death – Page 8 – Sixth in Line

Christmas Eve and I’m well
again. At last. Only a few days of ill health but
enough to have me imagine I would never feel okay again, never my normal self. Last week I copped a virus of some
sort, presumably one I caught from my grandson after he had stayed with us. I held myself together until the final
day of my work and then collapsed.

It’s always the way. I’ve come to expect it: go on holidays
and fall ill, mostly with a minor ailment but I tend to imagine it’ll be worse,
as if I’m waiting for the final diagnosis that signifies my pending death.

I’ve said this before, I’m
sure. When I was young I thought
sixty would be a terrific age at which to die. When I was young, a child at primary school, old age seemed
such a foreign country.

Last night I visited my mother in
her retirement village, the centre of that foreign country. I arrived at the end of dinner and
walked with her as she shuffled back from the dining room. There was a bottleneck of people
hunched over their walkers as we entered the corridor that leads back to her room, three old people staggering on the slight incline that leads from one
part of the corridor to the next, my mother at the rear. I looked down at my mother’s legs visible under
her skirt, at her angular though shapely ankles, on her unsteady feet. And I shuddered.

It was hot yesterday, and yet it
had stayed cool in the nursing home as my mother proceeded to tell me while she
manoeuvred her walking frame behind her fellow residents. Her hips
swayed from side to side as if without the frame she might totter to the
ground.

My hips are still agile. I can walk without difficulty, though
yesterday while I was shrugging off the last of the virus, still feeling
queasy, I went with one of my daughters into the city for a dose of last minute
Christmas shopping, and thought otherwise.

‘Why
do you need to stand around like that?’ my daughter said to me after she came
out of the change room where she had tried on a new dress, a potential
Christmas present. ‘Like you’re a
person with special needs?’

I was not aware I had been standing
around in such a way. I imagine
she expected me to look purposeful but by this time of the year
after more than one such visit to David Jones’s women’s clothes’ department –
four daughters after all, two of whom have particular tastes in clothes – I
found myself looking for a seat while I waited for said daughter to try things
on.

I have noticed, in this department store at
least, there are no seats available for the likes of me on which to sit. There was a sort of cabinet in the Ted
Baker section with a British flag painted on top – Ted Baker must be an English
label, not one my daughters choose – so I sat on the edge of it. None of the sales staff seemed to
mind. But my daughter found my sitting there troublesome.

I did not find my mother’s gait
troubled me yesterday, not at my age now, other than as a reminder of what is
to come. My daughter on the other
hand is in her mid twenties still in that place where old age is foreign territory and not worth considering in terms of self yet.

After my mother had reached her arm
chair and flopped down into it, I sat on the flat seat of her walker
nearby. Proximity makes it easier for her to hear me.

For the first time I noticed a
bracelet on my mother’s wrist, one I had not seen before. She told me she had bought it in Holland. It was silver with delicate incisions
cut into the surface like lace. I
knew at once I wanted it.

There is not much that my mother
leaves behind that I desire other than her bracelets, this one and another, a gold
bracelet, an heirloom left to her by a long dead aunt, also from Holland – a
thick gold chained bracelet that is linked to a single guilder. I would be happy to settle
for one bracelet only, if I could choose, but how could I tell this to my mother?

So far it has been easy to tell her that I’m okay about most things she leaves behind. She can choose.
Though I once mentioned a particular preference for the crucifix on her mantlepiece, not for
religious but for sentimental reasons, as in it revives memories of the time it
sat on the mantelpiece throughout my childhood.

The crucifix will no doubt go to one of my mother’s more
religious children. Sentiment is not a good enough reason to inherit a crucifix.

Bracelets are different. We
daughters might fight over them after our mother has gone. Not that we would fight. Not openly at least.
We never fight, not these days, not as we fought when we were
young.

To speak of wanting something was
forbidden from my earliest memories, only hinting would do. But it is no longer in my style to
hint.

Next time I see my mother I will
ask outright. It’s not as hard as
asking her other questions about the past whose answers she holds so close to
her chest I fear she will never part with them.

A bracelet is easy to give away
even if to speak of it again is to signify death. And then I imagine myself wearing my mother’s bracelet. I imagine my skin brush against the bracelet that my mother’s skin now brushes against and feel a mixture of pleasure and of revulsion. Such these days is my attitude towards death.

And here for good cheer is the
Lemon Myrtle my youngest daughter and I dragged in from our garden for this
year’s Christmas tree. My daughter decorated
it with her nephew. Together they
basked in that lovely place where old age and death are almost unthinkable.

My older brother untangles my hair with a comb circa 1962.

And then there was the day my father pulled down the Christmas tree. He was drunk as usual and in a fit of rage had ripped the tree out of its pot and threw it to the ground.

A tear shaped bauble, with its silver sprinkles encased in a gold centre, shattered on the carpet. Three other baubles broke in the fall that day, but it was this tear shaped beauty that mattered most to me.

My parents had brought it with them all the way from Holland. My mother had wrapped it in newspaper and cushioned it in a cardboard box alongside half a dozen other baubles, decorations that went back to the early days of their marriage.

These baubles had lasted at least another twenty years until now. I took care not to let the splinters catch on my skin.

This was the Christmas I remember when I could no longer hold to the idea that Christmas was special.

I suspect it happens for most of us in one way or another. There comes a time when our childhood pleasure at the excitement of events such as Christmas, and it need not be Christmas – it could be a birthday or some other celebration – somehow loses its lustre.

I read about Christopher Hitchen’s death on line yesterday and watched an interview conducted in 2010, some time after his diagnosis with oesophageal cancer.

Hitchen’s hair was wispy thin across an otherwise bald head and his face had the puffy look of too much medication. But his eyes were sharp and his voice focussed. He talked about the fact of his dying and debated the notion of an after life. The notion of uncertainty.

I often rehearse my own death. What will it be like? assuming I get to know before hand that I am dying. Will I be like Christopher Hitchens, thoughtful and resigned, or will I panic?

These days I think more and more about the limitations of time, and the struggle I have to make the most of it. Make the most of it, I tell myself. Do not waste it.

I have this thing about waste at the moment. I cannot bear to waste anything, food, money, opportunities.

The other day I noticed a hat in the spare room, a short rimmed panama hat. The type that was fashionable for men and woman a couple of years ago. One of my daughters had desperately wanted this hat for Christmas and although it was expensive I had conceded in buying it for her, as it was Christmas.

I cringe when I realise I have not seen her wear this hat, not once. This is not to say she has never worn it. She may have worn it at times outside of my viewing, but it could not have been often. A brand new scarcely worn hat that now sits unused in the spare room and I ache all over again.

I hate to become one of those dreadful whingers but in recent weeks I have become just that.

My husband went off to the country this morning to buy the special Christmas hams he so enjoys at this time of year and I urged him not to buy too much. Last year we threw out left over ham because we had ordered too much and could not eat it all before it went off.

Christmas tends to be a time of excess in so many ways and for some reason this year I want to draw a line on the excess.

A cranky old woman, my daughters say, and perhaps they are right. A cranky old woman who suddenly recognises the passage of time, the finite nature of resources and she wants to scream, let’s slow down.

Before the day my father pulled down the Christmas tree I thought of this time as a time of plenty. Every year since I have needed to balance the tension between my desire to celebrate and my need to hold back, to slow down, to resist the consumerist demands and at the same time, to join in the fun.

I am especially glad for my grandchildren, this year. They remind me of how simply delightful it can be to celebrate life, in generosity and good will. But behind the scenes for me there is still the spectre of the smashed and shattered bauble of my experience.