Free Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam by Peter Goldsworthy Page B

note: it was ‘an obituary to die for.’
    This seems to me one of the great aphorisms, deserving of a place in any collection of aphorisms — and a perfect distillation of Philip’s stoic courage, and style. It’s also a seamless mix of favourite joke and worst fear.
    1995 was a bad year for Australian poetry, with the death of Gwen Harwood after a year long battle with what she, also, knew to be a terminal illness. Whatever private demons this forced her to wrestle with, or share with her husband and family, in her letters she remained cheerful and courageous — and as irreverent as ever, her characteristic humour irrepressible.
    I can walk (as if on Jupiter) very slowly, I even look like an alien from another planet; moon-faced and swollen from the medications & decorated with magenta blotches. How uninteresting …
    This from the last letter I was privileged to receive, a few weeks before her death.
    It would be nice to think that we could all face our own ends with the same courage, and dignity, and tough humour.
    I often thought I was dying as a child, suffering attacks of asthma at harvest time — but I liked to over-dramatise. I did spend a week in intensive care in my early twenties with a chest full of blood — but I was too drugged to sense any danger, or take proper stock. The days passed in a dream, interrupted only by the worried faces of my parents emerging and vanishing through the fog of narcotics.
    What, me worry?
    My experience of death has (obviously) been from the outside, looking on — but the experience has been all too frequent.
2.
    People often ask how I manage to mix working as a writer with working as a doctor. Or — an interesting wording — which are you ‘really’. Part of me always resents this: why should the two trades be incompatible, or immiscible? Perhaps the surprise that people express at such a mix — writing and medicine — is due to received notions of an Art/Science Great Divide, notions which are much exaggerated, and usually come as a complete surprise to anyone on the science side of the alleged divide, most of whom read novels, watch movies and listen to music avidly.
    Sometimes the question comes from the other side, from an opposite set of prejudices: sometimes it’s a logistics question. How can a Busy Doctor Have Time to Write Books? There’s a subtext here, an accusation that harks back to that use of the word ‘really’: the notion that a ‘real’ doctor would not bother with anything so frivolous.
    And another, different part of me sympathises with this. It’s a question I often ask myself, as any good Methodist boy would — especially late at night, when the work of Making Up Stories often seems rather silly.
    I find it’s useful to quote Anton Chekhov in such circumstances, especially to myself: ‘medicine is my wife, writing is my mistress.’
    Writing is my Golf Afternoon? In fact, I suspect that my temperament is more suited to writing than to medicine. Ever since I treated a fractured right leg in my first year out of medical school by putting a plaster on the left leg I’ve had a feeling that life held out something else for me beyond medicine. Fortunately no harm was done, except to my ego. I removed the wet plaster, red-faced, and reapplied it to the other side. Creative medicine? Or gross negligence? I blame a wandering mind, a mind too often occupied elsewhere. I like to jot down ideas between patients in a notebook I keep for that purpose. Recently a chemist around the corner returned a prescription to me with the note that while he enjoyed the poem, he didn’t think it one of my best.
    And here is one of the advantages of writing as a career: you don’t need to be particularly alert to succeed. You don’t need to know the difference between a right leg and a left leg for instance. Or if you do, then you’ve got a few weeks or even months to think about it, and make up your mind exactly which is which. If it’s about nothing else,