Her vulnerability was palpable. Each day becoming a little more fragile, a little less able to do for herself, a little closer to what we both knew was unavoidable. Edna, my mum, had been living in the aged care home for the previous 18 months or so, not entirely unhappily and yet never quite getting over the loss of her home and her ability to do what she liked, when she liked. Freedom in short.

Meanwhile, I was off managing another aged care home, looking after strangers who were in the same predicament as her, this woman, my mother who had been unceasingly loving and supportive during the turbulence of my marriage breakdown and subsequent inability to cope. She had been my strength and my safe haven in what was to be a maelstrom for many years – too many years!

One night while visiting her at the home, she was particularly frail and just not able to make the effort to get ready for bed nor did she have the physical wherewithal to get into bed. I helped her get changed into her fresh, clean nightie ( she was always spotlessly clean and smelt clean), I arranged her hospital bed in the manner she was so pedantic about. The sheepskin placed just so, where she would lie, and the blankets in a very particular arrangement – not tucked in. I placed all of her night time paraphernalia so that it would be close at hand for her to reach easily, I could tell she was not going to have a very good night and it absolutely tore at my guts.

Once she was comfortable, looking radiant in a sort of angelic way, I began to say my goodnights to her, choking back my tears and my longing to make it all better for her. I would have given anything to make her smile and feel well again, but she knew and I knew that wasn’t how it would be, and in an instant, in the glow of her over bed light, we both understood that this was possibly the beginning of the end.

I remember stroking her smooth, warm face and asking if I could do anything else for her before leaving for the night. She responded with such tenderness and authentic sincerity, saying “ you’re a darling and I don’t know what I would have done without you …thank you for all of your efforts”. This may not be absolutely accurate, but it is what I remember. The poignancy of that moment stays with me always as it initiated something of a turning point for both of us.

For me, it helped me to crystallise my resolve to bring her to my home so I could care for her in the last phase of her life, for I simply could not risk her care being less than what I could provide on a 1 to 1 basis. So in practical terms, it meant that I immediately went on prolonged leave from work, so that I could devote myself to her needs. For her, I hoped it signified the end of her tenure in that place and some much longed for care at home.

Luckily, my wonderful husband Peter, showed only love and integrity during this time and this was to provide incredible support to me, my mum and indeed my whole family. For that I will never be able to thank him enough, but I know that he knows how much it was appreciated and that I love him unreservedly.

About a week after being at home together, Edna deteriorated quite quickly. She took on a very peaceful demeanour, and on the day before she died, related in a very contented voice, that whilst snoozing in the lounge chair, she had enjoyed a visit from all her deceased brothers and sisters! I sat at the foot of her chair and cried when she said that. She comforted me and told me not to cry. Later that same evening, she was unable to stand and was in pain and distressed by her breathlessness. She had always said that she feared not being able to breathe as being her huge dread, and here she was, living her nightmare.

I summoned by brothers to the house later that evening and together we held vigil around her bed, with me (being a nurse) left to administer the morphine intermittently to give her some relief. She lasted the night, but passed away the next morning, just as the palliative care team had arrived. I like to think that was her final way of saying “ don’t start messing around with me”, for she always had been a pretty spirited woman.

I had always thought that I would fall apart when she died, but I discovered that I had done a great deal of my grieving in the lead up when she had been so sick. She was a great woman who never faltered in loving her kids and grandchildren. I will never be without her, because I feel her living on in me continually, and even more so as I get older.

Good night and God bless my darling Mum. I love you forever… and then some!

When it comes to the ethics of using non-human animals for nutrition, entertainment, clothing and many other areas it seems society rarely ever considers that there may be the option to not use them. Why is that?

When faced with any decision we make unconscious assumptions about how to frame the decision that drastically limits possible options to a manageable number. This allows us to focus on the small number of options that – if the process of limitation worked effectively – will include one or more that will result in a desired outcome. However natural and efficiency-driven this process of narrowing down options might normally be, it seems it can also become maladaptive. We can unknowingly exclude options from consideration due to initial inaccurate assumptions regarding their practicality or chance of success, leading us to believe that the option we end up choosing to be the most appropriate when in fact it may not be. We also risk limiting our options to only the ones that are socially acceptable, when the option that best achieves the desired outcome may actually be a socially unacceptable one.

Noam Chomsky wrote about a similar process in his book The Common Good:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum…”

Extending this to our personal internal debates about the ethics of nonhuman animal use, we might often believe we are taking a sufficiently advanced ethical position on the treatment of non-human animals being used compared to the alternatives being considered. Instead we seem to often have our options constrained and only end up selecting between socially acceptable variations on a theme that reinforce the accepted use of non-human animals. We seem to consider only a strictly limited spectrum of options when it comes to addressing concerns regarding non-human animal use, which we debate with ourselves as if we’re honestly, openly and without restrictions considering all the options. Instead our options have already been limited by the industry, tradition, social norms, gastronomic desires and other influences to the point where use is a given and treatment is the context in which the decision is made.

Take the example of humans seeking to consume the egg of a chicken. To address the growing concern over the treatment of chickens, we are presented by the industry with different ways of using hens that will potentially alter their standard of living for the better. The options however always remain within the context of the use itself being an inevitability given that’s how the industry makes a profit. Taking a stand against taking eggs from hens in small cages thinking that would be improving their lives is an example of a decision potentially made within a narrow spectrum, the option of non-use which would more sufficiently address all concerns about treatment of the beings in questions having likely never been considered in the first place.

This may also be why there is often a backlash against vegans who seek to introduce an option outside of those deemed socially acceptable, as this endangers the safe, limited spectrum of options people are used to operating within. In turn this risks reframing whatever steps people within that spectrum had decided to take, making them seem less effective in addressing the ethical concerns when non-use is introduced as a viable option.

Part 2

Even when we are aware that we do not need to use a non-human animal for nutrition for example – we know people in similar financial, social, cultural and geographical situations to us who manage to survive not eating products containing non-human animal ingredients – we still seem to usually return to the limited spectrum of socially acceptable options focusing on treatment but not considering the option of non-use.

If we recognise that non-human beings are deserving of ethical consideration to the extent that how they are treated during use matters, then this position has already accepted the assumption that they experience living in ways that can be better or worse, with more or less suffering. The question then is, if we do not need to use them, and we have decided to be concerned about their lived experiences as individually aware beings, then surely this concern would extend to whether we need to breed and put them through the experience of being used in the first place?

Now that many people seem to be willing to take the well-being of non-human animals in to consideration, recognising their capacity for experience, can we really ethically justify their use simply to entertain our taste buds, to benefit us at their expense?

Once upon a time there was a tiny tiny boy. He was so tiny he could sleep in his uncles boot. Of course his uncle was regularly irritated by this as he often needed to wear his boots and after bedtime,  more often than not ,only one was available.
I need a volunteer he cried. “A volunteer to make the tiny tiny boy a bed of his own.  This volunteer need not have carpentery  skills or mattress stuffing skills, this volunteer needs to be a fine leather worker with attention to detail.  He needs to make a boot that either I can wear after bedtime or the tiny tiny boy can sleep in.  It is paramount that this is interchangeable.

Every day he sent out the call for a volunteer and every day no one appeared.  After a period of time a man appeared with a large quantity of rubber.
“I have not come forward before as your wish was for a boot made of leather, all I can offer is a boot of rubber…a boot that will not let your feet get wet and a boot that would be very comfortable to sleep in,  Would this be something you may consider?”
“Too sad, I don’t want a boot of  made of rubber.  Maybe one day., the Uncle said, “one day I will get my boot of leather and the tiny tiny boy shall sleep and I, the normal sized man, will  be able  to walk about after bedtime”
The man with the large amount of rubber didn’t care. He shrugged his shoulders and continued on his journey. Because of that the Uncle never got to wear a pair of rubber boots and the tiny tiny boy never got to sleep in a boot made from rubber.  Despite this,  they were both happy.   Life didn’t change, they shared the boots as they had always done.  They wondered why it had ever seemed upsetting or inconvenient. The Uncle re called his call for a volunteer and the tiny tiny boy was content.

WB

Once upon a time there was a photographer. His name was Brian. He was old-school, a physical man of film and negatives who took pride in the way he could coax light and shadow from paper and chemicals.

When he saw an Ansel Adams print for the first time, he wept. It had tone he could only aspire to, a presence no digital print could ever match. He looked to the dead masters: Dorothea Lange’s gritty realism of the Great Depression, the magic of Cartier-Bresson and his Decisive Moment.

For years he resisted the ephemeral pull of the digital world, everything so fast and complicated; a place where even a photograph – especially a photograph – was not to be trusted.

He romanticised his shrinking business, clinging to his craft the way he imagined clock makers or blacksmiths had in times gone by.

Every day he reassured himself: through mastery of the old traditions, he would be the last of his breed, the holder of wisdom. His prints had beauty and a poetry born under a red light, not with the click of a mouse.

He was a technological dinosaur, and proud of it. He knew nothing of pixels and certainly nothing of curves and levels. He didn’t even like computers.

Slowly these reassurances started to fade. Gloominess set in: You are too old to learn, he thought. You deserve to be extinct. He didn’t feel his actual size, but diminished and smaller, no longer a master craftsman but out-of-date and used up.

One day, he started to say to himself, perhaps I will take a course. One day, was always tomorrow or next week or next year. The step from master to apprentice too big a leap to make; because of that he put his camera away.

His world – once a place of delight and whimsy, truth and power – became grey and unstudied.

In effort to understand the ways of the new world he went to a university end-of-semester exhibition.

It only made him feel more out of touch – the prize-winning print had been given to an out-of-focus, photoshopped montage of a boy soccer player and a disinterested panda playing goalie.

A cheap gimmick and a load of crap, he thought. The judges thought otherwise: A homage to Breton and his notion of surrealist dislocation.

He closed up his dark room two weeks later and retired.

To fill his time and stop the slide into sadness, Brian established every day rituals: A walk, a cappuccino at the café around the corner and a trip to the library to read the newspapers. The mornings gone, he only had to fill the afternoons with chores. Evenings were for reading and crosswords.

It was in his local library, he had his own decisive moment; a perfect coming together of circumstance and timing that taught him a new way to take photographs.

He met Alice.

He was 72, she was 31.

In front of him were the collected works of Sebastião Salgado, a Brazilian economist turned photographer who had set himself the goal to tell the big global stories of work and migration.

Refugee camps looked like biblical paintings of the apocalypse, places of terrible beauty.

Brian had sought out these books wishing to be moved; it was the sort of work he had aspired to doing, but never quite achieved. It was both unique and universal.

Alice arrived at the shared table just as Brian was about to leave. She had her own bundle of books, a healthy eating guide for toddlers sat on top.

She sat down and started to restack her books – which served her needs of the moment but none of her passions. Not surprisingly, she was uninspired.

As she saw the books Brian had spread across the table, Alice stilled.

Brian only felt curiosity, wondering how this suburban mother would respond.

Alice ran her had across the photographs, unaware she was being observed.

A small sigh escaped her lips. Oh.

She looked at the old man next to her, embarrassed.

Brian moved his chair closer, and gently pushed away Alice’s books as he flipped the page.

This is my favourite, he said.

The pair sat together, slowly turning the pages.

Brian watched her with his photographer’s subtle eye.

He saw the light slicing through the window and her look of wonder.

He framed the scene, and took a photograph with no film and no camera.

It was the first of many, and it was just for him.

It was 1983. I was in the lift at work, going to the fourth floor. The lift stopped at second. A guy got in. I recognised him from Happy Hour, where I spent most hours on Fridays after work, making people laugh along with me at random, happy, drunken things.

I was depressed. A condition I hid well, but this guy caught me unawares. “What’s up with you? You’re always so happy,” he said. Fuck you, I wanted to say back, but instead, laughed. Nothing wrong with me, buddy. Get outta here! (Can’t a girl be unhappy? Can’t a girl have a bad day? A bad month? Perhaps a bad life?)

“No Happy Hour today,” I said with fake cheer. The lift stopped at my floor. I got out.

Fuck him. Fuck the lot of them. I don’t have to be happy all the time. It’s not my job to keep people laughing, smiling, wishing we were best friends, soothing their hurts, reassuring their married selves that all was okay back at home with their triple fronted brick veneer, 2.5 children and dog.

Yes, I can be happy, and often I am. I have what many would say was a ‘happy disposition’, but there’s a dark side to the happiness, a yin to my yang. A misery to my mastery.

I’ve had times of being so happy that I’ve felt I could fly. Surely fly. I imagine being the bird, sailing across the valley, riding the breeze, seeing the world from above; soaring, soaring. But I’ve also had more than my fair share of times of utter despair. Times of thinking that dying was the only way out of the bleakness, the never ending-ness of the grind of the day, and the slow, trough of night.

So yes, it’s true I often laugh. It’s true I can often make other people laugh. I even make myself laugh. But right now, in this time and space, all is not well in the house of Fiona.

Right now, my happy face is a lie. A farce.

Right now, the happy girl has gone.

I want my cartwheels back. I want happy me back.

I want way more than a happy hour.

The walls of ancient stone, were cool and damp
Every day, she played, behind them
The ‘right’ place for girls, dolls, shawls and then –
The day flickered. Light the evening lamps!

A voice urged her, go beyond the wall! A world unknown,
Unexplored. One day, she climbed the cobbled stone
And peered – and oh – her heart swelled and groaned
Calling to her, a small balloon, drifting alone

Smoking a cigarette, she stumbles blindly.
Seeking a new future. Until, finally –

Once upon a time there was a couple – a man and woman; they were lovers, but in the first stage, the honeymoon stage. They’d do everything together. He wasn’t one for spontaneity, but she was daring and rash.

‘Come with me, darling!’ she said. ‘On the flying fox. It’ll be fun.’

He was worried at first, but then laughed, and said, ‘Are you sure even you want to? You’re wearing a dress!’

She looked down. ‘Oh.’ She faltered.

‘Let’s neither one of us do it,’ he said with relief, and went to take her hand.

She giggled. ‘No, let’s both do it! Who’s going to cave first, I wonder? With your fear of heights and my dress.’

He narrowed his eyes and drew his shoulders up to full height, inhaling fully.

‘Alright! Let’s.’

Every day, they tried something new. She wore his trousers, he approached strangers, she sang every word for one whole day, he comforted a drunkard throwing up in a bar’s restroom.

On this day, he left the bathroom and went back out into the bar. He sat at the booth with his wife. (They were married just months after their flying fox adventure.)

‘This sure is tiring,’ he said and wiped his damp face with a cloth napkin.

‘What is, dear?’ she asked, looking up from the newspaper in her hands.

‘Trying something new every day,’ he said and sat back in the booth.

She smiled in an overly understanding way.

One day, he decided to stop. He decided to break their tradition.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘I’m not doing anything new today. I’m going to relax and be comfortable knowing exactly what’s coming, and what I’m doing, and what I will do until I finish my day inevitably by falling asleep in my own bed. Not under the stars, not naked, not in a car by the beach. In my pyjamas and beside you.’

She denied his assertions, thinking he was joking. He fought back, and her temper flared.

‘How dare you deliberately stop something so sacred, which had proven time and time again to be exhilarating, life-changing even, because you’re tired?’

She became crestfallen that she could not convince him, and subsequently left the house to look for some new adventure to dive into. So she took a walk. Their argument resounded in her mind – key phrases popped up in different orders, enraging her further.

Because of that, she refused to return home. She called a taxi service and requested he drive her to the airport. She booked the next available flight out of the city and boarded within the hour. She considered calling her husband, but only for a moment, because all she could think of was his inevitable reply: ‘Oh have fun. I’ll be here when you get back.’

But what if she didn’t return that day? Or the next? What would happen if she decided to leave him, so that their entire relationship was based solely around the tradition they had kept, from the day of their first date to many years into their marriage?

And because of that, the man was left alone. His wife did not return for a week. When she did, he did not ask where she went, or why she didn’t call. Instead, he sat her down and said, ‘I want a divorce.’

She was livid. ‘How could you? You were the one who made me leave, the one who threw our traditions away, disregarded what our relationship was made of, and who pushed me over the edge! Our relationship shattered the moment you refused me.’

‘Then it was something new for us, wasn’t it!’

‘That’s not the point!’

They argued for hours,

Until finally, they were crying.

‘Why don’t you value what we created!?’

‘Why don’t you value me!?’

‘What do you mean, value you?’ she asked.

‘I never wanted to do something different everyday,’ he said, hatred injected into every syllable. ‘But I went along with it all because I loved you, and I wanted to be with you, no matter what you did. Last week I realised that you didn’t care about me or what I wanted, you just wanted company when you did whatever you wanted.’

The woman stood frozen with mouth wide open – he had never so much as raised his voice to her before.

How could she be so clueless about what he truly wanted?

‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you wanted to – but I thought you were saying no because you were afraid of whatever it was we were about to do. Do you remember the flying fox? That was the first time we did something new, that neither of us wanted to do. You were afraid of heights, but I helped you get over your fear by trying it with you. Do you think I wanted to show my underwear as I flew over the crowd?’

He scoffed, despite himself. Then sighed.

‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘I should’ve been more open with you… and less relenting when you pushed me too often.’ He had a cheeky smile.

She did too. ‘And I’ll learn to take no for an answer.’