A Bird on my Shoulder by Lucy Palmer (Allen & Unwin 2016) $29.99
Lucy Palmer tells other people's stories for a living. As founding director of TheMemoirMakers.com.au, she has helped her clients bequeath their story to future generations as a possession more valuable than material inheritance. She has done the same for former Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan, as ghost writer for his memoir Playing the Game, which was published earlier this year by Queensland University Press.
Now she has recorded her own story. It is a gift not only for her own family but for anybody who has grieved – or is grieving – a loved one, which is effectively all of us. Its focus is meeting and marrying and – after only five years of marriage – grieving her partner Julian Thirlwall.
To understand A Bird on my Shoulder, it's worth noting the difference between autobiography and memoir. Autobiography is a chronology of our life in a manner as objective as we can manage. A memoir, on the other hand, is a poignant and often humorous interpretation of an event or sequence of events that made us the person we are. It is the meaning we have found in our own lives through making sense of what has happened to us.
It's not surprising that Lucy has enjoyed a professional and personal friendship with Caroline Jones since working alongside her at the ABC nearly 30 years ago during the heyday of Caroline's radio program The Search for Meaning. Recently Caroline attended Lucy's book launch and wrote a review of the book in which she observed that 'like its author, the book has become [her] good friend'. That is testimony to the fact that – like our children – our story begins with us, but has a life of its own.
There is a depth – and indeed a sacred quality – to stories that come from the heart and have not been created merely for a commercial purpose. But that does not take away from the entertainment value of our stories that can use devices such as self-deprecation to offer insights into who we are. Lucy relates advice given to her by her best friend Mary-Louise during the early of her courtship with Julian in Port Moresby: 'You've got to get rid of that dress... It makes you look like a sofa.'
Lucy's story is at once grounded in the school of hard knocks and an openness to surprise. We get an insight into this when her superficially hard hearted father visits from England and unexpectedly bonds with Julian, even though their personalities could not be more different. Lucy observes later in the book: 'The people I have loved who have left this physical life have become a part of me; I carry them, embody them.'
Lucy has a certain self-awareness of these assets bequeathed to her, and is determined to use them to help her and her loved ones get ahead and work through life's adversities. The most difficult of these is the subject of the book. That is Julian's terminal cancer diagnosis just five years into their marriage, and the challenge to their young family of his slow physical and mental decline.
Always in command of the moment, Lucy is not one to be intimidated, even when she visits the 'unnatural scene' at the funeral home to see Julian's body. She senses 'life moving slowly in the presence of death', but also a certain quirkiness. Julian is lying in his coffin. adorned with clothes and accessories with his characteristic fastidiousness. Lucy gets it into her head that it's not quite right that they have him lying there with his shoes on. Mary-Louise is by her side and squeezes her arm. Lucy is 'transfixed by the absurdity of it all; the quietness, the awful piped music, the contrived stillness'.
It is as if the funeral directors' gaudy sideshow is actually a careful orchestration of deliberate inadequacy on their part that is meant to give strength to the grieving family. The effect is to put us in charge of the main game, to challenge us to find a determined peace in a space that for most people is beyond words. A Bird on my Shoulder is testimony to the fact that Lucy has a rare ability to match that peace with words.
- first published in Dialogue, print publication of W.N. Bull funeral directors