Any Ordinary Day

by Leigh Sales

When Louisa says this, my heart sinks. I flirted with religion in my late teens and early twenties but ultimately, I just couldn’t buy the dogma. It seemed irrational to me that people who didn’t believe the same things that I did were going to hell. I saw too much hypocrisy in supposed Christians who said one thing and did another. And

It’s presumptuous. I’m never going to learn anything useful if the first time somebody trusts me enough to let me into their thinking, I immediately close my mind to what they’re offering. I hope my internal reaction hasn’t showed on my face. I really do want to understand how Louisa has dealt with what’s happened in her life,

and so at first, I had this thing where I would only allow myself one hour every day to think about the MS and my divorce and all the other random things you dwell on when your life has just disintegrated.

Okay, what’s the lesson? What good am I going to be able to suck out of this that’s going to grow me?’

‘This is the thing. We live in a myth that it’s not. We live imagining that there are certainties. That’s just this big, collective lie that we live in. We’re so caught up in the state of our Western culture – we can make this happen, we can affect that, we can do this, we can do that. We can create our safe world. Then along comes some nasty terrorist and blows it up. It’s a collective delusion.’ Louisa pauses. ‘I don’t say this too loudly because most people can’t handle me saying it, but it’s like a gift to be reminded that life can change, that we’re not in control. To have that shockingly ripped from you, it is a gift. You go, Right, okay.’

‘I’d better live more fully?’ I suggest. ‘That’s right and it’s very humbling. It’s not my plan, but tomorrow if you hear news that I’ve died in some bizarre and mysterious way, it’s okay,’ she tells me.

As a journalist, I rely on a particular skill set when I want to find something out. I’m good at tracking people down. I know how to craft a line of questioning that helps them open up. I’m a strong listener and I follow up what people are saying. I can connect dots and identify interesting anecdotes. Those are handy tools, but even before meeting Louisa I’d already suspected that to find answers about the probability of being caught up in a newsworthy blindside, and how people react, I’d need more in my kit than that. I’d

The brain gathers all sorts of data from the outside world and stores it as memories. Memories then help us to make decisions about how to act, by evaluating past experience against

present reality. That mental process occurs in a split second for something as simple as climbing a set of stairs, but it can be more tortuous for complicated decisions, such as whether another person is trustworthy. The brain particularly loves patterns it can recognise because they foster predictability in the world around us and help eliminate unpleasant feelings of insecurity or unfamiliarity.

The human bias towards predictability causes us to look for cause and effect

in the world around us, even for things that defy easy explanation. The idea that everything happens for a reason is a reassuring thought, as if somewhere out there is a blueprint, dictating the course of our lives, even if we can’t see it.

A sense of certainty comes with believing that things are under some form of control, whether somebody else’s or our own. For many people it’s comforting to believe that factors such as how hard we work, the choices we make, or the goodness ...

Actually, our bias towards predictability and explanation means that often we see what we want

to believe rather than reality.

The brain is disinclined to remember the dozens of unremarkable occurrences because it’s hardwired to remember the single unusual one (because it deviates from the predictable and therefore could be a threat to survival).

us are more scared of the plane flight than the drive to the airport, despite the

latter being statistically a far greater danger.

Mathematicians in a field called decision theory use the term to describe behaviour whereby you make a choice based on an evaluation of what you might regret later. I want to avoid rollercoasters in case I later regret injury to my children: that type of thinking applies minimax regret.

The term references those British explorers who arrived in Australia and saw black swans for first time, having only ever seen white ones.

hokey,

benign

the awkwardness quickly dissipated and

remember meeting this friend of my daughter’s who was a student here. He said, “Dr Spence, I was very sorry to hear about Mrs Spence.” I said, “Thank you very much.” He said, “How are you doing?” And I said, “Well, Rupert, it’s really hard, obviously, but we’re doing okay.” He said, “I probably can’t, but I just want you to know if I can be of help

in any way, please let me know.” And I said, “Thanks Rupert, I will.”

‘I think what I want to say in your book is that the bad things are hard but sometimes the good things are hard too,’ Michael says. ‘For me, it’s a really important point, that life can be hard in its evidently hard moments, but even things that are really good and really worth doing – and I love my wife to bits, and she me, and we have a strong marriage – they can be hard too.’ ‘If I’m understanding you, what you’re saying is that life is both good and bad simultaneously, is that right?

‘Yes,’ Michael nods. ‘One of the strengths of my tradition is the notion that the world is pretty broken. A lot of the time, life is just hard, and even for people who have a relatively benign life, for a lot of the time, stuff’s just hard. And it’s okay to say stuff’s hard, it doesn’t do anyone dishonour. It’s alright. It’s just giving people space to be human.’

that. ‘I don’t want any of my questions to sound judgemental, I just want to understand,’ I say.

literally believe that God exists,’ he replies. ‘Your question is really “Why do I have a faith?” And the answer is external and internal. External because to me, the Christian account of the world makes more sense than any other account of the world. And I suppose internal because it’s true to my lived experience. It makes sense of the world to me not only in the matter of theory, but also as a matter of my heart and spirit.’

As the last chapter explained, we are very rattled by major events that shatter our sense of security. Our minds keep turning them over until we find ways to make sense of what happened. The more shocking and awful the tragedy, the harder it is for us to

process. Our individual brains behave predictably in that quest, but we also act predictably as a community.

he was the person suffering the most. Walter says that having friends avoid him for fear of not knowing what to say or do was one of the worst things in the aftermath of losing his family.

‘You could sort of understand, but by the same token, it’s another part of loss. You’ve lost whatever you had but then people just go by the wayside and it’s more loss. There’s nothing anyone could say, no matter how badly it came out, that could be as bad as what’s already happened to you. So it’s much better for people to just let you know that they’re there to help, if you need it. For people to show that they’re still there is the most important thing.’

intense curiosity and fear. ‘You’re conscious that people are looking at you or maybe making judgements about how you’re going. That’s a hard thing because you can’t be sad every minute of the day,’ he says. ‘But sometimes I’d go out with my brothers, who were single at the time, to nightclubs in Melbourne and people would see you laughing or joking and dancing around the dance floor. People would actually say, “So you’re over it?” or, “You’re better now?” and I would say, “It’s just a distraction, it’s a way of passing time.’’

What Walter is implying, but doesn’t say directly, is that people were wondering if he would kill himself. When they speculated about that, what they were really grappling with was the question of whether or not they would kill themselves in his position.

The number one lesson that comes out of what happened to me is that you don’t know when things are going to change. Life is not promised today or tomorrow. It can all be gone.’

Howard often emphasised heroism, family and mateship. To him, those things are the core of what it means to be Australian and he tried to help people by bonding them through national identity.

‘He said that, did he? He must have been feeling particularly ignored,’

‘That’s what people identify with most in their lives and whenever there’s something like this, you have a sense of vulnerability of your own family.’

He always tried to meet the bereaved person at their response, not with something

preconceived.

conscious of was that different people expect different things in those circumstances. Some of them want a hug, some of them want a handshake. Some of them just want to t...

His medical studies furnished him with vital knowledge – for example, he didn’t eat snow without first melting it and he paced his intake so as to not reduce his core body temperature. He knew he would lose most of his body heat through his head so he wrapped it in towels and clothes. He was helped too by his personal qualities, especially his physical fitness but also his mental resilience. He occupied himself in ways that kept his hope of rescue alive.

Daniel McGuire,

Along with Amanda’s reporting for The Australian, she produced a Walkley Award-winning radio documentary called The Day That Changed Grantham and wrote a book called The Torrent,

could be summed up in four words: humanity (don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re dealing with people, not characters in a story), empathy (try to understand what the person is going through and act accordingly), autonomy (allow the subject to lead the discussion), and respect (make allowances, give the person time and space, and above all, don’t be exploitative).

questions. ‘When I did the first few stories, as I listened back to the recordings to transcribe them, I heard them talk and then I heard myself butt in with a question,’ she recalls. ‘I realised that the person I was talking to never came back to that point. They could never find that original thread that they were on. I missed all the rest of the story or I missed a substantial chunk of what was going on for them. I kicked myself. “You fool. Shut up. Just shut up and listen.”’ Clearly, that is the type of interview James Scott wishes he’d had with 60 Minutes.

‘It was painful to have unkind and untrue things said about me. It’s easier to read the news about other people, no doubt. But there’s something I want people to understand and it’s really important: life moves on.’

Father Steve appeared the day after Nick’s death. Juliet recalls that one of the first things he did was take dead sunflowers out of a vase in the hallway and throw them away. He didn’t ask if it was okay to do this, or even where the bin was. He just did it. The gesture is an incredibly memorable one to Juliet. ‘That just represented everything to

The first statement applies no pressure and contains no expectation. With those words, the priest gave Juliet permission to feel overwhelmed; indeed, he was saying how could she not be?

Steve Sinn