Author: Elisabeth

Do as if nothing is wrong

A flash of memory at the sight of a new dress my daughter had been sewing.

A crimson red in cotton, A-line with puffed sleeves. It rested on the ironing board like someone’s lost treasure, and I realised it was the dress my daughter had put together with her sewing machine ahead of a friend’s wedding where she planned to wear it.

Back through the decades, I’m sixteen years old and have received an invitation from a friend to be one of her two companions at the twenty first birthday party of her elder brother.

The party is to be held in reception rooms somewhere in St Kilda close by the sea and the rooming house where my friend lives with her mother, the owner.

My elder sister not yet twenty-one offers to sew me a dress for the occasion. A red dress in a slick cotton that shines when it’s under light or in the sun. It is a special dress made with love and care and I am proud to wear it till I reach my friend’s house and see her dress and the frock our other friend is wearing. 

No one says a word but looking back I recognise my dress as neat casual when this birthday was to be a formal affair with people in glamour gowns and stilettos. Some might have mistaken me for one of the wait staff.

My first such formal occasion and already I am undone. I have no choice.

In that same year I go with another group of friends to see the Sound of Music at a picture theatre in the city. I do not want this film to end beyond the first half where Captain von Trapp and Maria marry in the cathedral to the rousing strains of an orchestra.

I am in love with Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews simultaneously. When the Nazis enter the film after intermission and the situation goes dark, I’m lynched to the same disappointment washing over me, standing at the front door in my once glorious red dress, shabby against the glitter of the evening. 

I am lost in a welter of discomfort. Unable to find words beyond a feeling in my veins of poison. Whether from allergies creeping up on me in springtime pollen, the bees and the smell of jasmine or some sinister underlying malady I cannot yet identify, I do not know. But it gets into my mind and tosses thoughts around like confetti. I cannot find a way to make a story or get sentences to fit in any order rather than ramshackle.

My tea is cold and my head hollow.

The day you are born is the most dangerous day of your life a doctor once told me. It’s the day on which living is first decided. I think of this in the context of a book launch I attended recently for Lloyd Jones’s new book of poetry The Empty Grandstand. It puts me in mind of other book launches, including my own. 

The way the new book enters the world like a newborn and this first flush of daylight and air in your lungs can make or break you. Then in a strange way it’s all over. Not quite there.

All these years left to live, in ignominy, deprived of the spotlight, refused centre stage only to hover in the wings or somewhere between.

The sense of pleasure at first arriving rarely lasts beyond the first freshness of new clothes. Like me and my red dress. 

Outside the front door of my friend’s house, before I pressed the doorbell and she opened the door to greet me. When I saw her in her green taffeta gown, full length to the floor and behind her our other friend in blue evening satin, both resplendent, my heart sank to my knees.

Then all of it was gone in a heartbeat.

I pretended it did not matter. Skilled in the art of denial throughout my mother’s care.

‘Do as of nothing is wrong’, she said whenever out father threatened to trash the house or raise the TV volume beyond comfort. ‘Do as if nothing is wrong.’

Maybe this is one reason as an adult I have gone in the other direction and cannot abide when things go wrong, and no one addresses it. I cannot hide as I once did behind my mother’s pleas to denial. Better to acknowledge than to hide. 

Postponing the graveyard

We buried my brother at last.  We are a stoical bunch. Few tears shed. His wife the most distressed of all could not manifest her grief because she was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people at the funeral to send off her husband and the spectacle.

Her memory and mind are going. She has not fully registered he is dead. Nor I, not that my memories are going. On the contrary, they stay with me. 

If anything they crystalize at moments like this. When the white suited funeral officer in her red Akubra hat and matching scarf, offered a silver trowel filled with sand to toss down the hole over my brother’s coffin, I asked her to pour the sand into my hands. I wanted to feel its grittiness and to honour the tradition. 

Dust to dust ashes to ashes. She also offered a sprinkling of rose petals to strew over his coffin but I declined. 

When we buried our mother, the funeral officials offered their box of sand without the trowel. It seemed more fitting.

I wished it had been dirt, soil from the hole the undertakers had earlier dug for my brother.

I am rethinking the business of burials. I once thought that’s the way I’d like my mortal remains to be dispatched into a hole in the ground, for the worms and bacteria to eat away until all that’s left are my hair and teeth, my skeleton. But now the way the earth is so impacted by climate change, so overcrowded, I’m coming round to the idea of cremation.  Though that too is fraught energy wise.

Bury us upright in shrouds.

After all, we won’t be there to notice whatever arrangements are made.

On a happier note, I reconnected with members of my extended family who live in Brisbane and were more able to attend the funeral of an uncle, perhaps not beloved though his children are. 

 His children and wife, rocked by adversity and the pain he brought into their small family through his contrary ways. He was the son of his father. He was a man wracked by severe illness on childhood. He was a replacement baby for his parents after the early death of an older sister during the Second World War. He was a talented man, forced to leave school early, who went back in later years to complete his education but stopped short of completing his elusive PhD, which must have hurt his pride, given his desperate search for achievement. 

It was a long day beginning at four am with a trip to the airport, trouble getting into the correct long term car park which has changed its name to Value parking and finally getting onto our plane which arrived in Queensland around breakfast time. 

It was not sunny, the sky heavy with grey clouds. A taxi to Kelvin Grove where the White Ladies house their funeral parlour. And then early for the service. We visited a nearby Aldi to kill time, stopped in a nearby café for coffee, then traipsed back to the parlour where a few of my siblings were already gathered ahead of the service.

This then is the best time. The gathering before an event. The next best was the eulogy delivered by my brother’s first-born daughter and flanked by her younger sister and brother.

A long testimony to her father’s life with the emphasis on his best qualities and only occasional reference to their struggles.

Eulogies to me are the most important part of any burial service. The story of the person’s life. The story of their achievements, but also some brief reference to their struggles. Not hagiography, but honesty.

They’re gone now. We cannot hurt them but we can build a story around them and then elaborate on their lives to add colour to the story of this family and to give hope to those who follow. However much they might have failed.