by Mary Moody
Spoken in her most cultured voice, it was a bit of a conversation stopper.
Mum no longer resembled the beautiful and elegantly dressed journalist she had once been, but the spirit of that young woman was always there. It never disappeared.
She often had falls in the evening although she rarely injured herself, which was amazing because I imagine her bone density must have been low. I organised for Home Help assistance to get her in and out of the shower as she grew more and more frail, and I also had handrails installed in the bathroom, toilet and hallways to try to minimise the number of accidents. Towards the end I bought her a commode chair – a handsome one make of oak that sat beside the bed so that she wouldn’t have to brave the long hallway in the middle of the night to go to the toilet.
Mum’s nightly ritual of drinking and going to bed early always culminated in a dramatic farewell. She had maintained her strong left-wing political beliefs and even though it had been decades since she was a member of the communist party she still admired much of what it stood for. Every evening she would emerge from her room to say a final goodnight, usually dressed for bed and looking rather raddled. Her parting words were invariably: ‘Goodnight dear. I’ve got one last thing to say.’ At which point she would raise her right arm in a defiant gesture. ‘Up the revolution!’ Then she would turn and disappear for the night.
Once a week Mum and I would meet friends at the pub in Wentworth Falls for a drink or two. One of them was the retired politician and judge Jim McClelland, who shared a left-wing political background with Muriel. It was one of the few occasions I could lure her out of her smoky bedroom. We would go to the pub at five o’clock and be back home by six-thirty to watch the ABC gardening show on which I was a presenter. It was an enjoyable ritual that got Mum out of the house for a while and into the company of others. She had steadily become a little reclusive and spent far too much time alone in spite of the fact that she was in the midst of such a large and busy family.
One rainy Friday she declined the weekly trip to the pub, saying she felt unwell. I tried to persuade her to come. ‘You’ll feel much better when we get there, Mum. Come on, it’ll do you good to get out.’ But she insisted on staying at home. I had barely arrived at the hotel when there was a phone message for me over the bar.
‘Your son just called and asked if you could go home immediately. Apparently your mother is unwell.’
I was home in a flash. It was Ethan who had called. He had also called our GP, who had been with Muriel for several minutes before I got there.
‘What’s wrong with Grandma?’ I asked Ethan.
‘I don’t really know,’ he said, ‘but she told me she had a pain in her abdomen. When I asked her what was wrong, all she said was, “I think I’m dying but don’t tell your mother, she’ll be worried.”’
Our doctor, who was also a good family friend, said I must get Mum up to the hospital as quickly as possible. He was unable to make a firm diagnosis but could clearly see she needed immediate attention. He called an ambulance but there was none available. Apparently there had been a series of accidents on the highway as a result of the rain and we would have to wait two hours to get one.
‘I’ll take her myself,’ I announced.
It’s the funny things you remember in the midst of an emergency. There had been a delivery of cow manure for the garden that morning and the truck driver had dumped it outside the front gate. The rain had turned it into a soggy, smelly mess and somehow the doctor and I had to carry Mum over the cow manure to get to the car. The humour was not lost on her as we arrived in casualty stinking like a cow shed. There was a long queue but our doctor friend had phoned ahead to say that Mum must be given a bed to lie down on – she was too sick to sit on a chair in the outpatients waiting room.
What transpired over the next few hours is difficult to describe. The road accidents had filled the emergency room and there were not enough doctors to attend to the backlog of patients. Nobody had been seriously injured but there was a queue waiting to be seen, and Mum was quite a long way down the list. She was seen by a nurse, who was able to take notes but not offer any assistance in the way of pain relief. That would have to wait until a doctor could examine her. Mum’s pain grew more and more intense. She was writhing on the narrow casualty bed and I tried my best to comfort her. It was appalling. I kept asking how much longer she would have to wait, but they kept saying they didn’t know. At one stage I actually lay beside her on the bed, stroking her face and trying to soothe her. I was aware that none of the people being treated was critically or even seriously injured, but the hospital was handling cases in the order in which they had arrived. For four hours Mum was in agony, and eventually I couldn’t deal with it any more and insisted loudly that a doctor must see her. Now. Not in ten minutes but now.
She was examined, but the young doctor on duty was uncertain about the cause of her pain. He ordered pain relief which worked almost instantaneously, much to my relief. She relaxed instantly once the terrible pain had been deadened.
‘Mrs Moody,’ the earnest young doctor said, ‘I think we need to do some tests on you to find out what’s causing the pain. I’m about to organise a Care Flight helicopter to pick you up and take you to Nepean Hospital.’
Mum had a flying phobia, which hadn’t been an issue for a while because she hadn’t needed to fly anywhere for decades. ‘Young man,’ she said, again in her most cultured voice, ‘I haven’t flown for thirty years and I’m certainly not flying anywhere tonight.’
So an ambulance was ordered. I was advised to go home and get some sleep and then to drive down to Penrith in the morning to be with her for the tests. It’s a decision I will always regret. I should have just gone with her in the ambulance, but somehow I thought she was going to be okay. She wasn’t. She was dying as I kissed her goodbye and watched the ambulance head out of the hospital driveway and down the highway.
It was after midnight when I crawled into bed totally exhausted by Mum’s painful ordeal. I thought it was a terrible state of affairs that an elderly woman, obviously in terrible pain, had been made to wait for four hours before being seen by a doctor. As I fell asleep I made a mental note to myself to write to the hospital and also to our local state member of parliament to complain about the inadequacies of the system.
I had not been asleep for long when the phone rang. It was Nepean Hospital. I must come immediately because my mother was gravely ill. David and I threw on our dirty clothes from the day before and drove like maniacs down the dark deserted highway. I knew she was dead and that they just hadn’t wanted to say it over the phone. I repeated it over and over to David.
‘She’s dead, I know she’s dead. I should have stayed with her. I should have gone with her in the ambulance.’
She was dead, of course, and they wheeled her into a small private area with curtains around so we could have some privacy. She had tubes going into her mouth and her face was distorted and strained. She did not look at peace.
I was totally stunned and barely able to speak. ‘I need the children here now,’ I said.
So David phoned them at their various homes and woke them from their sleep to get them to come to the hospital and sit with us. I had spoken to them all from the hospital earlier that evening to say that their Grandma was being admitted but that she seemed to be okay. So they all knew she was sick but none had expected this.
Miriam was pregnant with her second child. Little Eamonn was barely two and he played cheerfully around his great-grandmother’s lifeless body, chomping on biscuits while the rest of us sat grimly trying to come to terms with what had just happened. We were shaken and in a weird state of disbelief. How could Grandma die? We all knew she was frail and that her health had been deteriorating for years now. But her character and her personality were so strong and so forceful that somehow none of us imagined that she could disappear. She seemed indestructible. Indomitable. Now here she was, a small grey shadow of a woman with tubes in her mouth. Muriel ha
d gone.
8
The days between Mum’s death and her funeral were a blur. I guess we were all in shock, but there was so much to be done. David was a great support, taking charge of so many of the practical things that needed organising and phoning people far and wide who needed to be told of Muriel’s death. He chose the funeral directors because they were women and they wore white instead of the usual grim men in black suits. We had a fit of the giggles when they showed us the display booklet of ‘caskets’, all with their own special names. The Promethean was a gold-plated affair costing $40,000. We opted for the Essential, which was a plain wooden box for about $400. We had plans for it. In fact, we had plans for the entire funeral because we didn’t want to just hand over the day to a funeral company. We wanted to be in control and make it our own. And Mum’s, of course.
We placed a notice in death column of the Sydney Morning Herald. It was the usual wording, with one slight exception. Mum had been affectionately known as ‘the old bag’ since I was a child and we all called her that from time to time. Often her birthday cards were written to ‘the old bag’ rather than to Mum or Grandma. It was a family tradition and a term of endearment. So at the end of her death notice we simply said ‘Farewell Old Bag’. It was picked up by the Column 8 editor, who made a disparaging remark about our disrespect for our ‘deceased relative’. On any other occasion I would have written him a terse response, but there was too much going on at the time. Too much to be done.
We wanted to paint the coffin to personalise it. We wanted to bring Mum home for a night and have her lying in her coffin on the kitchen table. We all agreed that she had left in such a hurry that rainy Friday evening. She needed to come back and spend one last night at home with her family. We also wanted to have the funeral service at the house and not in a church or a crematorium. Mum hadn’t been inside a church for decades and it seemed absurd to us to allow a stranger to conduct a funeral service. The women in white listened to all our requests and happily agreed. There was no reason why we couldn’t do exactly what we wanted. Mum’s body could be brought home and we could have the funeral around her in the kitchen where she had spent so many happy years.
Our son Aaron had just acquired his first car, a rather battered old white Kingswood ute, and he was charged with the task of picking up the empty casket from the western suburbs. On the way back up the mountains the engine overheated and he had to pull in to a service station for some water. An attendant came over to help him, took one look at the coffin in the back of the ute and fled. Aaron thought this was highly amusing.
We covered the kitchen table with newspapers and invited people to come and participate. I made a huge pot of Mum’s favourite Irish stew and we filled the fridge with beer and wine. One by one friends came and each made a contribution to the decorating of the coffin. Aaron’s closest friend from school, Jake, is a talented artist and he adored Muriel. He painted her portrait on the lid and perfectly captured her spirit. Another friend painted a cluster of yellow roses, Mum’s favourite flowers, along the edge of the lid. Jenny Kee, known for her love of Australian flora, came by and painted a large bunch of bright red waratahs. We dipped little Eamonn’s hands in red and blue paint and imprinted them along the side of the box. We tore pages from Mum’s famous notebook – quotes and sayings from various journalists – and pasted them onto the wood.
As the evening wore on and we drank more wine, our inspiration escalated. Mum loved the chickens we kept in a coop in the back yard. I scooped them from their perches in the dark and they were subjected to having their feet dipped in paint. The side of the coffin became a colourful montage of chicken footprints, and there were also footprints on the back verandah where they walked after having been so rudely woken from their slumbers.
The following morning Aaron did the same trip in reverse, taking the garishly decorated casket back to the funeral parlour where Mum’s body was lying. He took down her best outfit so she could be dressed, placed in the casket and brought back home for the last time. It was suggested by the ladies in white that they should bring her in the hearse rather than making the return journey in the back of Aaron’s ute. They were probably right.
That last night we gathered again, eating, drinking and telling funny Muriel stories while she lay in state on the kitchen table. Most of the stories revolved around her capacity for outrageous behaviour. Aaron recalled only a month before when David and I were away for the weekend and he had decided to have a party at the house. Mum went to bed early as usual, then woke up and joined the party after midnight, dressed in her nightie. She sat up drinking with a gang of teenage boys for hours until she finally fell asleep on the sofa and they all carried her back to her bed. Typical. It felt good knowing she was there inside the box on the kitchen table with all these stories being told around her and about her. Everyone was laughing. Although we were terribly sad, we were also happy. Our memories of her were happy ones. It certainly helped.
The morning of the funeral, Miriam and I opened the coffin and applied a little make-up to Mum’s face. We invited people for 11 a.m. and the plan was to leave for the cemetery at 1.30 p.m. We had organised champagne and lots of sandwiches. It was to be a party.
People gathered on the back lawn and drank champagne. David was the MC and we all spoke: David, Miriam, both my brothers, close friends and neighbours. My brother Jon reminded us what a beautiful and elegant young woman Muriel had been when he first knew her. Jim McClelland reminisced about their shared political beliefs. It was informal and spontaneous and it all felt just right.
After the sandwiches, we opened the lid of the casket so that those who wanted to could see Muriel and say goodbye. Quite a few family and friends had said they didn’t wish to see her in death, but somehow now they all did. They filed past her coffin and kissed her goodbye. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
The hearse arrived and we hastily replaced the lid and the pallbearers marched her coffin around the garden she had loved so much, up and down the winding pathways and between the roses. She chose well to die in spring when the garden was at its peak. As they carried her out the front gate (I had removed the cow manure by this time), the entire party let out a thunderous cheer.
At the cemetery the mood was more sombre and sober. We placed her last half-empty bottle of Scotch and half-finished packet of cigarettes on the coffin as it was lowered gently into the ground. An Aboriginal friend told David that it is customary in their culture for the deceased to be associated with a favourite animal or bird which is symbolic at the moment of interment. Mum had always loved the noisy currawongs that came up from the valley every autumn and sheltered in our garden. So we called out ‘currawong, currawong’ as a parting gesture. When we looked up into the gum trees at the back of the cemetery there were currawongs everywhere, watching.
Mum was a Celt and fiercely proud of her heritage. We built a traditional cairn of stones over her grave. She also loved the symbolism of the Celtic cross and we had one made for her from sandstone with her name, Muriel Flora Moody, and date of birth and death inscribed. Under her name we have carved the words ‘Up the Revolution’.
9
Our seventh grandchild, Isabella Rosa, with her Italian ancestry on her mother’s side and her sweep of burnished red hair from her Celtic side, has all sorts of medical problems. She was conceived by our youngest son Ethan and his partner Lynne on the eve of their departure for France on an extended working holiday. The only hitch was that they had no idea Lynne was pregnant as they set off with the expectation of exploring Europe in between stretches of working wherever they could find employment, as well as doing some basic renovation to our little village house.
Lynne felt ill from the day they first set foot on French soil and after six weeks of blaming her symptoms on jetlag, a virus and even the local water, she tentatively bought a home pregnancy testing kit at the local pharmacy. The result was positive.
It was not a good pregnancy because Lynne was either vomi
ting or felt nauseous for most of it. She gained weight, but not nearly as much as the local midwife she consulted every four weeks would have liked. The French medical system is very thorough and she underwent all the routine tests. One of them, taken in her fifteenth week, indicated that she was in the ‘medium to high risk’ category for a baby with a chromosomal disorder. An amniocentesis was recommended but given their age (both in their early twenties) and positive attitude towards the pregnancy, they decided to decline. In any event, even if a complication was confirmed, it would be too traumatic to do anything about it this far into the pregnancy. So they waited it out with great optimism.
At seven months, they cut short their European adventure, after bravely exploring regions of Holland, France and Spain despite Lynne’s permanently queasy stomach, and returned to Australia to prepare for the birth.
Ethan and Lynne have always been a very mature couple despite their tender years. They have been together since they were seventeen and travelled north to the Lismore region to undertake their tertiary studies at an age when most young people are still living at home, expecting their Mum to cook their dinner and do their washing.
Indeed I used to worry about their sober and responsible attitude to life, thinking they had grown old well before their time without ever having been outrageous, irresponsible kids. One chilly winter evening when they were first living together I called around to see them and was startled to find them cuddled up knitting a blanket – out of cast-off scraps of wool they had been given by Lynne’s Sicilian grandmother – Lynne at one end, Ethan at the other. I went home and said to David, ‘I’m really worried about those two. They’re like an old married couple. They should be out having fun, not sitting at home knitting. They’re more settled than we are.’
Or ever have been, I probably should have added.
They were always good at managing money and saving. From the beginning, our family nickname for Lynne has been ‘budget woman’ for her uncanny ability to save even on a student income. Unlike our other children who, from time to time in their student years, got into financial scrapes and called out for some urgent parental assistance, Ethan and Lynne have always managed brilliantly under their own steam. It was this resourcefulness that enabled them to save enough to fly to France and to travel as much as they did during their foreshortened stay in spite of the fact that Lynne had been too unwell to work after they arrived.