Tag: death

The Grim Reaper

‘Where all troubled souls go…the thousand yard stare.’ Magda Szubansky

Reading Szubansky’s memoir, Reckoning, so many resonances emerge from my childhood.

Magda spent her adolescence in Croydon while I spent mine in Cheltenham, And although her parents sent her to Sienna in Camberwell and mine to Vaucluse in Richmond, there were similarities. Catholic Convents for girls, for starters.

Magda is younger than me by a decade, and yet our lives cross. Every time in the book she makes a trip to the Camberwell Junction, my heart sings. This is one of the lovely things about reading, the way it can jog your memories for similarities and even for differences.

I remember the era of the sharpies, as Magda describes their hell-bent reign of terror, but I never encountered any sharpies except to look at on trains or the street. Magda tried to become one, but the point at which I resonate most is when she describes falling in love with Sister Agnes, a nun who took to issuing her charges work. While their heads were bent and she took to staring, the thousand yard stare. 

Young Magda, whose burgeoning lesbianism was only then awakening, stared at the nun. Sister Agnes seemed sad – left the convent sometime later. Magda surmises to marry. While my favourite nun left the convent, too, and she entered a relationship with a woman. 

Magda, like me wondered about the nuns and why they chose this life. Their marriage to Jesus. He was such a bigamist if he endorsed all these marriages, the young Magda concludes but no one ever says as much. It was okay in my day to be married to Jesus, even to wear ‘His’ ring on the correct ring finger.

I did not suffer the agony of recognising I was gay, not like Magda, but other agonies of adolescence followed me around, as they do for most young people. 

The torture of searching for and never quite finding your identity. And Magda’s father, a man obsessed with tennis and sport to exorcize what his daughter describes as his ‘killing muscle’, his extreme competitiveness, to kill or be killed, given his formative experiences during the Second World War, as a young assassin appointed by the resistance in Poland to deal with those who were collaborating with the Nazis. 

What a man. Different from my father but both tormented by the wrath of war. As others like Ruth Clare who writes about her experience as the daughter of a Vietnam Military Veteran in her memoir, Enemy. These men, especially Ruth’s father who were cruel beyond measure because of war trauma. It wrecks families, some more so than others.

I understand today Magda is suffering a rare form of cancer that sounds likely to be fatal and it saddens me to think this bright light in our world, the woman who played …in Babe, the story of a pig, should leave us soon, or maybe not. Magda’s father had cancer, too, and he survived for over five years after diagnosis and was ultimately considered cured. The same might happen for her.

This morning in my dreams I have flickers of memory many people in my dream had cancer. And I feared it might be a sign.

When I was a child the advertisement on television with their Grim Reaper words, ‘A lump or thickening in the breast or elsewhere could be an early sign…’. And thoughts of this monster crawling under your skin, a lumpy presence that like a tick or ring worm or lice might burrow away, spreading its malevolence, haunted me day and night.

At one time, I could not sleep for any twitch in my stomach, leaving me convinced I had cancer of the stomach. Even as our mother insisted our lot enjoyed high levels of immunity. From where I do not know, but she believed it would preserve us all. Even as her mother in her 69th year developed stomach cancer, during her one trip to Australia.

When my oma returned to Holland after a year away helping my mother with her little ones, including me and my younger sister, she went to the doctor. It was too late. She died not long after. 

A memory stays with me. My mother at the telephone, cradled on a wall stand on the wall of the log cabin house in which we lived. In tears. She had just received news of her mother’s death and could not afford to go to the funeral. 

No one expected it of her. Such pain. To miss out on the level of closure a funeral offers. Ceremonies designed around the concept of self-care. Of allowing ourselves to grieve and not bypass the necessity of acknowledging our loss. Otherwise, the loss, like cancer, eats away at us and won’t let go. 

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.