wish list for winter. She tended to them carefully throughout the cold months, with skills honed over a lifetime.
“I gave the other half to Dad,” I said.
I had not planned to visit either parent that day. But the green glow of the snap peas protruding from their stalks lulled me into thinking otherwise. And so I picked roughly twenty ready-made pouches, stuffed them into a reusable vegetable plastic bag Mum had stored underneath the sink (for moments like this) and got into my car.
The sight of the bag jolted life into my father’s despairing eyes. It did the same for Mum.
I recall what my late paternal grandmother once said to Mum soon after migrating to Melbourne in 1977, pointing to a fig tree in her yard grown from a stem she brought across the ocean.
“We take Lebanon wherever we go.”
The remnants of old Lebanon, and authentic pre-war Lebanese life, have since faded over the diasporic decades, but its spirit remains. It was present when I handed the homegrown peas to my parents. It was in their eyes, restored to a time and place where children ran through fields and plucked fresh beans beneath ancient olive trees planted by their ancestors, to the sound of playful screams rolling along the hills and into the valleys.
By right, they shouldn’t be here. Not in a nursing home. Not in this suburb. Not on this stolen land. Their childhood dreams did not count a rupture of an ancestral bond to their homeland. They did not envision war and imperialism catapulting them onto a distant continent. They did not cater for the immense hardship of renewal as poor outcasts, nor the pain of longing for the cultural and familiar.
But the winds do not blow as the ships desire.
Mum is too young to be so close to the end. Her story, however, is common. Migrant women in Australia suffer higher rates of diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Contributing factors “include stress, experiences of discrimination, cultural stigma, and marginalisation while in Australia, poorer working and living environments, dealing with previous and current trauma, lack of social support and poor access to health care due to cultural and language barriers”.
For Lebanese migrants, it’s less flattering. Among eight major migrant groups in a study last decade, “Lebanese migrants experienced the poorest health outcomes … given their relatively recent wave of migration (with the majority arriving in Australia after the 1960s) and experience of being displaced by war and violence”.
When a fellow second-generation Lebanese-Australian recently asked why Mum was in hospital, I replied, “The stress of war and migration and everything in between. At some point the body catches up.”
“Ah, like my Dad,” he said. “Allah yerhamo. He died at 63.”
In the hospital room with Mum, I withheld my tears. To be a carer is to be a constant source of strength, in hope the recipient draws from it and carries forward. But in the quiet darkness of my unlit home, the rain tumbled from a crack that splintered my heart – a wound that may never heal.
“This is the test of God,” my maternal grandmother once counselled a grief-stricken Mum after tragedy struck in the war in Lebanon. “To live with your pain.”
Antoun is the author of Rebirth: A Love Story from the Depths of War
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Thank you for this story of your parents and the green peas.
Thank you