Sunday Blog 154 – 30 Sep 2024
Graduation photo
From the night before she died, I started making shrines for my mother. It began with a candle and a photo nestled alongside the fragrant bouquets I’d received from kind friends and family. I burned candles all night long, without stopping, in the days between her death, the funeral, and my departure for an overseas holiday one week later.
Heavily influenced by my emergency reading of “The Way We Live is the Way We Die” by Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, the shrine grew each day. She suggested that snacks could be good addition to a shrine. Maybe Mum would get hungry as she traversed on the unknown sea to the afterlife, the bardo states Chodron wrote about.
First it was a mini sachet of marmalade and vegemite, for the toast she liked to have every day. One slice of bread, toasted, cut in half diagonally, marmalade on one half, vegemite on the other. That’s how her parents, born just before the turn of the 20th century had their toast too.
From there, I added butter menthols, minties, then branched out with her favourite lip balm. All these items were always in her handbag, nestled in a sea of tissues. She was so horrified when The Body Shop announced they were ceasing her favourite line of cherry lip balm. As soon as we heard this we’d made a pilgrimage to our local giant shopping centre to retrieve enough of the remaining stock. Maybe these would see her out. There was just this one pot left when she died, with about a quarter left, so on the altar it went.
Each day I added in pieces around my house, things I couldn’t bear to throw away in January when we cleared out her home of 65 years. The Holly Hobby Betty mug, missing its handle. The rusted thimble she’d stopped using years before when her failing sight had ruled out sewing.
When my brother came over for the funeral, we’d hired an air bnb so there was room for him and his adult children. Once, we would have all clambered into the family home, had our meals around the family table and shared our aching hearts together. Now, we must improvise with hired premises, all of us flung to the four winds. I moved in for the week he was there.
When I arrived at the air bnb, the boot of my car was still full of the last of Mum’s things from the residential aged care facility. Photos and books, mainly. I left most of them in the boot, then pulled out the three Perspex photo frames shaped in a V, big enough to hold two A5 photos in each. Since the 1980s, Mum had displayed these on the mantelpiece with a photo of each of her six children either on their graduation, or in my brother’s case, a beautiful photo of him as a young man. I displayed them at the air bnb just as they had sat on the family mantelpiece for decades. With candles, of course, although I’d switched to fake tealights by then, to comply with air bnb rules.
Two shrines wasn’t enough. I then started one at the graveside as well. Her favourite cupid candle holder – her tastes were very twee – with another fake tealight to illuminate her way to her final resting place.
When the funeral was all over, when the week was over and we checked out of the air bnb, it was time to break up the six photos. I handed my brother the photo of him in his prime, delegated out most of the others. I tucked away this one of me at my graduation in the back of my diary. Only when I took it out of the frame, I found the one of me and my parents tucked at the back. Me, 23. My parents 62 and 63. I’d asked them to the graduation at the last minute, being young and thoughtless. But even with this last minute invitation, they’d gratefully come, put on their formal clothes. My smile looks much bigger in the one with all of us.
Before I left Perth for my current Europe/New York/India trip, I meant to bring one of the funeral booklets with me. But I forgot. Then I found these graduation photos with their hideous brown background. So, this will have to do. Have shrine image, will travel. Mum’s with me all the way.