MEMOIR
Love, Death & Other Scenes
Nova Weetman
UQP, $34.99
There is a great deal to think about in this tender book. It allows the reader to spend time with their own experiences of grief and to ponder all the mysteries, both great and small, that grief brings with it.
At the same time, Nova Weetman invites us to share a story that belongs only to her. Grief is one of the most common human experiences. It is often packaged or padded in familiar expressions, all of which are well-intentioned but few of which get beyond the carapace of coping. Yet stories of grief, with all their tastes and smells and coincidences and unruly emotions and loneliness and connection and unexpected peace, are all unique. Weetman’s is a treasure chest of honesty and raw humanity.
Nova Weetman has written a tender book about her experience of grief at the death of her partner of 25 years.Credit: Darren James
Nova Weetman’s partner of 25 years, the celebrated playwright and actor Aidan Fennessy, died of cancer in Melbourne during one of the many lockdowns brought about by the pandemic. His memorial service was delayed by 15 months and when it finally happens “it is like being at a party where the guest has forgotten to arrive”. It also feels like “organising the opening night of one of your plays”. This is especially poignant because the opening night of Fennessy’s final work, The Heartbreak Choir, took place on a rainy night in April 2022, soon after he had died. An empty chair was left in a place of honour. Weetman was to watch the play 17 times.
There is much in this book about emptiness and absence, about gaps that are not easy to describe, let alone fill. I was reminded at times of a description by Gillian Mears who wrote that the death of a significant person is like a giant tree falling in a forest. Only in its absence can the meaning of its presence be understood, as an entire ecosystem comes down with it. Light gets into places that have been protected from such an intrusion. Weetman navigates this experience beautifully.
When Fennessy finally gets to see a specialist, the urologist says: “Well, obviously the horse has bolted.” It is an excruciating moment. He sounded like a mechanic telling them that a car was beyond repair. There wasn’t much the marvel of medicine was going to offer. Neither Fennessy nor Weetman allow themselves to be de-natured by the medicalisation of death, one of the anodynes of our time, and Fennessy dies at home. He doesn’t make any grand or profound statements as he slips from life. Indeed, there are very few of those in Love, Death & Other Scenes.
Weetman describes her mother’s death, her young adulthood, her experience of sexual assault, her connection with Fennessy (whom she first encountered in an op shop), the financial insecurity of living as writers and performers, the birth of their two children, a period of three years after the death of her partner and much else besides. All these things are spoken of with vulnerability. None of it asks why. It only asks who. The who becomes the why. This is exquisite.
Weetman mentions working simultaneously on a book for teenage readers called The Jammer (UQP, 2022). That book, written in a season of intense loss, is also beautiful in the way it handles the pain of its main character, Fred, as she deals with the sudden death of her mother shortly after the family moves to Brisbane: “I’m not sure how dad and I can fill that house without her. She was the decoration, the flowers, the lamps. Without her, we’re only bumping around the edges.”
Weetman finds that the necessity of work, along with her two children, keeps her connected to reality. “Grief is not so filmic when the bins have to go out.” Her children are central to the entire narrative but are never named, perhaps to protect their privacy. Her daughter reaches adulthood towards the end of the book, an event marked by the purchase of a second-hand piano, a reminder of the joy and healing that has come to this family through creativity.
Earlier, Weetman is lying in the dark with her 12-year-old son, talking about how sick the boy’s father was: “That night he sobbed. He shook and clung to me, his arms sticky and smooth in the way that young kids are. We just lay in the dark and cried. Each time I thought he’d stopped, he would gasp for air and start up all over again. The next day it was like it never happened.”
In a way, we should be grateful that grief is so immeasurably vast. We’d be less human if it were less profound. We need books like this to help us distil the essence of who we really are.
Michael McGirr’s latest book is Ideas to Save Your Life (Text).
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