This new book by Ailsa Piper is a moving insight into the experience of loss, hope and starting again, aided by the healing power of nature. Reviewed by Tracey Edstein.
When I was a teacher, one of the exercises sometimes used in Religious Education classes was to guide students in drawing a personal shield or coat of arms as an accessible way of identifying key values, influences and pursuits.
If I was using that exercise today, I would use the cover of Ailsa Piper’s book, For Life, as an unparalleled example.
It draws the reader in, and once you’ve read her memoir, you return to the cover with new understanding and deep appreciation.
Author Ailsa Piper. Image: Nicholas Coghlan/Facebook.
Ailsa Piper is a woman of words and of theatre, of ocean and sky, of feathers and fins, of family, and of friends who are family too.
The pivotal event without which this memoir would not have been conceived, and long laboured over, was the sudden death of Ailsa’s beloved husband, Peter, in 2014. Ailsa was not there.
After her father died in 2022, aged 92, and Ailsa keeps vigil with his body, she realises, “This was what I couldn’t do for Peter.”
In the slow struggle for clarity around life without Peter, made more excruciating by the suddenness of his lonely death, lifelines emerge.
Ailsa, who was a child of the west where there was never enough water, is far from comfortable in the ocean. But she is determined to learn to swim. “Maybe, I figured, conquering a forever terror would remind me that I could be brave enough, deserving enough, of more time on this blue planet.”
Published by Allen & Unwin.
Conquering the ocean brings many rewards; not only the satisfaction of mastering a new skill, but a window into life beneath the sea (cue seahorses, or hippocampi) and a coterie of friends who are welcoming and accepting. “We say we wouldn’t know each other with clothes on. We drop our guards along with our towels, sharing confidences before surnames.”
Long before Peter’s death, Ailsa was a committed long-distance walker. Her first book, Sinning Across Spain, is an account of her pilgrimage from Granada to Galicia, carrying (metaphorically) the sins of others. In For Life she writes, “Walking is where I can best be with my self.”
Ailsa Piper exhibits a rare ability to be able to identify her own waymarks and to be guided by them. Walking and swimming; writing and delighting in words; communing with seahorses and feathered friends (especially peregrine falcons) and, all the while, immersing herself in life is her path to a new, albeit unchosen, identity because, “When he died, my identity changed.”
It’s a turning point of sorts when Ailsa recognises, through others’ many kindnesses, that “people wanted me to thrive”.
Ailsa is thriving, writing (and living) new chapters and scenes, knowing that they bear the watermarks of her chief mentors, her dear Dad and her husband of 27 years. In determining to do so, she is honouring daily the gifts they gave and the men they were.
For Life: A memoir of living and dying – and flying, Ailsa Piper (Allen & Unwin, 2024).
In August this year, Ailsa spoke to Sarah Kanowski, co-host of Conversations.
