‘We all feel originals, maybe at most when we are universals.’ Niall Williams
When I was young I feared oblivion. To be alive and matter one day, and the next, dead, and forgotten.
If I could write something of value, if I could put down words so their poetry sang then I could at least outlive my life. Or so I imagined when I was young.
Reaching into the future, the prosect of oblivion worries me less. The longer I live. the more I have my fill of life, the more I imagine there will come a time when I will be glad to rest my head on the pillow of death and say goodbye to life.
But not quite yet. For now, living matters to me more.
When my mother reached her 94th year and had hopes to reach a century I wondered why the thought of death still troubled her. Her days then were small. From morning to evening she sat in her chair looking out the window into a small patch of green outside in the courtyard of her retirement village.
She loved this room. She loved this prosect. From there she could dip inside the well of her memories. Good memories only. She refused to think back on past hardships, or so she told me. Those pieces of her past only made her sad and she did not welcome sadness at her aged door.
She preferred the joyous moments of her life and memory. Mostly she found these in her childhood before migration and marriage brought here to Australia and her struggles with too many children and an abusive husband.
Her chair – one of those push button recliners in beige fabric – scarcely showed the marks of age. She could elevate herself to stand for visits to the dining table and meals, visits to the toilet and ultimately around midnight to bed. She could tip her chair back to doze or to rearrange her body to get the best view of the television screen, managed by remote which had taken her a long time to master. Once in control, she loved to switch it on and off at will.
Not for her the television blaring day and night. She was selective about her watching habits and decried her fellow inmates at the home who preferred the company of their screens, day and night.
In winter, her room was like a sauna. She kept her wall heater on high and in summer, on mild days, left the door open to let in a breeze. When it got too hot, she took off her cardigan.
At mealtimes, my mother hobbled along the corridor to the dining room on her walker. The walk went smoothly except in one tiny section where the floor, fully carpeted and kept clear of obstacles, dipped into an incline. It was dangerous to roll down too fast and made her breathless on the way back. For the rest, she could roll along, intent on ignoring the pain in her knees and spine.
Nothing could be done for her, the surgeons said. Age was against her. Age and a failing heart, which my mother had trouble believing.
Her heart had always been in tip top shape. Her blood pressure magnificent, if occasionally a little low. She was a heathy specimen all her life and when old age crept up she was shocked.
She rode her pushbike into her seventies, a throwback to her days in Holland where – don’t you know? – everybody rides a bike.
I marvelled she should claim enjoyment during the long days of isolation. Her hearing was going. Her memory was going and although she claimed to enjoy the many books in bold print she gathered around her from the home library, she could not remember much of what they contained once she closed their pages.
She was going through the motions of life. During my weekly visits on Sundays late afternoon, I found myself vexed by her insistence on repeating her questions, stock standard and cliched: What are you up to? Remind me, how many grandchildren do I have? How many great grandchildren?
When she told me for the tenth time how much she loved the view from her window, my insides screamed to be let free. Why did she not want to be set free? But she did not want to go.
Even after her only sister died in Holland and my mother could not attend the funeral. Even after three of her brothers died. And only two remained. One in Brazil and the other in a nursing home nearby, both too frail to visit.
Even after my elder sister sang to our mother, finally ill in hospital, a song of farewell. A song palliative care workers sing in respite homes to give the dying permission to die. My mother held on another two weeks.
Two weeks earlier, the occupational therapist and her colleague arrived at my mother’s bedside and urged her up and out of bed. I watched as they pulled back her blankets.
It was clear. My mother had no desire to move.
‘Just see how it feels,’ the OT said. ‘See how steady you can be on your feet.’
My mother’s bunioned toes hit the floor and her body recoiled. It curled up underneath her weight. They could not let go of her arms for fear she would flail to the floor.
She never stood again.
Maybe then my mother realised she was not long for this earth. Her refusal to bear her own weight and her body’s decision to refuse all food, even her favourite chocolate mousse, which we tried to spoon into her mouth from small, unsealed cups my sister bought at the supermarket.
The doctors recommended cranberry juice for my mother’s thrush riddled mouth. White flecks at the corners, on her tongue, but that too she refused. Even water did not get past the seal of her lips.
No longer did she talk of reaching one hundred. She stopped talking altogether. Only looked at me when I visited with haunted eyes, as if to say, Go away. I don’t want you to see me in this wretched state. On death’s door. I don’t want my emaciated body under anyone’s gaze. I want you all to go so I can rest.
Soon her eyes stayed closed even as the slow rise and fall of her chest told us she was still with us. Until the hospital decided she could no longer stay. There was nothing active in her treatment they could offer.
They called for palliative care and shipped her off to Bethlehem Hospital, once a maternity hospital where, by coincidence, my husband was born, and there she spent the last hours of her life.
My mother drew her last breath around 5.00 in the morning.
The first of her many children to arrive at her death bed, I could not believe she was gone. A nurse ushered me into the small viewing room with its single bed and my mother’s body ensconced under a quilt, her hands folded over the curve of clean white sheets. An aromatic candle lit on a chest of drawers nearby. I called to her:
‘You can’t be gone.’ Now it was my turn to plead for just one more day.
My mother wasn’t having any of it. Soon my elder sister arrived, and soon after another sister and brother. We four sat in silence around her bed and struck up a conversation about our mother and her life before the nurse brought us each a breakfast of yoghurt and toast. She turned on the air-conditioner, despite being winter, to help mask the breakdown of our mother’s body.
We could not fully fathom she was gone. She from whom we had each materialised decades earlier. She, who had given us life, gone for now and forever.
My mother had resisted the idea of disappearing forever. She feared oblivion, ignominy, and these days I wonder whether like many women of her generation beyond the making of children – my mother was not allowed to further her education after the age of 15, nor was she encouraged to entertain any idea of a career beyond motherhood – she could not aspire to more.
Her life stifled by domesticity, which she claimed to love even as she hated to cook and clean. She hated the responsibility of tedious labour. She wanted higher things and only reached them in her later years after my father’s death when she remarried a man who could afford to give her some greater pleasures. Only in her 75th year could she write her autobiography and get a chance to put words down on the page.
If she had a chance she too might have become a writer, but she was not given space even to contemplate such a life.
My choices have been greater, but my choices are also constrained by the opportunities into which I was born and the people I have encountered throughout my life. The decisions I made about who to marry, the children I bore, the career I leapt into, first as a social worker – my compulsion to help families like mine – and then the push into the therapeutic world because more than anything I wanted to understand myself and other people better from the inside out. Not the outside in.
I did not want to sit on the surface of life. I wanted to dig below the surface into the place where conflicts abound, and nothing is straightforward. The human heart and all its contradictions.
When my turn comes to go I hope to leave in a more agreeable way than my mother.
And I hope not to outstay my welcome.
