Tag: Helen Garner

Memory’s thump

After she died, my mother left each of her children $8154.94
as their inheritance.  She had wanted to
leave $10,000.00 each out of the proceeds of her rooms at the retirement
village where she had spent her last decade, but the way these things go, costs
and disbursements whittled some away. 
Throughout her life my mother was determined to give each of
her children something of significance, and each must have an equal share. 
Ironically, what she leaves can never be equal
For some of us, $8000.00 plus is a significant sum, for
others it’s a trifle.  For some it can go
into unpaid debts, for others it becomes part of their inheritance to their own
children, administered early.
They will give it away.
After my husband’s father died and left a small but more
significant inheritance size-wise, he wanted to buy something of substance as a
reminder of his father: a timeless piece of furniture that might stand up
against time. 
I have not been able to think of anything to honour the
memory of my mother other than through words on the page.
One of my brothers has been writing his ‘chronicles’ about
his life, which he had wanted to include in the family archive, but has since
withdrawn because some family members objected to certain of his
statements. 
The response to his writing, which he initially spread far
and wide among our extended family, was a bit like my mother’s
inheritance.  Some responded loudly – it
meant a great deal to them.  Others did
not react at all, or at least not in company.
Last night, I read the second section of my brother’s
chronicles in which he addresses some of the contentious areas where people
have challenged his view of what really happened in our family and I wonder yet
again about the nature of fact and of fiction. 
The ways in which one person’s story can seem so very
different from that of a sibling, when both occupied the same space in
childhood, when both shared the same parents. 
But in many ways, my brother’s parents were not my
parents.  All nine of us have different
parents, given that our parents – despite our mother’s best intentions to treat
us all equally – behaved differently with each one of us. 
My father prized the boys above the girls; at least as far as
academic achievement was concerned. 
Girls were good for housework and sexual favours. 
My mother, on the other hand, preferred her sons.  Especially, the first and last-born, though
the first might say that our mother preferred the second born son. 
These distinctions put differential pressures on each of us
as girls and as boys. 
Years ago, Helen Garner wrote a story about her sisters for
an anthology on sisters in which she gave her sisters names based on
chronology, second sister, third sister etc. 
I have a similar impulse in relation to writing about my brothers, given
there are five of them, and each is unique. 
Here, too, I try to protect their identities in order to make
a point about family experience, but this emphasis on family chronology can make
for dull storytelling, so the critic in my head pulls me up and says ‘fictionsalise’.
Does it matter that my brother writes in blunt words, that my
father penetrated my sister and raped her on a number of occasions, both for
its factual nature and that the statement seems to take it further than my
understanding of events. 
Did my father actually penetrate my sister? 
Does degree matter?  My
father penetrated my sister’s mind.  He penetrated
mine.  He penetrated all our minds but in
different ways. 
See these words on the page. 
See how they disturb, even as I put them down. 
See how much the reader wants to say,
‘No, don’t write that’. 
Don’t say that.  Don’t
speak of these events, they are too awful to consider.
Embellish them in a story. 
Give the reader some space in which to imagine.  Don’t leave it too open-ended. 
My brother writes about his own memory of seeing my father go
into my sister’s bedroom late at night.  Sometimes
my father was naked.
This one hits me with a thump.
My brother as witness and given that he himself did not go
into my sister’s bedroom, given he did not watch my father with my sister, but
could only imagine it, he may have taken his memories to this extreme.
When we witness events, we take in certain aspects of that
event and our memory and imagination then kicks in and rearranges the images
over time. 
When I read about my brother’s memory it puzzles me.  Only in so far as I do not remember my father
walking naked through the house until I was in my teens, by which time this
brother had left home. 
But when this brother still lived at home, it is possible
that he saw my father in ways I did not.
Does it matter, the truthfulness of all this, of who saw
what, of who did what to whom? 
I suspect it does.  But
when it comes to sexual abuse, the facts become murky, simply through the
overload of sensations that accompany our understanding.
When I read about the three year old boy who went missingfrom his home on the mid-north coast of NSW several months ago and of how
police later recruited the aid of Interpol to look out for a paedophile ring, I
cannot get it out of my mind: the sight of this little boy in the grip of a
group of paedophiles. 
In my imagination, they are a blurry group of dark clothed
men standing in a ring around this small boy, preying on his body as if they
are dogs fighting over a bone.
This is as much as my imagination can bear before I want to
snap it shut.  Stop the images.  They are too unimaginable.
My mother was a person who could not bear to see what was
going on around her, under her own roof. 
She could not contemplate what was happening to her
daughters, most particularly her oldest, even though she tells the story of
finding my father at my sister’s bedside and of telling him if she ever saw him
doing this again she would kill him. 
She thought that was enough to stop him.
It was not enough.
My father continued to visit my sister in the night and my
mother continued not to see, until it was too late. 
Even now in my family, and in the community at large, it is
hard to want to see these things. 
Perhaps this is one of the reasons I write about them.  I pick at them like an old sore, and there
are some who say, stop it, get over it. 
It’s done now.  Get on with your
life. 
There are some who might put our mother’s inheritance into
the bank – just a few extra dollars and nothing of any substance – and there
are others who might like to make the most of our mother’s inheritance, some
who might want to use some of the talent she passed onto her children, both for
observation and her ability to write, but also to fight against this tendency
of hers to turn a blind eye.  

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