Tag: death

The colour of death

‘Is that a nun over there,’ my mother asks.  
I look in the direction of her pointed
finger.  The empty bed in the four
bed ward of the Dandenong Hospital is stripped of blankets in preparation for
the next arrival.  There are
gadgets and boxes set in the wall and metal bars from floor to ceiling to
support the curtains.  The only
thing that resembles a nun is the blood pressure monitor.  A round dial the size of a face with a
dark border.  
Only in my
imagination could I see it as a nun, and even then not without prompting.
  
‘Maybe you need your glasses,’ I say.
‘It looks like a nun,’ my mother says again, and that over
there, in the oven.  What are they
cooking?’
My mother’s mind flips into these vague disconnected
thoughts.  I flip into my own.
Three weeks ago my mother fell.  A typical fall the doctors told us in a woman with a urinary
tract infection.  She must have had the
infection for a long time it would seem. 
Infections make people unstable.   My mother fell flat on her face, twisting her arm in the
process.
 
The staff at her retirement village bundled her onto a
trolley and took her straight to hospital when she complained of pain in her
arm.  
‘Broken’, the doctors
declared and she may be bleeding internally.
My mother sits up in bed, her arm propped up in a foam
sling.  She looks every bit like a
photo I have of her own mother after she had died.  Grey, the colour of death, but my mother is like a cat with nine lives.  She survives.

My grandmother not long before she died.

My mother rallies.  
The doctors catheterize here.  The infection clears with antibiotics and over the course of a week she
can recognize that the nun across the room is not a nun.
She’s frightened of dying, one of my brothers says.  It happens to the deeply
religious.  He saw it years ago
when he was visiting the elderly clergy, bishops, priests, nuns all.  The most devout among us.
Atheists imagine death should come
easily to the devout, it’s a comfort, but that’s not the case at all. Death for the religious is to be avoided because death is the moment of
judgment and they’re about to be judged.
My mother slinks down in her bed.  She groans when the nurse tries to
shift her.
I think about death. 
It’s easy to say I’m not frightened.  I’m not worried about heaven or Hell.  My judgment will not come later.  My judgment is now.
Back in time I sit in the church of Our Lady of Good
Counsel.  The priest at the altar
raises the host to the hosanna chorus and we all bow our heads.  I go through the motions.  I kneel and hold my hands together in
prayer; but my mind wanders.  
I watch
the other people in their seats, on their knees.  The man in front with a bald head bangs his prayer book
onto the head of a small boy who is chattering to his sister in the row in
front of him.
The look on the boy’s face, red-faced with shame.  
I would not let myself get caught out
so.  I keep my thoughts to
myself.
 
I can see my grade three teacher three rows further in the
front.  Her black hair tied in a
tight bun.  Her beauty transparent.
Then I recite my mantra to myself:  my mother is the most beautiful woman
in the world, second only to the blessed virgin Mary.  Then comes Miss Andersen, my teacher.  Everyday I watch Miss Andersen in class.  Her face like an angel.
My eyes scan the stations of the cross.  The thought hits me hard. 
Death.  What will I do if my mother dies?  I cannot live if my mother dies.  Surely I will die, too.
 
Back in the hospital my mother is asleep.  She snores.  
In my head I am calm.
My mother will die one day soon enough.  But I am calm.
The little girl in me lived so long ago I can hardly hear
her fearful thoughts let alone remember her feelings.
Does my mother know? 
Does she sense her children waiting, waiting for her to go.
And is it true, that she holds off because she is fearful
of that final judgment?   

Sex and death

There’s a story doing the rounds in cyberspace about a
father who wants to teach his adolescent daughter a lesson. In the family’s blog he is dressed
in very short shorts and stands provocatively at a bar for the benefit of what
I imagine to be someone’s iphone camera. 
Apparently, both
the father and his wife do not enjoy the spectacle of their daughter dressed in her short shorts.  They consider it unseemly, obscene,
inappropriate, disturbing, provocative – you name it.
 
Despite their protests, the daughter had insisted on
wearing her short shorts to a family dinner and so her father took a pair of his shorts from his room, cut off a few inches from the legs, and wore them out to dinner, too.
 
Did the daughter learn her lesson?  I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to
figure out what the lesson is.
Had the girl’s mother cut her own shorts down to size, the
comparison might have been more telling.  
I ask myself why these things matter?  Why do we care so much about young women wearing their short
shorts?  
 
Then there’s the Robin Thicke clip that’s also doing the rounds to the song Blurred Lines.  The lyrics are provocative, implying there are blurred lines to sexual consent. The men are in suits, the women naked.
 To counter this a group of Auckland University students created a spoof where the men, dressed only in white underpants, dance to the whims of the women who are fully clothed.  The lyrics are different, too.  An attack on misogyny.  
Not long after mini skirts came into vogue, women started
to burn their bras in protests against patriarchal constraints.  At the same time not wearing a bra
could be sexually provocative.
 
I cannot be sure what led me not to wear a bra on my
wedding day.  Was it simply because my wedding dress could not sit well with the imprint of
a bra beneath.  
My wedding dress was of a fabric that I believed could conceal the
fact that I did not wear a bra. At least in my mind it was sufficiently modest, though I later heard rumours that people like my mother were horrified.  
I have the horrors myself when I look back on another
time, a New Years Eve in the 1970s when I decided to go bra-less to a party at a friend’s
house in Ivanhoe.  
I had bought
myself a blouse, a long floppy sleeved and cropped blouse, the type you see
on a flamenco dancer.  It came
together tied in a knot across my midriff.  The white cotton was as thin as a summer nightie, and almost as transparent. 
I wore it with pride.  But now I find myself cringing at my exhibitionism if indeed
that is what it was.
 
That night people got drunk.  Someone pushed someone else into a swimming pool.  Fellows slipped off their clothes.  The
men, I might add, not the women.  
The women wore bathing suits, but several of our young male companions took
to skinny dipping. 
It was a night of arousal though nothing untoward happened
as far as I can remember, though to look on it from the outside it might have looked like an orgy.
I wonder then about what is or is not appropriate in this
life?  What determines our
behaviour?  What do we decide is
obscene and what not? 
Yesterday as family members stood around the grave side of an elderly aunt about to be
buried I checked out the depth of the hole.   
‘It’s
so deep,’ I said.
‘But look at that clay,’ one brother said.  ‘Oh to get my hands init.  To sculpt from it.’
‘It needs to be deep,’ someone else said, ‘so they can
fit another body on top.’
 
I looked into the hole in the ground and wondered what it must be like for my uncle to see his eventual resting place.   
My husband and I have yet to choose a burial plot.  I think about it.  Preparations for death.     
My sister has made a family pall of white silk, embroidered in gold thread.  It has sections to represent all the
members of our immediate family and in each section my sister has included both
zirconium crystals to represent the boys in each family on the extended line
and tiny pearl button to represent the girls.  
The pall symbolises the lives of our parents and their nine children, twenty three grandchildren and
twelve great grandchildren with another two on the way.  My sister hopes that every member of
our family will use this pall for their own funerals.  
I shrink a little inside whenever I see the pall.  It seems to me it will soak up so much
grief and I cannot help but think of the pall draped over my own coffin when I
die, or when my husband dies, my siblings, my mother and in time my children and then their
children.   
There’s something ominous about a pall, so unlike a
christening gown, which signals new life.  
‘When you’re dead you’re dead,’ my brother said.  ‘You won’t know.’  
‘But there’s the build up to death.’  One my cousins nodded her head in recognition of my qualms
but another sister insisted she does not think of these things. 
We chattered on about death until my oldest brother leaned
over, ‘I’m not sure now is the time to be analyzing such matters.’
People stood at the side of the grave and waited for the
funeral organisers to do their thing.  We fell silent, though a few chatterers further up the hill continued to talk.
 
When human silence prevailed I heard the birds twitter in the trees
above and fell back to thinking not so much of my aunt whose body was about to
be lowered into the ground but of the rest of us still alive who are left
trying to make sense of how we might go on living in a world filled with rules
and regulations about how we should behave.  
I still cringe at
the sight of me in my see through blouse.  
My older self wonders how could she
do it?  
My younger self says, who cares?  
The celebrant read out a poem.  Her words stay with me.  ‘Your bones are made of stars/ your blood is filled with oceans.’  
There’s more to us all than our appearance or desires.