MARY MOODY:
the author’s vibrant “third stage”
The night Mary Moody’s husband died, she curled up in bed beside him as she had so many times before. After 43 “wild and (mostly) wonderful” years together, she could not bear to say goodbye to her beloved David too abruptly. “I had visualised that I would hold his hand and we would talk before he died,” she says, but there hadn’t been a chance for that. “Because he was delirious, we never had that final conversation,” she explains, “but I slept with him that night.”
We’re eating rhubarb cake and sipping strong tea at the century-old home that Mary now shares with her youngest son, Ethan, daughter-in-law Lynne and their children in the Blue Mountains of NSW. It may be an unconventional arrangement in today’s isolated and isolating world but their three-generational lifestyle works for all concerned.
“When I got here, it was the first time since David died I felt safe, emotionally safe,” says the adventurer, best-selling author and former Gardening Australia presenter, whose conversation is as warm as her flame-red hair. “I’ve never been a ‘nervous Nellie’. Even when I was living alone on a farm I never worried about burglars. But moving here I had this feeling of coming home. It was being part of something again, not being on my own.”
The 69-year-old’s cosy, book-lined room is a riot of colour, from home-sewn patchwork quilts to tribal rugs and chairs upholstered with kaleidoscopic Indian fabrics. Travel
souvenirs jostle family memorabilia. But the centrepiece is Mary’s magnificent antique wooden bed where her “larger than life, fiery, passionate” film producer husband, David Hannay, passed away in 2014.
“Yes, this bed here. That’s where I slept with him that night,” she says. “I slept so deeply, I think the kids slipped me a Mickey Finn!”
Losing David to cancer at the age of 74, following his ferocious two-year struggle to survive, is at the core of Mary’s latest memoir, The Accidental Tour Guide: Adventures in Life and Death. Poignant, heartbreaking, funny, down-to-earth and uplifting, it details not only her husband’s passing but also that of her adored half-sister, Margaret, who had Alzheimer’s. And sadly, Ethan and Lynne’s disabled daughter, Isabella, also died last year, at just 16 years old, while Mary was working on the book.
“We all adored her,” says Mary.
“The house is so quiet without her.”
The book grew out of a need to work through those years of grief. “It had been nearly five years since David’s death; I needed to get it down on paper. I’d found in the past that memoir writing was quite cathartic,” she says, alluding to her four previous, popular and occasionally scandalous autobiographies. “I knew it would crystallise my thoughts, but I felt it could be a bit depressing.
“I wondered how I could represent what happened so it had light and shade and wasn’t just dark and sad. So I thought of my work as a tour guide, which is such a positive thing, and realised if I intertwined the two themes, it might be a story people could relate to and would bring them some pleasure.”
Mary’s painful journey of selfdiscovery on joining “a new tribe – the widowed” will resonate with many readers, like her memoir Au Revoir: Running Away From Home at Fifty.
It was her second book, Last Tango in Toulouse – with its candid confession of a torrid, middle-aged, extra-marital affair – that floored fans and family.
“It went completely crazy, for God’s sake,” grins the delightfully bohemian
“I didn’t want it to be over. I’d never fallen out of love with David.”
mother of four and grandmother of-11, slightly abashed. “I was a gardening writer! Who gets excited about a gardening writer having an affair? I remember my daughter, Miriam, ringing me from Adelaide and telling me their paper had a headline, ‘Gardener Commits Adultery!’ And we shrieked with laughter.”
Husband David, inevitably, hated the book, just as he hated Mary’s infidelity. Endlessly supportive, however, he admired her honesty and defended her right to tell her story. He even tolerated the affair for a couple of years, before calling “time” and threatening to move out of their historic homestead near Bathurst.
“It was like some temporary madness when I look back on it, like being caught up in somebody else’s soap opera,” Mary says wistfully. “At first I intended not to tell David about the other man, but he obviously knew me well enough to work out what was going on. He picked me up from the airport in Bathurst one day and just asked me outright.
“I had no idea what his reaction was going to be. He was terribly upset and hurt but he didn’t direct his anger at me. He directed some at himself for being a workaholic and perhaps neglecting me. He blamed the fellow. He blamed the fact that I was in the middle of the menopause. He was clutching at straws and blaming everyone but me …
“Because he didn’t rant and rave and threaten me with divorce, I thought I could have it all – have this romantic tryst in France and then come home and have my husband and kids and grandkids at the farm. But eventually David got fed up and said, ‘I think I should leave, I can’t put up with this anymore’. He told me while I was in France that he’d leave when I got back.”
How did she react to his terse ultimatum? This was the man she’d known since 1971 when they crossed paths at Sydney’s Channel Nine studios. She was an ambitious young journalist, saving to join her then boyfriend in London. He was an intense, much older, independent producer who looked, to a critical 21-year-old, like a “garden gnome”. He was also separated from his first wife, who was heavily pregnant.
It wasn’t love at first sight, but their relationship developed, with Mary first becoming a doting stepmother to David’s son, Tony, now aged 48, then giving birth to three more children – Miriam, 46, Aaron, 43, and Ethan, 39. She adored them all and, despite many work-related separations, their family unit was almost tribally close. Until her reckless, high-stakes affair with a charming, married French professor – known only as “The Man from Toulouse” – placed everything at risk.
“My initial reaction [when David said he was leaving] was relief,” Mary confesses, surrounded by photographs of her spouse. “Then I got on the plane and realised I didn’t want it to be over. I didn’t want to live in France with this fellow. I think the bottom line was that I’d never fallen out of love with David.
“Often when people have an affair they’re repulsed by their partner, but whenever David would be waiting for me at that little airport in Bathurst, I’d run and throw my arms around him.”
With considerable difficulty, she inveigled David into giving her another chance. “It was very hard because he’d made up his mind he was going,” she ruefully admits. “I had to use every ounce of my persuasive powers to make him stay. He wasn’t convinced it was going to work and there was unease for the first few months, for the first time in our relationship, until he realised I really wanted us to be together.
“I’d be very hesitant to say having an affair is good for a marriage, because in most cases it’s terrible, but it strengthened our resolve to stay together.” She laughs, aware of the absurdity. “Once he decided to stay, decided it was going to be him and me, that was it for the next 10 years before he got sick. We were closer than we’d ever been before.”
David’s bleak diagnosis with terminal cancer of the oesophagus, in March 2012, brought their idyll crashing down. He came from a long-lived family and had never contemplated dying. That “wasn’t part of his plan,” as he told a dumbfounded oncologist. He wasn’t going to lie down quietly, he was determined to fight.
And so he did, through radiotherapy and eight rounds of chemotherapy that, initially, seemed to have eliminated his primary tumour and other “hot spots” indicating the spread of cancer cells. It was great news, to be celebrated.
Only five days later, Mary discovered her childless half-sister was dying in Canada. After acting as Margaret’s part-time carer for years, she flew to Vancouver to help out one last time. It was heartbreaking, but at least David was maintaining an against-the-odds recovery – until October 2013, when doctors disclosed cancer had returned in his liver with a vengeance. More chemo followed, finishing in March 2014 with a positive prognosis of another nine months, maybe even a year, of life.
Fast forward 10 days, however, and David was gone, felled by a common side-effect of chemotherapy, a build-up of fluid around his heart. Though delirious, he’d been released from hospital to end his days at home, as he wished. Just three days after returning to the farm, his wish was granted.
“He fought and he raged,” Mary says softly. “It was like the Dylan Thomas poem. He did not go gentle into that good night. He raged against the dying of the light. But once he got home, his demeanour changed. He was serene at last.”
David passed away surrounded by three generations of family – 17
people in all. He was farewelled with wine, reminiscences and song until past midnight. To Mary it didn’t seem real.
The following morning, waking up beside his body, for a few blessed minutes she forgot what had happened. “He was lying there on his back, as ever, and I just thought, ‘Oh, you died’. I slid my left hand across the space between us and onto his belly. It was still just a little bit warm. I got up and brought my second cup of tea back to our bed of four decades and sat with him. And it occurred to me that this would be our last morning in bed together, ever.”
It was the beginning of a courageous new journey for a woman who had trekked the Himalayas, followed the Camino through Spain and marvelled at Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains in her second career as a tour guide.
For a while, Mary was lost, unable to sleep, read or write, and had no appetite. She struggled to clear the farmhouse ready for sale. “David was a hoarder,” she says. “There were sheds filled with boxes and boxes of stuff.”
Anti-depressants helped. So did counselling. Yet Mary believes salvation came when Ethan and Lynne, who both have horticultural qualifications, suggested they share a house.
There’s a large organic veggie garden, free-range chooks, an orchard, five cats and an energetic spaniel. At the end of the street, the Blue Mountains National Park offers outdoor adventure to Mary and her grandsons, Caius, 15, and Owynn, eight. “I’m a gardener, so I’m very active,” she explains. “I’m always moving. I do yoga every morning and go for bush walks. I have to keep fit to lead my overseas tour groups!”
The family shares cleaning and takes it in turn to cook. Mary and Lynne do three nights each, while “the boys” prepare a meal on Sundays. “We’re very well organised, we’d trip over each other in the kitchen otherwise.”
There’s food and fun and warmth and wine, and no shortage of people yelling at the TV when politicians upset them. “Fortunately, Ethan and Lynne are interested in a lot of the same things, so we all rant and rave. For me, it’s very healthy. I wouldn’t be nearly as happy without all these people to bounce off.”
Mary chuckles. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred a woman in my situation could have afforded to buy a little cottage and live alone with a cat. But because my son and daughter-inlaw suggested sharing, I thought about it. We’d lived under the same roof for a couple of years once before, when they were saving for their first home, so I knew we could do it. When I think about it, apart from various stages in France, I’ve never lived alone!”
Today, Mary has weaned herself off anti-depressants and finally come to terms with what she calls her “third life”: a life without David, but not without meaning, love and laughter.
“People used to tell me, ‘You’re so brave,’ and I thought I was. But after he died, I realised I was only brave because of him,” she confides. “He was my back-up person for 43 years. Suddenly, he was gone and I didn’t feel as brave and capable and confident anymore.”
Her blue eyes fill with tears as she nestles into her favourite chair.
“It’s not something you get over, losing your life partner. It’s something you have to process and deal with, and acknowledge you’re alive but have a different life. This is the third stage of my life. I’m still me inside and I suppose fundamentally I haven’t changed but I don’t feel like the same person. A big slice of me has disappeared.”
Maybe so, but vibrant Mary remains irrepressible. Over sandwiches – “I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to bake, I had to buy this bread but it’s okay” – there’s a final flash of daredevil naughtiness.
“I think I have a few more books and treks left in me. And there’s a man
I have a delightfully uncomplicated relationship with that includes lots of dinners and sleepovers,” she announces. “I’ll just keep cooking and gardening and hanging out with my family and friends, and behaving badly whenever the opportunity arises.”
“I’m still me inside but I don’t feel the same person.”
The Accidental Tour Guide is published by Simon & Schuster, RRP $35.