The Job by Janiru Liyanage

You go your whole life believing
dying is the easy part, then one day
your great aunt gets a brain tumour the size of a
kumquat burrowing inside her hippocampus, and
you watch her suffocate for hours before passing.
In the hospital, in her last moments, she tells you,
between spoonfuls of room-temperature baby corn,
Dying is a thankless job. What a line, you think, and you
write it down on your phone. Dying is a thankless job.
You leave her room without wiping the corn stuck
to the corners of her lips she cannot reach. Her striped
pink towel, folded over a leather chair by the door.
Her wrists, suspended in a froth of August sunlight.
Her beeping, fading behind you as you walk down
the hallway, trying out the line on other grieving
patients. Dying is a thankless job. Mostly, they don’t react,
but you learn that all the doctors here use fruits
as metaphors for growths: this lump in your breast
is as big as a grape, this cyst in your stomach,
an apple. You think this is the wrong crowd
for the line. You just haven’t found your
people yet. Dying is a thankless job. You will
use that line in a poem one day – one where
you will not acknowledge your great aunt. One
where you will not need grief to make the poem
work. One you will write when you are finally living
your quiet, uneventful, upper-middle-class suburban life,
where you set lilies in lusterware vases all afternoon.
Where you make a fruit salad for your two perfect
children, pack it into two green plastic boxes, take them
out for a picnic, yelling cows as you pass cows, driving
for hours past endless rows of powerlines jewelled in rain,
until you find an orchard where you can finally sit and
write while your children run through acres of fig trees,
picking the fruit with their hands, forgetting the salad you
worked so hard on, rotting in their bags. How much
sweeter the figs taste because they aren’t for them.

I still remember watching my great-aunt struggle to breathe as my family and I crowded around her bed. There was a fluorescent light above us that deepened the shadows of her already thinning body. I remember everyone covering their mouths, afraid to sneeze or cough near her. I was young and lacked the vocabulary for what was happening to her, as I do now. This “thing”, which I now know was cancer, would later destroy my great-grandmother in a similar manner.

After my great-aunt passed away, I began collecting stories and memories of her final days. Writing this poem, these images and ideas passed in and out of my head: the room, the striped pink towel, learning how, after her returning home from her first round of radiotherapy, no one used the bathroom because her waste was radioactive. As a child, hearing this, I kept picturing a glowing green toilet.

Not every image I remembered, including this, made it into the poem. Yet the image of my great-aunt, sick and dying, was one I was deeply moored to, and have been for years. Meditating on that image, the idea of futurity and legacy naturally arose – what do I hope to leave behind? What kind of perfect future do we strive towards? And how does illness and ageing inevitably threaten this? The contrast between the concluding “uneventful, upper-middle-class suburban life” and my great-aunt’s opening fragility is metonymic of these questions, and they remain a theme throughout my work. At the same time, self-accusing statements like “one where you will not acknowledge your great aunt” and “one where you will not need grief to make it work” point to my ongoing ethical struggle with representing suffering in art, particularly art that beautifies. I do not have an answer for this, and neither does this poem. Yet this tension continues to drive me.

• Australian Poetry Month runs throughout August and includes festivals, events, workshops and a commissioned poem of the day brought to you by Red Room Poetry. Find out more here