For the remainder of the year, the idea of running a vegan wholesale business from between a desk and bed faded rapidly. In hindsight it would have been wiser to just drop everything, but I wasn't used to not fighting and struggling for my life and the planet, by creating more and more 'ethical' work for myself. I became slower and slower. The weeks and months were slipping by, with me eventually being able to do very little aside from moving from a bed to a chair and back to a bed again.
I was to spend the next few years often in a painful, nauseated and exhausted state struggling to get out of bed, sit in a chair, or read and write in short bursts. My walking and breathing were slow and laboured. I relied on my supplements, vitamin B12 injections and when I wasn't too ill to take stronger medication, I used tiny dosages of phentermine and panadeine forte in order to to be able to shop for food and meet medical appointments for the dogs and myself. I had overdone it and now I had blown it big time, or at least for as long as I had this disease. After all, some had recovered from CFIDS, so I didn't see why I wouldn't be one of them. Doctor Chung Wah said that my positive attitude might well mean that I would be one of them.
Despite my remaining positive and even joking about the CFIDS, things were not going well back in Macquarie Fields. My mother had discovered a dead body in my wardrobe in the granny flat on 18th December in 2003. It had been there for twelve days and was the body of a tenant who had suicided. The discovery occurred on my grandfather's ninetieth birthday. Mum told me that when the police arrived, the leg and foot of the corpse were so bloated and swollen with gas, that the shoe had shot off the foot across the room. She confided in me that as he hung there in the wardrobe, she had touched his face and spoken to him. I said, "You shouldn't have touched the body."
On top of this my grandfather was becoming too ill and old for her to manage from home and so my mother had to make the hard decision of putting him into a nursing home. Also my own father was dying of cancer. To add to this my mother's partner of sixteen years had deserted her for a massage parlour girl from the Phillipines, taking with him a lot of her money that he'd invested in a dud business venture. Mum later emailed me in a very matter-of-fact way about the end of her relationship with her long term live-in partner John. She wrote, "John left on 10th December while the body was still in the wardrobe."
Believing that something spiritual needed to be done, I rang the priest at St Mary's Cathedral in Darwin and sought permission to pick up some holy water. My intention was to sprinkle it around the house at Ridgehaven Circuit and also to send a bottle to my mother for the granny flat. The entire flat now reeked of the corpse and my mother was having the interior demolished and everything replaced from carpet through to doors, cupboard doors and the paint on the walls. One of the police had commented that it might be many years later and you would get one hot and humid day and the place would start to reek again.
On 24th December in 2003, I bought home some holy water from St Mary's Church in Darwin. As planned, this included a small bottle to send my mother and a large bottle for me to sprinkle throughout the Ridgehaven Circuit place. I intended to get rid of what I considered to be the sombre energy around the outside of the house, on the stairs and in the garden. I left both bottles on the kitchen bench overnight. In the morning the large bottle meant to be used for my place was shattered from top to bottom. Three large cracks ran the length of the bottle in a triangle shape and connected to each other in several splits. They were deep cracks as if the bottle would break in your hands if you squeezed it, but the holy water was still inside.
Suddenly I got the distinct feeling that I was doing the wrong thing by having the holy water in the house. As a result I threw both bottles out and decided never to bring any holy water there again. Later on Maria (who is Greek Orthodox) asked me, "Did you sprinkle that holy water around?" I replied, "No, I threw it out." Knowing my situation she looked startled, "But why, Darling?" I answered, "Because the ghosts didn't like it."
