Dying of thirst

Drowning across the continents

I bought Sally along with all the rest of the plants that Mike and the boys and I had piled onto a trolley at the Beijing Flower Market one winter’s afternoon. We’d all selected different plants, pots and flowers, and Sally was one of the ones that I’d chosen. She was little – about 30cm high – and her beautiful deep green leaves, purple on the bottom, were striated with lines of an almost fluorescent pink. The leaves reminded me of the crayon drawings I’d do with the boys when they were tiny, when we’d fill a whole page with different colours and cover it over with black, then scratch off the black in patterns to reveal the colours beneath. When we took all the plants home to our new apartment and found spots for them, I put Sally on the desk in my bedroom, where I could see her while I wrote. I watered her and she made me smile.

After I’d watered Sally, I also invariably watered myself. But my hydration didn’t come in the form of water. It was more often red wine or gin and tonic. I’d always drunk socially – I’d challenge anyone who knows me to name a social occasion in the last 30 years when I didn’t have a drink in my hand – but during covid, the frequency of my drinking had crept up. There was no socializing during those lockdown days in Suva, Fiji, and so I drank at home. And there were no working hours so there was no reason to wait until 5pm to have my first drink of the day. Home-schooling two five-year-olds was stressful, and being separated from my support network was isolating, and so I’d cheer myself up with a drink or four. Social media was awash with jokes and memes about mamas all over the world doing the same, so drinking made me feel like part of a community.

A year later, after we’d moved from Fiji to China at the height of the pandemic, Sally sat on my desk in my bedroom in Beijing and I kept us both very well hydrated. I often put my gin and tonic beside Sally when I rolled out my yoga mat in the evening after the boys had gone to sleep, and she’d witness me taking sips between poses. By this time covid restrictions had been lifted in most of the rest of the world, but in China in January 2022 the Covid Zero policy was still very much in place, and now I was home-schooling two seven-year-olds. I needed the yoga, and I was quite convinced that I also needed the drink.

And then Sally started to sicken. Her deep green leaves started to turn light green, and then brown at the ends, and then the edges of her leaves started to curl inward, one side towards the other.

I too was turning inward. My dad died in Australia at the height of the country’s covid isolation, and even if I’d been able to travel out of China to try to be with my family, Australia would not have let me in. I couldn’t grieve with other people who’d also loved my dad, and so I toasted him alone with his favourite tipple, pouring generous Bombay Sapphire martinis into the glasses I’d bought especially for Dad the last ever time he'd been able to travel to visit me.

In my desperation to save Sally, I watered her more and more frequently. And in my desperation to sooth my own sadness, I poured larger and larger quantities of gin. And then I bought a bottle of vodka too, so I could mix it up a bit and it might not be quite so obvious to my husband just how much I was drinking. And then Sally died.

That weekend, we went to a barbecue at an embassy where a couple of our friends work as diplomats. We’d packed food and drinks and we walked there, Mike and the boys and me, the boys scooting ahead of us under the blossom-laden trees along the canal. I remember opening the first bottle of wine when we got there, and I remember opening the second. And I remember waking up in my clothes the next morning, my head throbbing and my mouth dry.

That day our housekeeper, known locally as ayi or aunty, was working in our apartment. When I got home from the gym, I found that Ayi had taken Sally from my bedroom and cut off all her leaves, leaving just tiny stumps, and placed her on the windowsill in the bathroom. It was sad to see Sally in that state, but I was grateful that someone else had taken control of her wellbeing. And I thought that maybe someone could help me take control of mine.

It was then that I discovered a genre playfully referred to as “quit lit”. In the weeks that followed, I downloaded and listened to one sobriety audiobook after another. Mrs D is Going Without. The Sober Diaries. Blackout. A Happier Hour. Drinking – A Love Story. Dry. The Wine O’Clock Myth. Every single one of them resonated with me in a thousand ways, and every single one of them kept me company while I swapped out the G&Ts for lime sodas.

Within a week of Ayi taking charge of Sally, tiny shoots had started to grow among the stumps that she’d previously been reduced to. I didn’t water her anymore, but just sprayed her leaves lightly every few days, and allowed the steam from the shower to provide most of her sustenance. And as I’d also stopped over-hydrating myself, my own tiny shoots of recovery had started to come through too. I was now allowing myself to feel things rather than suppressing my emotions by reaching for a bottle, so I was able to discover that my grief about my dad, whilst considerable in itself, wasn’t only about him. The loss of my dad had also triggered grief for my mum, who I’d not really been allowed to mourn when she’d died forty years before. And the fact that I hadn’t been able to travel to be with my family after Dad’s death made me desperate for a more permanent home than any I’ve inhabited for decades.

Today, 500 days after I stopped drowning us, Sally and I are doing just fine. I can’t even count the number of beautiful, pink-striped green leaves that stand proudly from Sally’s pale green pot now. Every few days I spin her around so that her constant efforts to grow towards the sun won’t end up making her lopsided.

And when I do my own daily sun salutations, it’s a bottle of water that sits beside the new plant on the desk in my bedroom. I’m standing straight, and constantly striving to grow towards the sun.