On ‘The Dying Light’ by Robert Gray

When HEAT asked me to write about one of Robert’s poems, and suggested ‘The Dying Light’, it seemed almost too reciprocal, too close to me, in that, as Robert’s old friend, I had recently pushed him around in his wheelchair just as he describes doing with his mother in the poem. I had qualms also as to whether to write about the indignities of Robert’s failing body and mind when he had always been so fastidious about his presentation to the world. But then I thought, ‘This is life – it’s tough.’ Robert had no such qualms when writing poems about his parents, and, to me, they’re his most emotional and moving works.

‘The Dying Light’ straggles down the page, resembling a moth-eaten scarf, or the erosion of memory. It describes Robert’s last visit to his mother’s Coffs Harbour nursing home before he leaves for a residency overseas. Its ending is delayed, as in a long goodbye.

In 1982 I spent four days staying with Robert at his mother’s Housing Commission cottage at Curacoa Street, Coffs Harbour. She was welcoming and kind. The house was old-fashioned and neat, its interior walls painted in the ubiquitous, government-issue colour ‘Driftwood’. She was obviously pleased to have Robert back home and talked to him in the kitchen about family and friends: who had died, was sick, getting married, having babies. I could see Robert glazing over but maintaining a smile. In a letter sent to me from Curacoa Street a few years earlier, he’d written: ‘I’m bored out of my brain, which is the very best state of mind for a writer. It drives you to desperate lengths of work. I ward off all the blandness, all the empty days, with prodigious machine-gun clatterings of the typewriter.’

More memorable to the poet were his mother’s scrambled words, uttered twenty years after that letter, with their strange imagery and obscure meaning. Alzheimer’s can be like that sometimes, briefly opening a window of beautiful language to replace the daily platitudes. In the poem, Robert expresses comfort that the disease has also freed his mother from her strict religion and memories of past hardship, leaving her less anxious and calmer than she’s ever been.

Robert’s mother loved him unconditionally, and even if she didn’t read his books (or feared what she might find in them) she knew he was very clever. Very sick as a child, he had survived the doctors’ predictions of an early death and blossomed in unexpected ways. When Robert’s partner, Dee, came to stay at Curacoa Street, she told me, a single bed was made up for her with a framed photo of Robert on the bedside table.

I sat often with Robert this past year, his body clamped down by Parkinson’s disease, his mind elusive, old memories intact, but sometimes prey to hallucinations and fantasies. His sentences were often left hanging in the air, half-finished. I think he felt comfortable with me, we’d known each other for so long. He didn’t have to put on a good show. Dee said that Robert’s saddest loss was the ability to read and even the desire to be read to. While he railed against the shrinking boundaries and restrictions of his disease, he never complained about being struck down by it. He was stoic, like his mother.

‘If you live long enough it isn’t death you fear
but what life can still do.’

About two months ago Dee rang up to say she had flu and couldn’t enter Robert’s nursing home. I went to ‘Illowra’ in her place, to feed him some lunch. As usual he was prone in bed, so I slowly gave him small teaspoons of the soft nursing home food, chatting intermittently about what I’d been doing and things we’d done together in the past. He said very little. After fifteen minutes he pushed my hand away and spoke, ‘Tom, I’d like to ask you a favour.’ He paused while I leaned in closer, ‘Hail me a taxi to Central. I want to take the train to Bellingen.’ I fobbed him off, saying, ‘The train doesn’t pass through Bellingen. We’d have to get someone to pick us up at Urunga or Coffs Harbour. But it’s too late today. The North Coast train has already left.’ I wheeled his tray table away from the bed and while my back was turned, he somehow swung his bony legs around and stood up, almost straight, swaying. I turned round to grab him, but got there too late – he’d launched himself forward and crashed to the floor. I left him there, on the vinyl, and ran to the kitchen to get one of the carers to help me. We lugged him back onto bed. ‘Are you okay? Where were you going?’ I asked. ‘Somewhere,’ he muttered.

I remember, fifty years ago, Robert telling me about the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, whom he admired. In Robert’s interpretation Heraclitus said that no matter how decrepit your body, if you had some small sensation of nature and what’s going on around you, then life was still worth living.

RE:HEAT is a series in which recent contributors to HEAT reflect on writing from the magazine’s archive. Sign up to our newsletter to receive RE:HEAT in your inbox.