It’s been a bumpy, busy old two weeks since I returned from Rishikesh. And almost every one of those 14 nights, I’ve dreamed of India. Unusually active dreams with colours, sounds, sights of India. And lots of animals.
Because I’ve been dreaming of India, does that mean I’ve been celebrating, not appropriating Indian culture?
While in Rishikesh, I often thought of Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert. Back in the 1960s when Richard or Ram Dass had tired of using LSD to enlarge his mind, he travelled to India. Spent months in ashrams, meditating, learning yoga, weaning himself of hallucinogens. He wanted mind expansion that didn’t finish when the trip wore off. He was one of the people responsible for bringing yoga to the west, and for that I am very grateful.
Then, he turned his attention to end of life care. He essentially became a death doula, although that phrase wasn’t used then. He educated others to do support dying people– Elizabeth Kubler Ross was one of his students. I’ve been re-reading his last memoir, Being Ram Dass, finished just before his death in 2019 at age 88 where he “escaped the confines of his increasingly painful frame.” By then he’d lived with the after-effects of a stroke for 22 years, and being in his body was generally not a lot of fun.
This week, I had a two-night work trip to Sydney and while there, saw a post about a friend’s ex, where she let us know he was in his last hours or days. He’d been confined to an aged care facility for the last decade, decimated by early onset dementia. The day before, I’d seen someone walking the streets of Sydney, just out of the corner of my eye. I knew it couldn’t be John, but it looked like John. Bustling along with a vigorous stride, how he was when I knew him best, twenty years ago. Her next post confirmed he had died.
That night in Sydney I met up with an old friend who also lost his mother this year and we swapped tales of our parents’ deaths, all of them in their different ways were a knock-down, drag out fight to the end. Like it was for John. For Ram Dass too. We agreed we want something different for ourselves when that (far-off, we hope) time comes.
Tonight, back home again, I walked around the block, savoured the sounds and smells of my suburban home paradise. Saw a plane in the sky and was grateful I wasn’t on it. Grateful for all the things.
For those of you who’ve been following along, I finished up my five weeks of globetrotting with a two-week yoga retreat in Rishikesh, India. Last weekend, from midnight Friday through to ten pm Sunday night, I was travelling back home. The interwebs were not consistent and sometimes when the internet was available, I was too exhausted to surf it. So here is the Sunday blog from last week, at last.
“There’s the same number of beads on a mala as on a rosary,” I said confidently to fellow retreat attendees. There’s not. There are 59 rosary beads and 108 mala beads. Just shows how rusty my Catholicism is. But essentially both a mala and rosary beads help keep track of how many prayers or mantras you have already said, and how many to come.
During this Indian yoga retreat, I clambered around Hindu temples and watched (even participated in) fire ceremonies, visited yoga ashrams, lit candles and rang bells, let memories from my profoundly Catholic childhood resurface. Hanuman depicted in a giant statue put me in mind of the portraits of Jesus with his exposed heart. Or is that just me?
Memories from my long-abandoned faith which bubbled up, but in a good way. It was inspiring and comforting. As we passed the thousands of shops selling malas, I reminisced about the plaster Pilgrim Statue of Mary that perambulated around our parish in my early years. On loan to a household for a week, it was meant to encourage the family (and any unsuspecting guests) to say the rosary each night. Not just a decade of Hail Marys interspersed with one Our Father, repeated on a loop five times. But also a long litany of trimmings at the end of all that, in call and response fashion. “Holy Mary, mother of mothers, pray for us.” There was a little booklet with the many different ways you could address Mary. It was nestled in the bed that Mary’s statue came in.
“The rosary was but trimmings to the trimmings we would say,” our Irish grandfather had famously said. Not to me, but to his children who in turn recounted the saying to us. He was going to be a priest in Ireland but left for political reasons and came to Australia in the 1890s. Eventually in his fifties he married and had 12 children, 11 who survived into adulthood. He was gone before my parents were courting. His Catholicism infused his children’s lives, and in turn ours. On and on it went, the rosary and trimmings we would say back in the day. Once I was almost sure I saw the statue of Mary move, but perhaps it was just a trick of the light, and all that repetition.
It’s been many decades since I broke free of what felt like a straitjacket of Catholicism. I gradually unshackled myself from the age of fourteen when my sister joined the Rajneeshies. It culminated in me as a 19-year-old, sinking my teeth into a bacon double cheeseburger deluxe on Good Friday. (Catholics will get just how evil that really is).
When still in the early days of having renounced Catholicism, I raged about it all to a nun who used to teach at UWA – Dr Veronica Brady. She blinked at me, owlishly, unperturbed by my energy and blasphemy.
“At least it gave you a system of beliefs to reject,” she said.
These words stayed with me, and over time I’ve softened. Come to believe that having a system of beliefs was helpful in some ways, even though most of it needed to be jettisoned. Especially the denial of the body, plain old misogyny and slut-shaming.
While I’m not keen to take up anything else that considers itself the one and only way, yoga has become a central tool in my mental and emotional wellbeing. During the yoga retreat, it was on my list to buy a mala and dip it in the Ganges, prime it for use when I got home. Saying mantras helps still my monkey mind, even if only for fifteen minutes a day.
The first mala I purchased for about $8 had small beads and was reminiscent of the rosaries of my childhood, but after the tassel fell off I was on the hunt for something more substantial. One of our many interesting outings was a visit to the ashram of the saint Anandamayi Ma. A spry Indian guide took us on a tour through the grounds and ushered us into his gift shop. We pored over his goods for sale, and I settled on a mala with large, seven-faced beads from the Rudrashka tree and a robust tassel. I wondered dimly if there were a few extra zeros in the transaction as I handed over my credit card. Later, back at the hotel I realised I’d spent $150 on my second mala. Oh well, at least I contributed to the refurbishment of the ashram.
The mala was dipped in the Ganges as planned, and I’ve and used it regularly in this first week back home after my adventures. As always, I’ve been reflecting that I guess we’ve got to found what works for us, what keeps us able to show up in this confusing, contradictory and occasionally heart-breaking world.
At the conclusion of last Sunday’s blog, I was marooned in the limbo of a Heathrow airport hotel. Before I move on, let me linger on my six-day stay in London. Very rusty on London landmarks, I caught sight of an enormous statue when walking through Kensington Gardens. For a second I thought it was Queen Victoria, gloomy in grief. I muttered inwardly about her ego. Look at the size of it. But of course, it was the monument to her beloved Albert. The Taj Mahal, London-style if you will. A resonance of her deep mourning washed across the years over to me, and, chastened, I took a quick snap (see pastiche).
London for me was about catching up with friends, but also looking for labyrinths in obscure streets and poking around churches that didn’t charge entry. Lighting candles for my parents for 50 pence apiece. (See spooky cupids and skulls, me and a labyrinth, and two candles for my parents in the collage).
After this miscellany of simple adventures, there was the kerfuffle of being turned away for my India flight to join the yoga retreat I’d booked early this year. My fresh India visa arrived in the early hours of Monday, and I was on my way that evening. Not my normal itinerary, there was a tight turnaround on Tuesday for my connecting local flight from Delhi to Dehradun near Rishikesh. I had to slog through immigration, wait endlessly for my bag and circle straight back through the airport entrance. After clearing security I was panicky, red-faced and running, mouthing my gate number with a wild look in my eyes. A nice airport staff member ran alongside me in a wheelchair and said, “get in.”
I readily jumped in and he rushed me towards the gate. Just as I was boarding, I thought I’d lost my passport. I postponed a breakdown to when I was in my seat and could make sure this disaster had happened. But once I took my seat and the mists of adrenalin receded, I checked my handbag again, and there it was. I kissed it. And thus I made it to Rishikesh.
“Are you feeling nice and relaxed?” my husband asked yesterday, the first time we’ve been able to connect. He’s cycling around Western Australia and we’ve both been out of range.
“Um, no.” Invigorated. Alive. Challenged, but not relaxed.
India. On Wednesday, the day after my panicky entrance into Rishikesh, we visited a temple and I took random selfies of the gods and goddesses who really did seem to be looking at me (see picture under the labyrinth).
We then walked further up the Ganges and I witnessed the daily fire ceremony extravaganza – one of many happening all up and down her banks. I was lifted up, up, up on the crowd energy and dropped just for a moment my husk of constant mental activity. (That’s the final panel on the collage – the god Shiva, and some fire to burn away ego to give a little hint of the wild spectacle that it was.)
This particular fire ceremony was convened by the Parmath Niketan Ashram (it has its own You Tube channel). After the ceremony we shuffled in to listen to one of the Swamis undertake a question and answer session with the audience.
I was not expecting the first question to be a request for advice to support a 90+ year-old parent at the end of their life. Swami Sadhviji had some excellent answers I thought, but as she listed options for him to consider, the sorrow welled up in me. When she described her grandmother’s last night, where she cuddled up to her and kept telling her over and over again not to be worried, I was sobbing openly and wishing I’d brought tissues. (Earlier in the day I’d wished I’d brought toilet paper, but we’ll draw a veil over that).
All the if-onlys. If only we could’ve kept Mum at home. If only there’d been some way to comfort her more over her last year of life. I often snuck in a Pema Chodron book, but the words stuck in my throat. It wasn’t what she needed. There were sweet visits and happy times but–if only I hadn’t gone home and left her all alone on her last night. I often wanted to stay the night but never broached the subject with the aged care facility staff. Her last week was a jagged stop-start experience where morphine was charted one minute and food provided the next. So I went home on the last night.
I dreamt of her after the night of the fire ceremony. It was the first time I’d dreamt of her since New York. She was still living at home in the dream, but the house looked different. She needed support and care, but was happier.
I thought I heard her voice the next day, saying, “you did all you could.”
Perhaps India magic, or lack of sleep, but I’ll take it.
When I landed in New York on the first of October, it was my very first visit to America. I’d meant go to an in-person yoga retreat with my favourite online USA teacher in 2020 but…the world had other ideas. I waited until 2024 and chose New York and New York state for my first US trip.
“Won’t you get caught up in the elections?” people asked.
“I’ll be gone before the election itself,” I said, not entirely convincing myself or others.
As I exited JFK airport, I was unable to resist bursting into a cheesy rendition of New York, New York. I quickly realised that New Yorkers weren’t outgoing and friendly, and certainly didn’t find me amusing. The only person who talked to me at the airport was a man who emerged from the shadows, unsmiling, asking if I wanted a lift to New York. He didn’t seem to have a car. I didn’t dignify his sinister approach with a response. I may be light-hearted, but I’m not foolish.
Clambering into an official yellow cab, I was safely on my way, expecting my first New York moment on the drive to my hotel. What a fizzer. Where was the Brooklyn Bridge when I needed it? It was the ugliest drive in human history. Plus the driver was almost entirely silent the whole way, didn’t chat companionably about anything, not even the election.
Fine. I was there to write anyway, and I’d chosen the Library Hotel for the first three days to get myself in the groove. Their hotel is categorised according to the Dewey Decimal system. I was in Science and Math(s) floor, my room was the sub-section Animals. This meant that all the books in my room were about animals.
Down in the the Reading room there was endless tea, coffee and snacks supplied, and an inspiring view to New York Library. As a result, in my first 72 hours of the American trip I was able to do what I said I was there to do–namely get on with the editing.
There was a quick foray to have a look around (Times Square disappointingly was not a Square), and work out the subway. I dined alone downstairs at the Madison and Vine restaurant and reflected on the great tragedy and liberation that solo travel and its fleeting relationships bring. I knew I’d never see the people in the Madison and Vine restaurant again and felt elated and hollow all at once.
And I couldn’t help wishing that I was in London rather than New York. How I love London town.
And then the moment the train pulled out of Penn station on a Friday night to take me to Rheinbeck in upstate New York, I began to fall in love with USA. The train line hugged the Hudson river, the scenery was captivating.
Rheinbeck was where I was attending a weekend writing workshop at The Omega Institute (a hippie paradise). It was one of my trip’s absolute highlights-Cheryl Strayed’s Wild Awakening’s workshop. She is the author of the memoir Wild. You may know it as the movie starring Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl when she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in an attempt to wrestle with her grief at her mother’s early death.
Having come all this way to attend the workshop, I sat at the very front, close enough for Cheryl to say-
“I like your trousers.”
“Why thank you, Cheryl,” I said.
You can’t get that with an online course. In the picture in the bottom right she’s looking towards me, clocking my trousers.
Straight after the workshop’s conclusion on Sunday at lunchtime, I was whisked away to a noisy family gathering, just like the ones we used to have in my childhood home, now sold, presided over by my parents, now both dead.
I’d only met my cousin Jane and her husband in London, everyone else I met for the first time in glorious noise and confusion. We were having early dinner at my cousin Catherine’s house. The connection is that her mother and my dad’s father were brother and sister. They had both left Ireland, one to travel to Australia, the other to America, and they never met again. The next generations however are keen to connect.
Catherine reminded me so much of my Dad, how she smiled, the way she reads her paper in the morning. Mum and Dad had stayed at Catherine’s home in the nineties – I slept in the very same room they did. It added potency to my travelling shrine to them. Everything about this visit filled my heart and readied me for another go at New York.
For my last five days in New York, I loved, loved it. My apartment on Wall Street was a great location for everything. As well as ascending the Empire State Building and the pediment of the Statue of Liberty, I had the cultural experience of getting my hair cut. I marinaded in my hairdresser’s wisdom. “New York is New York. London is London. It’s best not to compare.” Who needs a yoga retreat to get Zen and wise?
I also posted a parcel of all the books I bought and couldn’t carry back with me. This offered a frontline seat to witness the cultural phenomenon of American bureaucracy that Ellis Island museum had warned me about. Two supremely cold and laboriously inefficient staff members presided over the necessary form filled out in quadruplicate to get my parcel out into the world. Luckily there was no one else in the post office at the time or I’d probably still be there.
I also bought groceries to cook some soup, did my washing. How I love to do the ordinary things in another part of the world.
But what this second part of the US trip had more than anything was people. I was travelling alone but now I had family and friends. Fun family catchups including a day trip to Mystic and an evening ascension up the Empire State Building. Lunch at the Chelsea Hotel with a family friend, dinner with one new friend from the writing workshop. A walk on Brooklyn Bridge and soup at my apartment with a high school friend who’s lived in the US many years. Catching Hannah Gadsby perform with another new friend from the writing workshop.
I lost last Sunday in transit back to London from New York, hence no blog. Today I was determined not to miss the Sunday Blog but fretted because it was another transit day. London to India. I’d already drafted it but still it needed marinading, more time to emerge. Would the interwebs let me down at the airport? I rose early for the trip to Heathrow, with the blog all but done. Sad to leave London but excited for India.
I had plenty of time for checking into my flight and getting on with the blog, but it was not to be. My India visa was very confusing in terms of its validity, but not to the staff at Air India. They wouldn’t let me board my flight to my yoga retreat, and I’m hunkered down in a Heathrow airport hotel, waiting for a fresh visa, googling flights and practicing being Zen.
Oh well. At least I’ve had no trouble posting this Sunday Blog!
I’m running a little behind–or is it a little ahead–in my Sunday blogs on this valedictory trip remembering my dear Mum. There’s a bit of commuting going on. London. Athens. Limnisa. London. New York. That’s all since 18th September. As I’m in America now, it was already Sunday on Saturday, so it’s quite easy for me to become flummoxed and feel like I’m missing deadlines.
Last Sunday’s blog was a piece I wrote at Limnisa, but I didn’t talk about Limnisa itself. I thought I’d save my Limnisa Love Note for this week. It gives me a chance to re-warm myself with the memories.
There’s no getting around it – it’s a schlep getting to Limnisa. But then, that’s true of anywhere in Greece. Limnisa isn’t on the map, it’s a retreat centre situated close to Methana (as in methane). Methana is a port town in a volcanic area with hot springs and mud baths. Occasionally there can be a hint of sulphur/ rotten egg in the air, but the wind blows it away. Once the ferry from Athens (2.5 hours) drops you at Methana, Limnisa is a ten minute taxi ride. After all that, you’re dropped at a dirt path. The first time I attended Limnisa five years ago, I stood at the top of the path for a while, not quite sure what to do next. This time I knew you’ve got to walk down the dirt and gravel path just a little for Limnisa to suddenly appear like a miracle.
And really, isn’t that a metaphor for writing? A lot of schlepping, last minute total confusion then voila! One great sentence.
Once you’re at Limnisa, you have your meals, tea, coffee, wine on tap. There’s yoga and meditation depending on the day. The beach is just there for a dip any time you feel like (bring your beach shoes), and your room is a haven to retreat to for a nap.
There’s also apartment accommodation a fifteen minute walk away for those who prefer it, or when the Retreat Centre is full. The apartments are modern and there’s less competition for bathrooms, and the view from the balcony of the sunrise and sunset was to die for. I tried both this stay, but I did find the walk to the retreat centre was a bit tricky. I kept missing the path in the olive groves and ending up in someone’s back yard, having to scramble up rocky slopes to get back on track. And did I mention the heat? After 10am it was quite a hot walk. I should’ve taken up the offer of using a bike.
As well as sun and swimming at Limnisa, there’s outings including taverna visits and walks, and hot spring visits if you fancy covering yourself with mud. Then there are the sunrises, the sunsets, the everyday quiet miracles of a beautiful location.
What’s special to me about Limnisa is the tradition of no talking until 1pm. It’s simple magic. Mostly women attend Limnisa, and to have a ban on talking is just what we need to be released from the tyranny of social engagement. To put our writing first.
But then, when 1pm passes and we meet for a delicious Greek lunch, the talk naturally turns to our writing projects. And all water cooler conversations are about writing. If you want to turn to books for inspiration, the shelves are groaning with them. I read a memoir written by Hilary Mantel I’d never heard of (An Experiment in Love – would recommend).
A week’s stay is the minimum, but I wish I’d stayed for two. Holidays are supposed to go slowly, but this week sped by.
And there’s this. A quarter of this trip was paid for by my writing. I won fourth prize in the Limnisa Writing Competition held in 2023, and received 25% off the cost of my stay, to be redeemed by 2024. There were so many times during the week I thanked myself to making the effort to come and claim it.
I dreamed of Mum so vividly twice while at Limnisa. That hadn’t happened at home in Perth. The first time I was so excited to see her then realised she was gone and I’d have to grieve her all over again. The second dream was a gentler visit that ended in a hug. Just as in real life, I made sure to tell her who I was before I hugged her because she couldn’t see any more. She confirmed she knew it was me and she hugged me so warmly. I think I could get used to the dream visits.
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.
One of the absolute wonders of travel to me is that I can be me, but somewhere far from home, if I just travel enough miles. And since Wednesday, I’ve travelled 17,000 kms/ 10,563 miles. The I, the Me that is housed in my body can find itself on the other side of the world in a new bedroom, looking in a different mirror as I clean my teeth, rolling out the yoga mat on a new floor in the morning. The magical time travel effect is heightened if I return to a place I’ve been before. There I am again, the same but different.
Top left is the 1975 photo of us in our finery to see my uncle off on his European travels. I’m the smallest one on the left. What an occasion this seemed to us!
By 1978 my brother left on his odyssey to India, South Africa and the UK, and the top right image is the one he snapped of Mum, looking for all the world to be excited. In truth, she hated it when any of us left home.
The bottom left shot is Mum and my exhausted sister Gay in London. After the very first long haul flight we’d endured, we were turned away by the cabbie in Victoria station and had to walk with all our suitcases and completely inappropriate foot wear to an uncertain destination. At a certain part of the trudge, I think it was my brother who again snapped this shot of Mum looking very happy despite the elusive bed and breakfast. She was a driving force in planting the travel bug in us all. Her entire salary as a teacher librarian was set aside for several years to finance this 1979 European trip.
In the late 1980s she got to enjoy some child-free travels, including Delphi, the image on the bottom right.
Travel beckoned to me but also challenged me from a very young age. One particularly traumatic airport farewell with our brother in 1979-we were leaving him in London and didn’t know when we’d see him again-put me off for some time. I cried the entire long haul flight back to Perth. Travel is destructive, my fourteen-year-old self had decided. It causes painful separations.
Predictably by adulthood I’d coarsened any such sentiment about family separations, and left in 1990 for a two year working holiday in London. This stretched into a decade, during which I only saw Mum a handful of times. The moon was one of our ways to stay in touch. I’d look at the moon, she’d look at the same moon on the other side of the world. We did have letters and phone calls, but the moon felt like a direct line to each other.
I boarded the plane from Perth to London on Wednesday this week for my working/ writing/ yoga/ valedictory tour for Mum exactly one week after her funeral. The full harvest moon as the plane took off was breathtaking, but resisted all attempts to be captured in a photo. It was there to greet me at moonset in London just over seventeen hours later.
And here I am, walking through faraway places I’ve been before. I went down the very London street where Mum is looking triumphant while sister Gay sags against the railings. I’m now in Greece, back to the retreat centre I last visited in 2019. But everything’s changed without Mum in the world.
This phrase from favourite book kept nagging at me so I’ll let E.M Forster have the last word.
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?
Almost to the very end of her long life, my mother, Bet, remained who she was, of sound mind. Funny, spunky, unpredictable.
In the emergency department last week where she was being treated for her broken hip, she was next to a man who had imbibed a little too much alcohol. We were talking about him afterwards when we were (finally) up on the ward, and despite all the pain she was in, she still managed a quip. Never a potty mouth, she said from her prone position on the hospital bed, “He only had one word in his vocabulary. And it rhymed with ‘duck’”.
Between the hospital and coming back to the aged care facility, she wasn’t quite the Bet that we knew. It was so hard to see her, here but not here, and increasingly unsettled. So many times over the last few years, I have felt the truth of the Brene Brown quote above about caring for a loved one (from Episode 88 of We Can Do Hard Things.) Both are true. It is an honour. It is unbearable.
Thrown into this mix was my impending five week world-wide trip. London, Greece, New York, India. Writing and yoga retreats and workshops. Would I be the person who left, missed her mother’s death? Her mother’s funeral? I tried this idea on but it didn’t quite fit. There was nothing for it but to live with the agonising uncertainty and clusterfuck of guilt and confusion and sadness with a side-dish of selfish desire.
But just like Mum made the decision to move into aged care so we didn’t have to, made the decision to sell the house so we could get on with that mammoth task while she was still with us, she slipped away on Tuesday morning in the early hours. Considerate to the end, Bet made sure I’d be there when she died, and that I could be part of her funeral.
My grief and relief have been like a dog chasing its tail ever since her passing.
The day Bet died, the funeral home that attended to take her away presented me with a beautiful single protea. I followed Mum out of that aged care facility, protea clutched in my hand. I got to walk her out, just like I’d walked her in.
In the sifting and sorting of the last things, I found an incomplete diary of hers from the European family trip we took in 1979 when I was 14 and she was 54. It only covered the tortuously long flight over there and our first two days in London. We were away for four months in all and I longed to read her account of the whole trip, but alas, it was never written. Those few pages though took me right back to that life-changing time, when as a 14-year-old I knew my destiny and future would include travel. Much more travel.
So one week after the funeral, I’ll pack my suitcase and my journal. Head off on a valedictory tour for my beautiful, beautiful Mum. Finish all the diary entries, and the damn manuscript edits while I’m at it.
Of all the careers to fall into, like Alice down the rabbit hole, museums would surely have been the least likely one for me. Long before Marie Kondo, I understood all too well the dull sheen items get over time when they no longer spark joy. One of my favourite ever sounds is the thud of my bagged items hitting the bottom of the charity bin. To date, I’ve almost never thrown something away and later regretted it. And I’ve thrown a LOT of things away.
Back in 1987, in the last months of my Arts degree, I worried myself into a rag wondering what on earth I’d do. Then two weeks after graduating, there I was. Employed in the history department of the Western Australian museum on their collections catalogue (back when the hideous 1970s building was still in place.) I was just passing through though, and two years later I ended up in London’s Greenwich Maritime Museum.
About a year into my six-year tenure at Greenwich I met the woman who had the newly created role of “De-accession Co-ordinator.” Her actual job was getting rid of surplus museum items. Given that on average only around 3% of any museum’s collection is on display, there was quite a big scope for her role. How jealous I was at the time. Here was my dream job, disposing of unnecessary items and getting paid well for it.
Why is this topic so present for me right now? In this incredibly melancholy week which began with my 97-year-old mother breaking her hip on Monday, somehow the topic of shedding things keeps coming up for me. Trying to find a way through this vigil time of negotiating the end of a loved one who didn’t believe in religion any more but was a very spiritual person all her life. And was also a huge hoarder.
As I bumble and stumble through each day, I’ve been listening to the Pema Chodron book How You Live Is How You Die. She talks about how getting rid of as much as we can before we die is a good idea. Mum’s life is already confined to a small room in a residential aged care facility, but like all of us witnessing our parents transitioning, there seem to be so many lessons for us.
Shed the things. Embrace the joy of chucking shit away.
