The sound of her voice

Traces of my mother are everywhere.  In the cups in my kitchen cupboard, the mock crystal sugar jar beside the
jug and the dinted green tea caddy my mother had used for years. 
I do not need these things but
could not bear to see them shipped off to strangers. 
My sister, brother and I cleared
out the last of our mother’s belongings last weekend.  There were things we should have sent to the opportunity
shop but my sister and I took it in turns to lament our inability to part with
them.  
And so among other things, I found
myself taking home my mother’s small two-seater couch.

The couch is in good condition but
it has a striped and floral pattern that goes with nothing in my already over cluttered
house.  
I took home my mother’s
bookshelf, the one my father built over thirty years ago in the months after he had stopped drinking and was trying to make amends.  
I took home the small cabinet
on which my mother’s TV sat.  I took home
the crucifix.
The crucifix spent its life on the
mantelpiece of my childhood.  It holds
sentimental value for me more than anything else, but it gives my daughters the
creeps. 
They reckon it is fearsome.  They did not grow up in the same religious
tradition as me.  They see a man spreadeagled
on a cross.  They see cruelty and
pain. 
I see a memory of my childhood
home.  A man on a crucifix did not
trouble me then because it was so much part of the story of our lives, and I knew
he did not stay that way for long. 
Life has slipped back into normal
gear but every so often I hear my mother’s voice in my head and remember then
that I will never hear her again.
There’s a you tube clip doing the
rounds of a profoundly deaf baby who gets hooked up to a machine that
enables him to hear sounds.  He is surrounded
by his mother, the specialist and an assistant or two and you hear them
chattering in the background while the camera focuses on the boy’s face.  His eyes light up to the sounds, as if for
the first time in his short life there is a new activity going on in his
brain. 
He smiles, again and again, and leaves
off the grizzling from when they first shoved an earplug into his ear, into a
wide-eyed state of delight at the sound of his mother’s voice.
My mother’s voice was thick with
Dutch.  There were a few English words
she could never manage, words like enthusiastic, which on her tongue became antogestic, and psychiatrist became psychiater. 
There are Dutch words I use myself
these days and I have to stop to find the English translation for them, words
like stoffer and blick for dustpan and brush.
I try to feel sad about my mother
now, but I cannot muster a feeling.  It’s
as if my feelings for her have moved into cold storage.  I do not understand this.
 Last week at the retirement village as I
carried yet another box of my mother’s belongings to my car I met a woman who claimed
to have known my mother well.  This woman
leaned on her walker, much as I mother did before those final weeks when she
could not get out of bed.
‘Your mother was
a lovely woman,’ the woman on the walker said. 
‘She never missed a thing.  Sharp
she was.’  And the woman
went onto tell me how one day my mother had remarked to her on how much she
loved her tea.
‘How many cups
of tea must she have drunk over her lifetime,’  the woman said.  ‘She was nearly 95 wasn’t she?’  How
many cups of tea my mother had wondered and then she joked with the woman about the
number of Hail Marys she must have said. 
I staggered to the door several more times with the bric a brac of my mother’s life, her books, her lamps, the
cushions from her couch and then thought of the people who sat around the dining
room and library area there, the people who go on living in my mother’s retirement
village.   Another one down.  
Whenever I read the obituaries I
think to myself what will it be like when my name features among the names of the
recently dead? 
It’s a grim thought, but the names
in the obituary are names that seem innocuous and ordinary, and now these
people are no more, like my mother. 

I knew it would be like this: this
eerie sense of being next in line for death. 

The stuff of grief

The weather’s on the turn.  I’ve seen the first of the pink blossoms out
in the neighbouring streets.  My mother’s
body is decomposing in the ground near to where we had buried my father but my
life goes on. 
On the day of my mother’s funeral I
looked into the deep hole in the ground where her body was soon to rest to look
for signs of my father. As if the gravediggers would allow for that, but some
part of me hoped to see signs, bones perhaps, some testament to my father’s
existence where we last put him over thirty years ago.   I saw none.  
These two, my parents, united in marriage in 1942, their bodies together again in the earth, despite all their trials while living.  
This morning I needed to use a long
stick to dislodge the newspaper from out underneath our car.  The indignity of it all, me in my dressing
gown on all fours poking underneath the car as far as my arm could reach to
roll out the newspaper that the deliverers insist on chucking in over the
fence.  But that’s small indignity compared
to illness and death.
Still my mother is not far away and
images of her during her last few weeks pop into my mind unbidden.  When I find myself clearing sleep from the
corner of my eye I see my mother’s pointy finger nail on her index finger as
she tried to brush aside the conjunctivitis gunk that had built up in her eyes
as she lay dying. 
Is this the stuff of grief? 
Somehow I do not imagine myself
grieving for my mother anymore.  One of
my brothers sent an email and called it something along the lines of ‘Closing
the file on our mother’. 
Closing the file.  As if it were so easy.  But grief is at the other end.  When we grieve we cannot let go. 
I sense a too-easy ability to let
go.  My mother comes in and out of my
thoughts, but she is not there at the surface most of the time. 
I run into a friend for the first
time since my mother’s death and she asks me meaningfully with a special tone
in her voice, ‘How are you?’ and for a minute I go to say ‘I’m fine,’ but then
I recognise the intent of her question and I have to modify my tone.  I go back to the week of my mother’s death
and talk about how hard it was then, but for now it seems I’ve entered a
protective bubble that tells me I have too much to go on with to grieve for too
long. 
It was different when my mother was
around and I sensed my deep obligation to her, especially in her last few
years, unlike it had been from my early twenties through to more recently.  Now I am free of her, and yet it jars. 
For the past two Sundays, the day
on which I visited my mother regularly during these past few years I factor in
a visit to her, only to remember I will not go to her any more. 
I will make one last trip next week
to my mother’s old room in the retirement village to help my sister and whichever
other of our siblings might show up, to move out the last of our mother’s belongings. 
And thereafter, my sister, one of
the executors, will distribute my mother’s few possessions to which ever of the
siblings most expresses a need or desire.  
We will divide up my mother’s belongings as
best we can, much as we did when I was little, when on Sunday nights we shared a rectangular block of Neapolitan ice-cream for dessert.  Strawberry, chocolate and vanilla in three tight layers.  My older sister took a knife and divided the block into ten, if we were
all at home. My father, a diabetic in those days, missed out. 
I’ve ordered Helen Garner’s latest
book, This House of Grief, about the
Farquarson murder.  This is the story of
a father who has been found guilty of murdering his three sons by driving them
in his car into a dam.  According to
court and news reports, Farquharson claimed he had suffered a coughing fit and
had lost consciousness at the wheel. He managed to get himself free from the
car, but his sons were trapped inside and drowned.  The event took place on Father’s Day during a
custody visit.  There is evidence from
witnesses that Farquarson had said he wanted to pay back his wife, and that he
knew she would remember every Father’s Day for the rest of her life.  This is yet another story that ranks among
the particularly spectacular examples of revenge enacted.  After two trials, including an appeal, the
jury held that Farquharson was responsible for the death of his three
sons. 
Helen Garner’s a brilliant writer I reckon but she
turns people into characters   Should
there be a ‘but’.  Isn’t this what
writers do?  Isn’t this what I do when I
write about my mother as though she is now only so much decomposing matter in the
ground and for the rest she is a memory, a fiction, a fantasy, a person who
once lived but is now no more.
My mother, and those three little
boys drowned in the dam, like ghosts they hover over us.  The skies are filled with their invisible
spectres. 
I cannot figure out the maths but I
imagine there are many more ghosts in the sky above than living people on the
ground. 
As for me, still alive, I have a day to meet;
a daughter who complains jut now that some unknown person – not me – has bought
‘caged’ eggs.  We do not eat caged eggs
here.  We abhor the cruelty shown to hens
kept in cages. 
‘The cat food stinks, too’, my
daughter says.  The food I serve the cats
first thing in the morning a mixture of dry and wet from a can – pilchards and
something else – offends her sensibilities. 
How can she eat breakfast with that smell up her nose?    
And I skulk off to write.
Life is back to normal