Family Ties & Euthanasia- The Modern Dilemma

Nikki Gemmell is an internationally acclaimed author, most recently of After,  and a columnist with The Australian. She has written of Australia’s dry centre and the Antarctic, of sex and family bonds, of life in London and Lake Macquarie north of Sydney. Honesty and openness have been trademarks of Nikki Gemmell’s writing since she wrote her essay for Quadrant on her coalmining dad, and the world it included. Her latest book – After – is no less confronting in its frankness and emotional pull. On Tuesday 11 April 2017, Nikki Gemmell spoke about her experience of writing After with The Sydney Institute’s Deputy Director Anne Henderson.

FAMILY TIES & EUTHANASIA – THE MODERN DILEMMA

NIKKI GEMMELL – in conversation with Anne Henderson

Anne Henderson: Nikki’s always struck me as an exciting writer because she’s honest, she’s probing, she’s imaginative and, of course, she’s daring and emotionally charged. Now, when you put all of that into a non fiction book, you have something really special. I took Nikki’s After to bed and I read half of it on Saturday morning until lunchtime. I didn’t get out of bed. I did the same on the day after – Sunday. I spent a whole weekend with Nikki in bed. And it was quite an experience. So, for those of you who don’t know anything about the book, let us start with the title. The title’s brilliant. Nikki tell us about why you called your book After which will offer a way into what the book is about.

Nikki Gemmell: Why did I call it After. I always find the titles of my books very problematic. There are three titles for my books – out of the thirteen, fourteen, that I’ve written – that came very clearly and just stuck with me. They were Shiver, Cleave and The Bride Stripped Bare. The others usually went to marketing meetings at publishing houses, sales meetings, all the rest of it where the professionals mull over whether someone’s going to buy the title, if it’s wrong, whatever. In America, my novel Cleave was turned into Alice Springs because the American publishers thought that a word like “cleave” would not be known to the American public. It was too hard for them. So, consequently, my novel was put in the travel section alongside Lonely Planet guides.

But, After, did come fairly soon to me. Even though I sent it off to my publishers and said, what do you think. I called this novel After because in a way it’s a journey that began with a dead body. And that dead body was my mother’s. The book begins at the morgue. It’s all about what happened from that point. For me, as a novelist, when two police officers knocked on my door and told me that the body of my mother had been found, in unexplained circumstances, a crime scene was established. From that moment, the police were investigating what on earth had gone on. And I wanted to investigate it too. Because I write to understand. I do that with my column in The Australian, in my novels and my nonfiction, and certainly this.

I wanted to write through the bewilderment. I was the subject of a police investigation, whether I had been involved in any way in my mother’s death. I wanted to write alongside the police officers. In a way, it wasn’t a race to work out what happened first. But they were going to all my mother’s doctors, they were looking at Philip Nitschke, and so on. I wanted to do that too. I wanted to get to get in there with them. Even possibly get in there first. To find out what on earth had happened. After relates to the aftermath.

It’s also a journey into my mother’s life and a very tricky, problematic, scarring mother-daughter relationship. It was also, ultimately, extremely loving but it wasn’t until after my mother’s death, tragically, that I saw it all in perspective. All those things that I had not said to my mum throughout her life, for whatever reasons. Mothers and daughters are champions for that. I wanted to put into this book what I never said to my beautiful mother Elayn in real life. It’s a love letter to her as well as an acknowledgement of a very tricky relationship.

Anne Henderson: Even so, Elayn has given you this experience which you’ve just turned into a gift for her. It’s fascinating how you present the experience through a series of flashbacks. Moments and memories come to you at different times. It’s not just chronological. There are different bits and pieces all the way through. So, let’s start with Elayn, your mother. Tell us about Elayn.

Nikki Gemmell: Elayn was a beautiful woman as you can see from the cover of the book. She was from a coal mining family and raised in the Hunter Valley. Her destiny was to leave school at 15, which she did, no matter how intelligent she was. It was the expectation that she would leave school and marry a coal miner. Which she did.  He had left school at 16. From that young age, Elayn was to be a coal miner’s wife in Cessnock. She would raise children and stay there forever.

Mum was fiercely intelligent and always chafing at the bit in terms of societal expectations. But she had a hedge of men’s will around her telling her what had to be done and how she was meant to live her life. Her ticket out of invisibility, in a way, was her beauty. She was stunningly beautiful. Crowned Miss Hunter Valley in the 1950s, she progressed to being Miss Newcastle. But she always had her eye on Sydney – the big smoke. So she came to Sydney and worked as a model, photographed by the likes of Max Dupain and Laurence Le Guay. She was in campaigns for Remington, Frigidaire, the Hordern Brothers department store, David Jones and the like. I’ve still got the notebook where she recorded in pencil all her jobs – the photographer, how much they paid her and when. There was one photographer with a blank next to the payment, as in he never paid her. It was Max Dupain.

For all that, she married my dad, the coal miner. And he didn’t want a bar of the modelling world. If any of you saw Australian Story a couple of weeks ago, my Dad was in that. He now feels like he was the star of the show because he’s recognised at the library and everywhere. His line in Australian Story said it all –  “I don’t like women working, I don’t think that’s a good idea”. Said with his cheeky Cheshire cat grin. So they ended up in Wollongong and Mum disappeared into the world of being a wife and mother for several decades. It wasn’t enough for her. They got divorced and Mum moved to Sydney with me. She ended up working very near here at Telstra, in the corporate sector, running Telstra’s video conference centre in the days before the internet.

I look back now at how this magnificent woman shaped her life. She was absolutely determined to do it her way. And that informed her death too. She took the bull by the horns in terms of euthanasia. What I didn’t know, until after her death, was that she had been liaising with Phillp Nitshke and his international organisation for eight years. Philip sent me a ream of emails, their correspondence, going back almost a decade. She had been thinking about euthanasia for a long time.

Elayn lived her life doing it her way, the perfectionist, not wanting to implicate her children in any way. Not telling us what she was going to do. The good girl, the swot had done all her research. She’d read Philip Nitschke’s Peaceful Pill Handbook, which she left beside her as an indication of how she’d done it by the book, literally. Mum didn’t want to take the risk with all the legal ramifications that could involve her family. She knew we could possibly face a police investigation, which I did. If any red flags were raised, I could have been facing a fine of up to $80,000 or a jail term. So she didn’t tell us what she was going to do. In the process, she broke us as a family. And she broke my children too with the shock of it.

Anne Henderson: That’s very strongly described in the book. I want to take you to one particular thing you wrote about. You said, “Elayn’s love was like black market money. There was nowhere to security deposit it.” Tell us a bit more about your relationship with Elayne, because it is very complex. You say you loved her, but there are reasons why you may well have been estranged from her. If she had been my mother I think I would have stayed in London.

Nikki Gemmell: Well, that’s one of the reasons I did go to London and live there for 15 years. My whole adult life has been a process of fleeing from my mother. I lived in Darwin, I lived in Alice Springs, I lived in London. When I was a young ABC journo there was a chance to go and work in Newcastle or Antarctica, and I took it. My mother was the love of my life and the hate of my life.

Elayn knew my Achilles heel like mothers always do with daughters. I’ve got a daughter. It’s casual cruelties that mothers can inflict upon their daughters. Elayn went for it; no one could fell me like my mother could. No one could reduce me like she could. But I could be cruel back, I could. I quote Hilary Mantel in the book, talking about Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher, apparently, said that from the age of 15 she had nothing to say to her mother. She just turned away from her. From that moment, in her mid teens, there was a cold judgement and revulsion. Everything the mother stood for. It was a forward going tide, propulsion into the future. The mother clung on by the coat tails.

My mother was always like that and furious that I didn’t acknowledge any gratitude for how shaped me, or for the woman that I’d become. She was a single mum, she pushed me into getting a scholarship, she got me elocution lessons. I don’t sound like my brothers, who also left school at 16 and 14. One went to the coal mines in Wollongong and one went into the steel works at Port Kembla, as apprentices. They sound very different from me. That’s because, from the age of 6 or 7, my mother sent me to elocution classes. She was always trying to shape me into the image of the perfect daughter that she wanted.

And I, in a way, always wanted the perfect mother. So we were always clashing. I can remember when I got glasses in my teens; she was furious. She thought they were ugly and that they made me look ugly. She said words to the effect of, “Oh why do you have glasses – they look so ugly!” My response was, “Mum I have to wear them”. She could be unreasonably cruel. But there were also wonderful times. With After, I just wanted to acknowledge the complexity of womanhood. To say that we are all flawed. Elayn was flawed and I’m flawed too. I never acknowledged that in her life. I never saw her as the flawed human being, or softened towards that. This has been a big journey for me.

Anne Henderson: The mother-daughter aspect of the book is fascinating. But then it moves into a public discussion of euthanasia. Can you tell us a little bit about how that affected you? You admit that if you had talked to your mother and she said she wanted to kill herself you would have reacted with “Oh no – how could you?” And what would the children think. Eventually, however, you come round to seeing her point of view. Can you tell us a bit about that journey?

Nikki Gemmell: In terms of mentioning the word suicide, it feels really hard to say it in this context. There’s a difference, I feel, in terms of the semantics of suicide and euthanasia. Suicide implies irrationality, mental fragility. Whereas, euthanasia for me, now that I know my mother and her journey, implies empowered thought and a sure and rational decision. It implies a deeply considered impulse that has come to fruition after months, or perhaps years, of deep thought. I salute that. There’s a lot of courage in that. I didn’t understand that at the time Mum was alive.

In the last year of Mum’s life she had chronic pain. She’d gone to a doctor to try and get the pain fixed in her foot. I saw her just after the operation. She was euphoric and was the best I’d ever seen her. I realise now she was high as a kite on opioids. She left the hospital with a likeness for opioids that became a dependency, which developed into an addiction. That’s what the operation did for her. In the final year of her life, she said to me a few times, “You know Nikki, I really admire Philip Nitschke, I’m going off to his exit forum. I think it’s good what he advocates.” And I, stupidly, turned into that little girl who put her hands over her ears and went, “Mummy, Mummy don’t you want to see the children grow up, my children.” It wasn’t about me, because she wouldn’t have bothered about seeing me grow up. It did, kind of, plunge me into girlhood again. I feel like it broke me, it made me very vulnerable. I felt abandoned. Rejected and full of anger.

But I also had anger because of what she did to my children. I know now, that I didn’t listen to my mother. I was getting emotional. I was making it very difficult for her to have that conversation with me. She was saying, “Nikki, I want to kill myself.” I should have given her air in the conversation, to have a very calm, rational and supportive discussion about that. As difficult as it would have been. I should have said, in hindsight, you know Mum, I will help you and I will support you, however I can. I want to be there at the end. I want to convey all my love and gratitude and tell you everything that I never told you in life.

I asked Phillp Nitshke why is it that so many older people decide to make the decision to euthanise alone. Why is it so complicated and hard to involve families. He old me that lot of people, a lot of adult children, get very upset. They try to bring in the police, or try to get their elderly parents sectioned. They bring in psychiatrists. They do anything to stop a parent doing what that parent ultimately wants to do. Mum didn’t know that about me and my brothers. We never had that conversation. I really regret that.

Anne Henderson: I’m fascinated with this cover. With that little gold line. This book has a most marvellous extended metaphor, which just happened. Tell us about the lanterns. They’re the most superb piece that holds this book together.

Nikki Gemmell: Oh thank you.

Anne Henderson: It’s all about your family.

Nikki Gemmell: I feel so lucky because this book is beautifully produced. It’s got these thin gold cracks through the photograph. Has anyone heard of Kintsugi? In the recent Canberra exhibition, of the 100 objects that shaped the world, one of the objects is a bowl from Japan that’s been broken and repaired with cracks of gold. With seams of gold. That’s called Kintsugi. It’s a Japanese method of repair that was developed about 500 years ago by a Shogun, who smashed, by accident, his favourite teapot. He was devastated. So he said to his servants, can you please try and develop a method of repair. I want this object to stay with me. What they came up with was a clear resin, shot through with gold powder. Ever since, it’s been a process of repair in Japan where you still see the original object but it takes on a different beauty. It’s a flawed beauty, it’s a cracked beauty, but the object is still there. It’s a different beauty.

I have these beautiful porcelain lanterns, which I treasure very much from my time in London. All my children made them. We had a friend who was a potter and she said, Nikki when you go on holiday just collect natural objects – shells, rocks, leaves whatever, Bring them back and we’ll stamp the porcelain and then make beautiful lanterns. I ended up having about nineteen of these. Instead of photographs, of my family life and my kids growing up, I had this line of nineteen porcelain lanterns. We came back to Australia and one day a huge gust of wind came through the house. The painting above all the lanterns was lifted clear off its hooks and crashed down on top of the lanterns and broke them. I was devastated.

But I turned to Kintsugi. If you go online you can buy Kintsugi kits from Amsterdam, of all places. They mix the gold powder with glue now. But it’s a wonderful way of repair and it looks beautiful. So the metaphor through the book was that we’re all flawed. And we have to acknowledge the imperfections in each other and see these imperfections as strengths. It makes us deeper and richer. I look at my mother in terms of all the flaws and complexity that she had. She was a fabulous woman.

Anne Henderson: So you have the reality of the book. You have the lanterns and they break at a most vulnerable moment, and now you look at them all repaired in the light shining in a different way. A fascinating metaphor. What I want to discuss, finally, is how this book is very personal. It can affect the way people see you afterwards. Everybody’s named there. Your brothers are there, your children are there. How has it been? Has it been cathartic or invasive for some of them? I know how it’s been for you, but how has it been for them? I know after The Bride Stripped Bare, I remember a very well known Radio National presenter saying privately, “That marriage won’t last”. And my response was, I know her very well and it’s all fine. This is art, you’ve got no idea, don’t take it too seriously. The point is, this is very different from The Bride Stripped Bare, which was fiction. How does it affect your family when you make this kind of creation in non fiction?

Nikki Gemmell: I am actually very careful with what I do. And very generous with how I write about people. As I say in the book, I’ve got two brothers and they have a different story with my mother. I cannot speak for them. I make that very clear. This is my story; this is the mother-daughter story. This is how I perceived the whole situation. So I just wanted to get that out there. In terms of my father, he read the first page of Shiver, my first novel, and there was a swear word in it. He shut the book and said, “I’m never reading another thing of yours.” And he’s been true to his word. That was 20 years ago.

After is an affectionate portrait of Dad. He was just as bewildered in terms of what his ex-wife had done. I did want to write about my kids just fleetingly. They’re not in the book very much.

In terms of the ramifications of euthanasia, this book is about honesty as much as anything. I’ve always wanted to write honestly, because honesty connects. It gives an authenticity to the writing. When my mother died there was a sense of shame. It was hard to tell people what she had done. I felt guilty. I felt culpable that I’d let her down. As a very busy working daughter trying to throw all the balls into the air. They were all crashing on the ground and I wasn’t the best wife or the best mother. I certainly wasn’t the best daughter. I was trying my best but it was just so hard in Sydney traffic and all the rest of it to help everyone. Mum would ring me and say, “Could you pick up my grilled fish from the fish shop?” I’d say, “Mum, I’m three suburbs away with soccer training for the six year old. It’ll take me an hour to get there.” The practicality of doing things in Sydney makes it very, very difficult.

But get that sense of shame. My husband and I had decided that when Mum died we’d just tell the kids that their beloved Nonna, whom they adored, had passed away in her sleep. Technically, she had. She’d taken an Oxycontin and swallowed it down with Bailey’s Irish Cream and fallen asleep. Then, a couple of days afterwards, my eldest son’s school rang. It’s a very, very caring school and caused me a rethink about high schools. They’re good. One of my son’s teachers was on the end of the line, and she said, “Nikki, your son has had a breakdown. He’s come into my office and he’s in floods of tears. And he’s just said to me, ‘Why did my grandmother die? Why were the police involved? Was she murdered? No one is telling me anything.’” She tod me the school had full time counsellors and my son needed to see one. I had no idea that high schools had full time counsellors, I was impressed. I said yes, please, can I talk to her too?

This teacher also said to me, Nikki you have to be honest about this with your children, particularly your teenage boys. They were 15 and 13 at the time. She said, if you don’t tell them what happened and what you know, they will find out eventually and they will hate you for not being honest in the first place. They will grieve all over again. And I thought, she’s absolutely right. So these two beautiful boys came home that afternoon and I sat them down either side of me and we had an adult conversation about suicide and Nonna and euthanasia and Philip Nitschke. Those two boys grew up in front of my eyes. Maturity came over them. It was extraordinary. And it felt absolutely right. From that moment I felt emboldened to write about this.

One of the things a female police officer had said to me, when they were with me, compassionately and gently, while they were pulling out their notebooks and taking their notes was that they saw this situation again and again and again. Elderly people killing themselves. No one talks about it. It’s an epidemic. It intrigues me that we don’t have conversations about how older people are dying. That was another trigger for me to dive into this whole world. There’s a story here. Elayne would want this honoured with a story. She would have been here tonight.