Author: Elisabeth

As she lay dying

They shifted my mother into a private room, as if they knew she was dying even when they had plans to move her off to a nursing home as soon as they could, so she could live out her life in care uninterrupted.

The little things that had needed their help they’d overlooked, like the puffs of white on the tip of her tongue that she was forever trying to spit away. Until they decided to take out my mother’s denture this thrush came back again and again to torment her. This woman who could no longer swallow and who no longer wanted any food or water to pass her lips.

In the last weeks of her life I increased my visits, not that my mother appreciated them, but out of some sense of guilt and some sense I needed to get there to see her as much as possible before she would be no more. She kept her eyes closed throughout these times, opening them only briefly to catch a sight of this person, her daughter hovering over her. And each time she opened her eyes I sensed, not a look of recognition or of pleasure, but a look that said ‘leave me alone’. Let me be.

It was twilight and the sun was doing its last trip through the sky, letting just enough light into the room to make artificial light unnecessary. I had touched her gently on the hand and my mother’s eyes flickered open, after a shudder, as if her body expected some unwanted intrusion. I had only just arrived and I did not want to leave too soon so I hung about closer to the door than to my mother’s bed at one side of the room. I watched her for signs of life. I watched her as if I knew this would be my last turn to see my mother alive. I watched her in the hope that I might soak in some last minute radiance from this woman who had once welcomed me into the world, who had nursed me for the first three months of my life and had then slipped me off her lap to make room for the next lot of babies that followed me in turn.

I recognised the same hooked nose, the same pointed chin, but her skin, once a vibrant olive glow, had turned sallow and her hair had lost its shape and hung back like a dishcloth from her forehead. It draped around her pillow lank and greasy.

It was a strange and secret time standing there to look upon my mother as she lay dying. A time of reconnection and of severance. All my life I had lived with the knowledge I could never keep up with her. She was always thirty-three years older than me, always thirty-three years wiser, thirty-three years ahead of me in advantage and knowledge. She let me know this often; with every choice I made, except those that suited her. My choice of husband was wrong, my choice of schools for my children, my choice of career as a psychotherapist, my lack of religion. All these things had rankled my mother and she let me know this without words. A hint of disapproval whenever we met such that I had long ago stopped talking to her about the innermost workings of my mind. And I had learned to turn off my own interests whenever she started up on topics of her choice, especially those related to her God and her disapproval of others who took no interest in that God, for surely she was talking about me again. Me and my godlessness. This God, or lack thereof, who came between us.

My mother looked up then, turned in my direction as if she had noticed the soft rise of my breathing or felt my warmth nearby. She turned and opened her eyes. She looked at me and with all the strength she could muster she lifted her hand in such a way as to usher me away.

Go away she seemed to be saying, go away and leave me in peace. I took her instructions, the last sight of my mother alive, a dying woman who wanted me gone.

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Of weddings past and present

It worked.

For all our fears: that it would rain; that we would run out of food; that we would not keep up with the drinkers, of whom as it turned out there were only a few; or that some other unknown unimaginable disaster might befall us on the day; it worked.

And in an hour or two when every one else is up and about, the next stage of the clean up will begin, a clean up that includes a post mortem of proceedings, one of my favourite times after a significant social event, when we all get to gossip and reminisce about who said what and to whom.

Where we crow about the joys of the day and pat one another on the back that all our preparations have paid off and from time to time we might remark on something small that we could have done better, but it will only be small.

As the groom’s father left our house at the end of the day, he patted the bride’s father on the back – they’d both had a bit to drink – and said something like, ‘You’re the best person I’ve met in a long time.’

Such a compliment to my husband and even through the alcohol you could tell it was sincere. Small exchanges like this help to bring these two new families together. Now united through the marriage of our two children.

It’s one aspect of marriage that I relish, the bringing together of tribes, of families of people who would otherwise not connect. For all our differences we have similarities.

 

My parents’ marriage in Haarlem and my husband’s parents’ marriage in Mansfield, Australia could not be further apart, though both brides wore white veils, both carried bouquets and both their grooms wore suits. My father wore a top hat.

Both marriages happened in the shadow of world war two and in both cases you could not see the trimmings of war in the background.

I long admired the fact that my mother and father were such contrasts in height, my father six foot three, my mother five foot two  Even those measurements held some synchronicity.

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I do not know the height of my husband’s parents though both were short.  My mother-in-law wore glasses on her wedding day, as did my father.

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And all four young marrieds had the thin look of hunger from working hard, whether on the land, as did my husband’s parents; or through war as did my parents.

When my husband and I married we failed to please either set of parents by sharing the tradition each upheld of marrying in the Catholic church. We chose instead the Religious Centre at Monash University where my husband had once studied.

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I’m all for receptions held at home. The personal touch. My oldest daughter married in her own home, my second daughter had the reception in her home of origin. Home can be wherever we want it to be, but it’s a place where the small children, and there were several at both weddings, can run amuck in relative safety.

Not one child fell into our pond, not one child fell while running, though there were a few brawls among our two grandsons, none of great import, not that I could see and both boys managed to hold onto the rings during the service for long enough that they could in time hand them over to their grandfather who became the ring bearer on the occasion as he had made the rings.

Two daughters married, as Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice fame might say: two daughters married… ‘I shall go distracted’.