Sunday Blog 152 – 15th September 2024
Perhaps you noticed there was no Sunday blog last week. It was half a conscious decision to pause, have a minute’s, or rather a week’s silence. The other half was the exhaustion of washing up on the Sunday between my mother’s death and her funeral, with the clock running down, and the right Sunday Blog still elusive.
After all, what was fitting to write about, in the lag between the death and the funeral? Where I worked through the shock and surprise of the only thing that could have happened?
As always, I sought refuge in doing, organising her funeral. I was propelled by the chance to capitalise on the quicksilver few hours of a funeral to honour her memory, pay respects.
And we did it, shaped the thoughtful send-off our mother deserved.
Her legendary humour was showcased in the eulogy, how she had bemoaned her thin hair with the quip “I’ve seen better hair on bacon.” Also, her rebellious attitude as a fifties and sixties housewife who was not a slave to housework.
Once her younger cousins, still footloose and fancy free, came to visit Mum dressed in their finery for a night of dancing. One of her cousin’s dainty shoes was momentarily fused to Mum’s dining room floor, the likely culprit jam or marmalade. “Stick around!” Mum quipped.
For someone who had outlived most of her friends and family of her generation, Mum pulled a crowd. How wonderful it was to hear everyone spontaneously applaud her at the burial. How that eased the memory of me, all alone with the protea, walking her body out of the residential aged care facility just two weeks earlier.
And now, it’s all over, I can began to digest the reality of a world without Mum in it. The new normal will slowly emerge from the sadness and the laughter, the sting of the loss of her, and the relief that she’s no longer suffering.
And always, fond remembrance of the woman who always preferred a good book to chores. Someone who figured that housework wouldn’t kill her, but why take the risk?
Pip, I am thinking of you and crying for you. In your eulogy , without knowing it, you have captured the experience of many of us. Today my mother went into palliative care aged 99. I had not cried until I read your post just now. Why I was reading it is for another day but, maybe, there is some kind of message in that, however prosaic. Go well.
Oh Margaret, I just saw this. Thinking of you so much xx