by Denise Scott
I envied their ordinariness.
I longed for the day my life would feel normal again. I pondered the synchronicity of the two major events happening in my life—my mother dying and the online hate campaign inspired by my work as a comedian. Mother versus comedy—that old chestnut! Once more the battle was raging. The resulting tension was crippling. While my heart was pulling towards my mother, my bruised ego was pulling towards my career. I was dismayed that at the end of my mother’s life I was still finding time to worry about my work. It felt like an enormous betrayal.
In the foyer of the Vic I kept my eyes down and spoke to no-one. In my venue, Dori, my tech, gave me a warm hug, which I appreciated. I went and peeked through the curtains and watched the audience coming in. I imagined that there was someone with a gun who halfway through my show would stand up and cry, ‘Not funny!’ and shoot me dead. A vitriolic online hate campaign can make a girl think that way.
The music faded, the house lights went down, I took a deep breath and walked to the middle of the stage. I had never felt so alone in my life.
Words came out of my mouth, but I had no connection with them. I was sure the audience was looking at me as though I was insane, because without doubt I was kind of mentally unwell. I was too hot and felt faint. I was thinking, I have to tell the audience I’m not feeling well, say I’m sorry but I can’t continue. But then I told myself that the show must go on.
By the end of the show I was having an out-of-body experience. Of course, I’d had one before—at the Our Lady of Mercy centenary dinner—but this was much worse. I was looking down at myself struggling to deliver my jokes, getting everything mixed up; sentences and punchlines were coming out all wrong. I made it to the end but left the stage feeling devastated. I’d let the audience down. I’d let myself down.
The following evening I cancelled my show. I ate a nourishing dinner and had some wine. John checked my Facebook page for me—something we’d agreed he would do while the hate campaign continued—and announced with a beaming smile that, yes, there were still lots of abusive posts, but there were also ‘lots of nice posts from people supporting you, and there’s even some guy campaigning to get the “I hate Denise Scott” page shut down.’ Positive or negative, the fact that people were warring about me on Facebook made me feel ill. I had learnt a lesson, that was for sure: when Facebook is good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad, it’s soul destroying. I took a sleeping tablet and went to bed.
A day later I filmed some scenes for Winners and Losers, and such is the wonder of TV that all it took was for someone to ask my character, ‘So, Trish, how’s the cancer?’ and for me to reply, ‘It’s all clear,’ and bingo! The drama was over, and we moved on to a sexier storyline involving the young characters in the show. If only real life could be that straightforward.
* * *
Thanks to Saint Geraldine, my mother was moved to the palliative-care unit. What was immediately striking upon arrival was the overwhelming sense of peace and calm—as though, finally, after an epic and difficult journey, we’d made it home.
Initially, Mum was sharing a room, but two days after our arrival she was moved to a private room. We knew what this meant. The palliative-care nurses were always moving patients, making sure that when their time came they and their family had privacy. My mother was lapsing in and out of consciousness. Family members started to visit. Once more I cancelled my show. My sister, John and I prepared ourselves for the long night ahead.
As I sat by my mother’s side I pondered the silence in the unit. Mum had been there nearly three days, and in that time who knew how many other patients had died? Three, four? Maybe more. And yet at no point had there been any noise. No loud wailing, no sobs, not even the sound of subdued tears: just a beautiful quiet peacefulness, as though everyone understood we were there for the same purpose—to die or to farewell someone who was dying. And so out of respect for all those who had to share this space, people went about the business of saying goodbye with an exquisite, delicate silence. It was humanity at its very best. It was as though everything rotten about life had been stripped away, and all that remained was love, a very pure sense of love.
I contemplated the synchronicity of events again, but this time rather than seeing the timing of the Facebook hate campaign as ‘unfortunate’, I felt that there could have been no better time for it, because being inside the palliative-care unit I felt protected from the outside world. No-one could hurt me. I was in an oasis of calm. To my surprise, I let go of all the work stuff; it had no relevance any more. There were bigger, more important things to think about, such as life and death, and love, and family. I went so far as to wonder whether my mother, in her own weird and wonderful way, even in death, was looking out for me. It was a long bow to draw, but I liked the idea.
In the communal kitchen, I bumped into a woman who looked younger than me and recognised her as the mother of the young man in the room next to my mum’s, who had cancer of the throat. She was there day and night, blending food that she fed him via a tube. It broke my heart when, as we stood side by side washing dishes, this woman asked what had brought me there. I felt guilty as I explained it was my mother, who, at eighty-six years of age, having lived with Alzheimer’s for over ten years, had been diagnosed with cancer.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ the mother of the young man said, with genuine concern.
My mother had lived her life, but as for this woman’s son … I smiled gratefully and said nothing.
Julie and I attempted to sleep on the fold-out bed in Mum’s room, but it was impossible. John set up camp in the communal lounge area, lying on the couch, his head on a cushion, a jacket covering his eyes to shade them from the glare of the streetlight coming in through the window.
The peace I had earlier been lulled into was replaced with a new tension: death was on its way, but when? And what would it be like? Did I want to witness it? I wanted to be there with my mother, that was for sure, but I was scared. I’d never seen death before.
As the hours ticked by, the fear of facing Mum’s death changed to impatience. Now I wanted death to come. I was sick of waiting. I wanted it to be over. I wanted my mother to be out of pain, to be liberated from her Alzheimer’s. I wanted to be liberated from her Alzheimer’s, from having to worry about her. I wanted to be liberated from guilt. I was not proud to feel this way.
At 4 am Mum stirred. Julie and I stood on either side of the bed. After two days of barely being conscious she was trying to speak. We leant in. ‘What is it, Mum? What do you want to say?’ She muttered something but we couldn’t hear. We moved closer. ‘What is it, Mum?’
‘I’m angry.’
Just to make sure I’d heard correctly I bent even further over her and said, ‘Pardon, Mum?’
‘I said I’m angry!’
‘Who are you angry with, Mum?’
‘I’m angry with the whole world.’
My sister and I looked at each other, then at Mum, and then at each other again. Angry with the whole world? God Almighty, how the hell was Mum going to achieve peace before dying now?
Our mother started to talk about the nuns who had taught her at primary school. ‘They thought they were so holy, they thought they knew me, but they didn’t have a clue what was going on.’ She also referred to the adults who, when she was little, had called her ‘the bastard’. She kept asking, ‘Will they be there? I don’t want to see them.’
By this stage, Mum wasn’t the only one who was angry. My sister was also angry. So was I.
I was angry because my mother was angry, and I was devastated that she might die angry. I wanted to say, ‘For God’s sake, Mum, why the hell didn’t you do something about this years ago, get some counselling? There’s nothing any of us can do about it now.’ I was angry that Mum’s ‘secret’, which wasn’t even a secret any more—everybody knew about it; it was just that no-one ever spoke of it—still held so much power. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t just about her. Given the circumst
ances, I admit this was a little harsh—surely, if ever there’s a time when it should be all about you, it’s when you are about to pass from this world to the next. But it did feel as though it wasn’t just about Mum: it was also about my grandmother May and my sister and me. May could have been in the room with us: four angry women raging against this stupid secret and the subsequent shame and belief that no matter what we did in life we were never good enough. For eighty-six years it had held pride of place in our family. Eighty-six years! I think I can safely say I was speaking for all of us when I muttered quietly, ‘I’m so over this.’
A nurse came in—her lilting Irish accent a little too bright and bubbly for my liking. She checked my mother’s pulse and asked her how she was doing.
My mother answered that she would like a cup of tea.
‘It’s a miracle!’ The nurse looked at us, her face beaming, her eyes misty, then turned and looked upwards to heaven as though she’d just seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. ‘It happens sometimes at the end. They rally and come back for a while; they’re just not ready to go. Aren’t you girls lucky?’
I looked at that nurse with as much dismay as I have ever felt in my life. Lucky? Was she kidding? There was nothing lucky about this.
Eventually, Julie, John and I went home to grab a couple of hours’ sleep, leaving Mum to enjoy some jelly.
A few hours later I returned to the hospital and had a meeting with the doctor, who explained that it could be another week or two, even three …
My dilemma was that I still had two more weeks of Comedy Festival shows at night, and filming for series one of Winners and Losers was scheduled to finish in a few days’ time, at which point we were going to break for some months. I was needed for a big doozy affair—Bec and Matt’s wedding—with a cast of hundreds. While I didn’t have much to say or do, it was essential for me to be there for it. If I couldn’t get there it would mean that hundreds of people would be unable to work, and cast and crew would have to change their holiday arrangements. What was I to do?
The doctor looked at me with sympathy. She asked if I was close to my mother.
I replied in the affirmative.
Had I spent much time with her in the previous years?
Affirmative.
Did I trust the staff at the palliative-care unit?
Affirmative.
She explained that often it was those family members who hadn’t spent much time with their ailing relative who needed to be there when they died, to appease guilt and make up for lost time. In my case she suggested that for now I should go on with my life and see what happened.
* * *
If ever the expression ‘a new day dawns’ was apt, it was the following day, when Mum’s room took on a joyful party atmosphere. The dark storm clouds of rage were gone. As luck would have it I didn’t have to work. Mum’s sister Noreen arrived from the country. My son, Jordie, managed to get a last-minute flight from America and arrived that morning and sat in Mum’s room playing guitar and singing songs all day. Relatives came and went—grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins, in-laws—and we all laughed a lot.
Noreen told us about the time ‘Marg and I were in the city—it was during the war—and we were on our way to a dance. We were crossing over Swanston Street and blow me down if Marg didn’t get hit by a hearse. She didn’t let that stop her, though—there was no way she was going to miss that dance, so she just brushed herself off and away we went. Gawd, Marg loved to dance. There was that time in Tat, one night, I’ve never forgotten it. Your mother had a brand-new white fur coat. She’d saved all year for it. She loved it. It was beautiful too, real soft white fur. Anyway, so she goes to this dance, puts her coat in the cloakroom, comes back at the end of the night and it’s gone—in its place a tatty, dirty, thin, old white fur coat. It broke your mother’s heart. But geez, we had some fun, cos of course we used to sleep in the same bed for years in Tat, in the old sleep-out in the backyard. We had Cocky the cockatoo in the cage right behind us, and, poor Marg, she’d go out on a date and come home late, and she’d be trying to sneak in, and Cocky would be screaming, “Hello Marg! Hello Marg! Hello Marg!” and Marg would be saying, “Sh! Shut up, Cocky,” but he’d just yell even louder, “SCRATCH COCKY, MARG!” Oh Gawd, we’d laugh. And you know Jimmy, well, after we started going out together, he used to sneak into the sleep-out and lie down between Marg and me on that bed, and fall asleep …’
‘I bet he did, Noreen!’
‘No, it’s true. He did! As soon as his head hit the pillow, bang, his eyes would be closed and he’d be out like a light, for hours. That’s truck drivers for you. Oh gee, we had some laughs.’
Although Mum was not conscious I could tell she was happy and calm, relieved to have her sister there. At 5 pm Noreen kissed my mother goodbye, held her hand, and said, ‘Rightio then, see you next time.’
At 2.58 am the next morning, my mother died. My sister, my niece, John and I were with her. She died peacefully.
* * *
Three hours later John drove me to the Winners and Losers set. It was the day of the big wedding scene. It was bizarre—there I was, dancing the macarena in the Rippon Lea ballroom with my onscreen husband, played by Francis Greenslade, appearing to have the time of my life, when only a few hours earlier I had held my mother’s hand as she passed from this world.
I told the producers and Francis, but no-one else, what had taken place that morning. At one point one of the cast took aside the assistant director and reported a ‘weird extra who seems to be harassing Denise. Every time we stop filming he goes and sits with her.’ The ‘weird extra’ was John. He had come with me to offer his emotional support, and whenever the cameras stopped rolling, he was helping me organise Mum’s funeral.
The producers kindly found a body double for me so I could leave the filming early. She slipped into my costume and shoes, and wore a blonde wig that was fashioned to be similar to my hair. From the back she was identical to me—hence the psychological trauma for cast members when they called out, ‘Hey, Denise …’ and a twenty-five-year-old woman with a teeny, tiny pixie face they’d never seen before turned around to answer them.
* * *
My sister and I were sitting at the table in my kitchen. Her job was to write a eulogy covering all milestones: where Mum was born, where she grew up, when she married, and so on. I was working on a separate eulogy, focussing on funny stories.
Julie looked up from her note making. ‘What will I say about Mum’s parents?’
‘I guess just say the truth: Margaret Scott, daughter of May …’
‘Do you think? I mean, does everyone know that?’
‘I think so. Anyway, too bad if they don’t. It’s the truth.’
‘Yeah, but would Mum want us to say it? There might be someone there who gets upset, and Mum would hate that.’
‘I don’t want anyone to be upset, either, but Mum was May’s daughter. What else can we say?’
‘So should I name all her siblings?’
‘Yes. Let’s just do it.’
Writing a eulogy for our mother wasn’t easy, because since Dad’s death all those years ago it seemed not much had happened that we could tell stories about—at least, not joyful stories. So Julie and I found ourselves writing about the old days—the war, Dad’s clown costume, their mutual love of dancing. I finished with the story about the elephant pulling us out of the bog.
As unresolved about God’s existence as I was, I chose to believe that in the afterlife Mum and Dad would be reunited. It made me feel happy, picturing the smile returning to my mother’s face.
* * *
The funeral was a jolly affair.
John played the ukulele and we had a singalong. Jordie played the guitar and sang ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’.
Bonnie read a poem.
My sister’s children did readings and showed photos of Mum.
Julie and I read our eulogies.
At the graveside, Julie and I wa
tched our mother’s coffin being lowered into the ground. Everyone else stood at a respectful distance behind us.
Suddenly, I became aware of someone squeezing between my sister and me. I turned my head and saw a young man, no more than fourteen years of age, and I thought to myself, Who the hell is this? before I recalled that of course he was my cousin’s son.
Just as Mum’s coffin came to rest at the bottom of the grave—an intensely poignant moment—this young man leant towards me and said, ‘So, Denise, got any tips for getting started in comedy?’
I looked at him in shock and then said, ‘Actually, I do. Timing. It’s all about timing.’
Marg Scott (left) Matron Barnes (middle) and Mrs Ellis (also a nurse) off to the Oaks Day races, mid 1960s’our house was the one behind them, without the trees
Acknowledgements
Big thanks:
To Fran Berry, from Hardie Grant, for once more publishing me and also for completely ignoring me whenever I rang, emailed or appeared in her office declaring: ‘You can have the advance back, I can’t write this book.’
To Rose Michael, editor extraordinaire and supreme queen of tact who, after wading through my first draft (or, as I liked to call it, my pile of vomit), declared: ‘Well, there’s a book in there.’ I was, of course, mystified and asked: ‘Where?’ Without batting an eyelid Rose calmly repeated: ‘It’s in there.’ When I asked once more, this time with a high-pitched, squeaky voice, indicating extreme stress: ‘But where in there?’ Rose replied: ‘You’ll find it.’ At the time I didn’t believe her but she was right, for better or worse, I did find a book, ‘in there’. So thank you, Rose, not only for your mighty editing prowess, but your incredible support.
To Penny Mansley, another editor extraordinaire! Penny was quite literally dynamite, so much so that at one point, as her edits, suggestions and questions kept popping up, day and night, non-stop, in my inbox, I did wonder if she was on some kind of Red Bull and speed cocktail mix. Apparently not, it seems she’s just driven and brilliant at her job.