A Journey Through Life, Loss, and Love
When I turned 40, I found myself writing from a hospital bed. Propped up against the pillows, I returned to writing – a passion I had always loved but hadn’t pursued since my teenage years – because I had nearly lost the chance to do so. This moment marked the beginning of a profound transformation in my life.
For almost a year, I had been sick without a diagnosis. It was a slow decline, a gradual loss of the vitality that once defined me. In the final stages of this unknown illness, I lacked both physical and mental energy. I struggled to get through each day and care for our three children. I was constantly nauseous, unable to sleep or handle any form of stress. I barely left the house, relying heavily on my husband for everything. By the time I realized I might be dying, there was an odd sense of relief; the thought of slipping away and no longer feeling too weak to exist was strangely appealing.
It was an emergency doctor who saved my life. I had Addison’s disease, a rare autoimmune condition, and this doctor had encountered it before. After being sick for so long, I was injected with the cortisol my body desperately needed, and the sensation that enveloped me afterward will never leave me.
Almost dying taught me that life is precious. It filled me with an overwhelming gratitude to be able to mother my children, to love them, and to love in general. This experience has deeply influenced my writing, making me more aware of beauty and truth, of the frailties and joys of being human, and of what truly matters.
My first novel, The Wakes, captures the essence of what I went through – the juxtaposition of life and death. My new novel, Margaret, Are You Leaving?, explores love in its many forms. However, how devastating this story would be caught me unawares.
A girlfriend asked if I’d like to write her story. She had begun searching for her birth mother, having uncovered fragments about a baby left on the steps of a church in Fitzroy and a new-immigrant mother who disappeared from the face of the earth. I agreed immediately, thrilled at the prospect of writing a story that had the potential to be wonderful. Thrilled enough that I didn’t stop to consider the profound responsibility that comes with telling someone else’s story.
With all my naivety on board, I sat down to interview my friend. To write her story, I first needed to understand her. It occurred to me that, apart from being an otherwise open person, I knew almost nothing of her upbringing, of what may have formed her. We talked at my kitchen table, and when she left hours later, I sat there stunned by the overwhelming sadness in what I had been told, by the stark absence of love in her story, and by the sheer enormity of what she had stored deep within herself and was now entrusting to me.
In time, and with my friend’s blessing, I would turn partly to fiction, with its creative freedoms, to adequately capture the deep truths I was handed then, and later.
We continued with several more interviews, each one raw and intimate. As my knowledge of her life grew, the story I had first imagined – one of mothers and daughters, and the mystery of a lost family – became much more. It became a story of deeply held human needs. I realized my friend was really searching for some evidence, however small, that she was loved as a young child (surely the most crucial and foundational love of all). That she needed, ultimately, to have the answer to the heartbreaking question: Was I ever loved?
A mother’s absence is a loss I know too well. My mother, whom I adored, died of breast cancer during my final year of high school, and her death was a trauma I struggled with for a very long time. Eventually, though, I saw that I was blessed to have known that kind of love, to hold the beautiful truth of that love inside me. As my friend continued her search, I hung onto a hope that she would find some part of that for herself, or something akin to it.
As it happened, that hope of mine transformed into a conviction. One evening, I watched an interview with actor Jack Thompson. Talking about his early childhood, he said something along the lines of, “If you haven’t been loved as a child, you won’t have the capacity to love.” If that were true, I knew my friend must have been loved, truly loved: maybe by her mother, or if not by her, then someone else, as I had no doubt about her capacity to love.
The search and the novel are now done, and along the way, our friendship has turned into something special. We embarked on a strange and often challenging journey together, but not for a moment did I want to be anywhere else. It was full of humanity and love, and joy, too. All the beautiful human stuff that matters.
Margaret, Are You Leaving? (Hachette) by Dianne Yarwood is out now.
