My resurrection took a civilisation, Whitlam and a team of doctors. It cost me $7

As my generation saunters into ageing, we don’t do it as adults, so much as like eternal teenagers. I realised this while lining up for the toilet after seeing the latest Led Zeppelin documentary at IMAX — an endless queue of pre- and post-prostate men, aged 50 to 70, desperate to get to the urinal after a two-hour film.

The audience was mostly men. The youngest were maybe 35 or 40, apart from a few in their 20s — the pride of their fathers.

An X-ray of Fotis Kapetopoulos’ chest after he had a pacemaker installed.

I don’t mind getting old – less pressure to be anything or anyone. And this isn’t some self-help or positive affirmation stance – I just care less and less about stuff, and that’s good.

I am moving closer to mortality, and I try to avoid nostalgia — nostos (home) and algia (illness), literally the sickness of longing for home. Often, a longing for a place that never really existed in one’s past. Like being a veteran of Vietnam films.

My nostalgia is shallow. I miss parties. The time before I started shrinking to become a nose and ears. And the sense of a never-ending future — the anxiety to “make it” or “make a difference” (mainly to me).

On the Wednesday before Easter, as I was writing up an interview with Peter Dutton for Greek newspaper Neos Kosmos, I started to faint. Dutton wasn’t to blame – he was pleasant enough. But I began blacking out, again and again. My wife and son rushed me, despite my protests, to the Austin Hospital. We were preparing for Good Friday with her Spanish side, then the Greek Anastasi (or resurrection) with my Greeks. I am not a theist, but I love a tradition. Those that lead to gatherings, parties, revelry, or, like this, renewal and resurrection.

Life in Ancient Rome would be interesting, but you wouldn’t want to crack a tooth or get an infection.Credit: iStock

In the emergency department, I apparently fainted 15 times. My heart stopped for three seconds. In one session I was transported to a world of saturated colour and surreal images – the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. Not bad – except for the dying bit, but I must say, to paraphrase Zeppelin, it was not my time of dying.

They raced me into resuscitation. Tests later showed that my heart was physically fine but misfiring. By Thursday, I had a pacemaker. I resurrected faster than the Nazarene. Easter Sunday, I was walking around, reborn.

The materialist in me – too much Aristotle, Mill, Hegel, Marx, Weber – recognises that my revival had naught to do with God. It was due to the secular order born of the Enlightenment, science and our national health system.

Even back in the 1980s as a young Keating acolyte denouncing “unreconstructed Whitlamites”, listening to Prince and Hunters & Collectors, smoking too much of everything, and downing cheap pints at uni — I had to concede: Whitlam’s Medibank, later Medicare, is one of Australia’s greatest and most enduring achievements.

My resurrection took a squad of nurses, technicians, cardiologists, surgeons. And expensive technology. It cost me $7 – for five OxyContin tablets.

I like looking at old photographs of myself in my 20s and 30s, admiring my looks. My mother was right whenever someone brought me down, or I suffered the youthful pain of lost love: “Don’t worry, darling. You’re beautiful and smart. They’re all just jealous of you.”

My father would say things like, “It’s your fault he’s like that – deluded. Your whole family is deluded – movie stars in your own productions.”

Now, I’m 63. My father became worms at 62. My mother at 82. Sooner or later, I will too.

Not long ago my son, 23, and I were having our usual debate – top 10 rock albums, greatest soul artists, best British bands, the Russians in WWII, the Battle of Hastings, Genghis Khan and so on. We ended up at the old question,“When would you live if you had a time machine?”

We went through various geeky scenarios. Ancient Greece? Maybe the Roman Empire – maybe not.

I usually set my time machine for periods with modern conveniences. Sure, there were ancient civilisations with sophisticated plumbing like the Romans, even Egyptians. But a non-negotiable for me is access to basic dentistry and antibiotics. As clean as Rome might have been, you’d not have wanted to get a graze, or break a tooth. They certainly didn’t have pacemakers.

I said I’d go back to the Beat Generation in the early 1950s, hang with Kerouac and Coltrane, drop bennies and smoke reefer – as they’d say.

My son said, “I wanna go to the ’90s.” I was shocked. In my mind, the ’90s weren’t that far away – I turned 30 in ’92.

But I get it. Back then, all was well in the zeitgeist. Melbourne’s economic collapse had left empty retail fronts in Fitzroy, commandeered by artists. The Cold War was over. The Reagan puritanism was over. Everything was allowed again.

I see my son and his generation’s nostalgia for the ’90s. It all went south after 9/11, but we can imagine, for a moment, it was all Nirvana, Blur, and Oasis. Not unlike the nostalgia I had when I was 20 for the Beats and the Mods. Close enough, yet not there.

After my heart scare the most poignant moment came on the Saturday night before Easter. Normally, we’d be getting ready for the midnight service at Greek church, waiting to receive the holy light at 12, chanting Christos Anesti, cracking eggs, eating avgolemono – egg and lemon chicken soup.

My wife and I lay in the dark, waiting for our son and his girlfriend to return from church – they went just to maintain some tradition broken by my heart on Easter. We listened to music – listened – for the first time in decades. Dylan’s One More Cup of Coffee, before he heads to the valley below, and Bowie’s Joe the Lion made of iron and nailed to his car, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook’s My Heart, My Life – the closest one can get to god as a non-believer. It all made sense.

“We haven’t done this since we were young, living in Fitzroy, in 1997, before Tasso, [our son] when we really listened,” my wife said. Music bathed us and mingled with our tears in the dark. Liminal memories trapped in the aspic of time.

“It’s life, it’s death ... will I be normal again?” I asked.

“You’ve never been normal,” she replied. “That’s why I love you.”

I suspect there will be more cups of coffee before I “go to the valley below”, to paraphrase Mr Zimmerman.

Fotis Kapetopoulos is a journalist for the English edition of Neos Kosmos, a leading Greek-Australian masthead.

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