Cover photo of Neil Creighton’s mother and her first born, Duncan in 1944.
By Neil Creighton
Brenda Lynette Creighton was a mother to three girls and two boys. She was a sweet, gentle, intelligent, creative and loving person who in her extreme age declined into toxic codependency with her two youngest daughters. Imagine the shock and sense of exclusion when her three eldest children, including myself, found out on her passing that at age 88 she had rewritten her Will to exclude we three.
The loss we felt was not material. That Will, known to the beneficiaries but kept secret from those removed, felt like exclusion from all the deep connection that should be a feature of families.
I wanted to write of this all too common story it but I needed a little distance. I found the answer in parallels and persona. My mother, like the famous King Lear, had three daughters, one of whom was disinherited. For that and other reasons I named her Leah and I called my narrator Cordelia. Cordelia is in part based on my lovely sister, Jean.
I didn’t want to write just about betrayal, grief and the challenging search for forgiveness. I wanted to honor the kind of person she was. Hence, Part I, Five Visions of Leah, is a portrait of her. Part II, Letting Leah Go, documents Cordelia’s difficult path towards understanding, acceptance and forgiveness.
Storyteller Alan Walowitz had this to say:
If Loving Leah puts you in mind of King Lear, it’s quite intentional. Finding forgiveness within ourselves has never been easy. The hurt, the heavy heart, the torn-fabric of lives once intimately connected--all we believed ourselves to be must be faced and measured. This remarkable sequence of poems takes the reader down the entire rock-strewn and sometimes unnerving path. In the chapbook’s concluding poem, "Tapestry," Creighton comes to the final letting go, which might, at last, allow for loving Leah again. You’ll be moved, and changed, as much by Creighton’s journey, as the arrival.
Sample poems from the book:
The Centre of the Universe
Cordelia’s young life barely knows sorrow.
She wanders the lake’s uninhabited shore.
She explores the bush.
She observes birds.
She finds a shortcut through the reedy swamp
to the little two teacher school.
She tracks brumbies on the hill above the school.
She is young, exultant and free.
Leah is at the core of her happiness.
Leah gives her freedom.
Leah is always there.
Leah is a fragrant balm.
Cordelia loves Leah without thought.
Cordelia’s trust is absolute.
Leah is the center of her universe.
Cornelia’s teenage years are more troubled.
Her father becomes sick.
His mood changes suddenly, erratically.
He cannot stand opinion other than his own.
His temper rages can last for days.
If he drinks the family is on tenterhooks.
His coughing and struggle for breath
fill the house with dread.
It is a relief when he is hospitalized,
sometimes for weeks at a time.
Leah holds her family together.
She is the rock on which they stand.
She treats all her children equally.
In times of stress, she makes jokes.
She is never judgmental.
Cordelia admires her, loves her,
wants to be like her.
Leah is the stable center of her universe.
Free
Leah’s disposition is calm and controlled,
her heart loving and loyal,
even for her husband,
a complex and challenging man
capable of joy, generosity and love
but also irascible, difficult and jealous
and a sometime domestic tyrant.
A war veteran, his final fifteen years
are filled with a perplexing mixture
of love, sickness and rage.
If she sometimes bends under the dual strains
of husband and family,
she will never abandon him.
At the moment of his death
there is tender acknowledgment:
she gently places her forehead on his,
mind to mind, body to body.
Then she stands and quietly leaves.
It is the beginning of a new life.
Tightly bound chains fall.
She travels overseas for the first time.
She rediscovers long suppressed,
once barely permitted creativity.
She paints, exhibits, sells.
She has a group of artist friends.
She visits Cordelia.
The towering gum trees,
her grandson walking to school
down a tree-lined dusty track,
the view across the deep, narrow valley
to ever-changing, light and shadow filled
Mumbulla Mountain
fill her with joy and creativity.
Why don’t you live with us?
Thanks, Cordelia, but no.
I have a very good relationship with you.
I wouldn’t want to do anything to spoil it.
At home, in the evenings,
if sometimes she feels a little lonely
or, because her heart is so loving,
she misses that deep bond of intimate connection,
she has no intention of taking another lover.
One man has been more than enough.
Then, after some years, her youngest returns,
needy, damaged, possessive, jealous.
She opens her door but it closes
to a faint chink of chain and click of lock.
Bit by bit the possessiveness increases
and ageing Leah with the loving heart
and the need to be needed
will surrender to the kind of relationship
with which she was once so familiar.
Cordelia, increasingly excluded,
discovers, on her mother’s passing,
the totality of her exclusion.
She will grieve, not for the exclusion
but for Leah herself, for her weakness,
for her helpless deceit and folly,
for her lies and guilt and for the contrast
between her last days and her prime.
One day she will come to understand
her mother’s oft-repeated words
about her youngest daughter,
viewing them as a kind of powerless warning,
an explanation when she was no longer capable
of stating the full horror of explicit truth.
Your sister is very like your father.
Surrender
It is easy for Leah to welcome back
her two disappointed daughters.
She craves company and close connection.
Living alone has been difficult.
It is easy for her to imagine
that she can love them into happiness.
She has the empath’s weakness.
She believes that she can fix things.
If, over time, tyranny emerges,
like bullying or sulking in bedrooms,
it is easy for her to shrug it off.
It only means that she is important to them.
It is easy for her to surrender.
It is her nature and it happens so gradually,
a concession here and there until one day
there is no longer any space for Cordelia.
It is easy to hope for Cordelia’s understanding.
She has grown old and dependent
and as usefulness diminishes
she lives in fear of abandonment.
It is easy for her to keep secrets.
Secrets are something over which she,
who has surrendered everything else,
still has some power and control.
It becomes easy to pretend that all is well.
It becomes easy to justify the unjustifiable.
It becomes easy to expect assent.
Such things are as easy as lying.
It is not easy, though, to wake in fright.
Too often there is a child in her bedroom.
Cordelia, is that you? I’m so sorry.
Please understand that I had no choice.
Nor will discovery be easy for Cordelia.
For long nights she will stare into the darkness
in a difficult search for that terrifying place
where her loved mother came to dwell.
Mother
I watch the rise and fall of her chest,
listen intently for her breath,
part fearful, part hopeful,
waiting for death to come,
knowing that life can be lived for far too long.
Where is she now?
With her much-loved mother?
Smelling the rich warmth of the milking shed?
Seeing her brothers walking across the near paddock?
Let her be anywhere but this
diminished and difficult present
where vitality is gone and each day
she seems to fade a little more.
She wakes.
There is a smile, as if sweetness
cannot be washed away, no,
not even by the relentless grip
that sweeps her inexorably along.
Suddenly, seeing that smile,
I think of what she was,
how she walked through this world
in quiet anonymity, a creative spirit,
deeply gentle, calm and self-controlled,
flexible, open and inquisitive,
her heart tempered in love,
and bending to kiss her,
perhaps for the final time,
walking away from her,
past the repetitive muttering
of the vacant ghosts in their wheelchairs,
this sad, last abiding place,
my heart is strangely swelling
with a sense of privilege and gift,
sad that life can come to this
but proud and elated to have known her,
been nurtured and loved by her,
marveling that my anonymous life
can be so rich, so full of blessing,
so beautifully filled in its entirety
with the wonderful love of women,
and raising my eyes heavenwards
in silent, sad, complex thankfulness
I ask that I can carry her gentleness with me,
passing it on to those that I love,
setting free her unknown greatness
to ripple and wash through and over
the countless generations yet to come.
Tapestry
The loom is quiet. Its treadles are still.
The shuttles, once filled with somber weft spools
of darkly shining silk, are almost spent.
Silently I add new shuttles, splice a brighter palate
for an open French door, light, zephyr-lifted curtains,
transparent silver morning light, rich complexity of sun
sparkling on myriad green and the sense of birdsong.
Yes, there must be birdsong. There must be joy.
Yet let me unroll the cloth roller
and look at you for one last time
as you shuffle along your darkened corridor.
It is well before dawn. Those visions of children
which so haunt your sleep have woken you again.
Your stoop is not just the weight of years
but a heavier load of guilt bearing relentlessly down.
Over and over come those terrible words:
“Whatever will people think of me?”
Too late for that now.
I re-roll the cloth.
I have grieved long enough.
Through the open door is blue sky
but I will weave through every scene that remains
those little bits of glowing silk thread that depict
the light of your eyes and the gentleness of your smile.
I must also take one thread of dark somber silk,
a sadly powerful reminder of the tragedy and folly
that comes when independence is surrendered,
when strength of body wanes and the diminished spirit
grows vulnerable and weak.
I re-arrange the shuttles with spools of shining blues,
greens and splashes of gold and vermillion.
I put my foot to the treadle.
With a clatter the parts move,
warp thread absorbs weft
and the tapestry moves on.
Let all your years of goodness outweigh
those final spools of silent, secret surrender.
Now take your peace.
Dream no more.
Wring your hands no more.
Rest quietly.
Sleep easily.
I carry you in my heart
even as I let you go
and with you
all the grief and sorrow
of your last days.
I love you, always,
but now, dear one,
I say goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
