by Larry Writer
She was beside herself with terror. I said, ‘What do you mean the nurse is crazy, Mum? What are you saying?’
She paused, quietened down, and then she said, ‘The nurse says I’m dying. I’m dying. That’s ridiculous. She’s crazy.’
I didn’t know how to deal with the situation. I replied quickly, ‘Look, don’t worry about the nurse, Mum. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You’ll get better.’
Then I thought about what she was saying. I couldn’t just let this go. Mum was frightened of dying and I had to be there for her. The time for pretence and niceties was over. For a while we talked about her illness, and what would happen to us, her kids, if she did not survive. I was dying myself, inside, but somehow I gathered the courage to talk her through it. I loved her so much, and when I left her bedside that day I kissed her and told her so.
I’m not proud to admit this, but it’s true. There was resentment, too. Why me? I whinged to myself. When is it going to be my time? When am I ever not going to feel oppressed, as if I’m carrying the weight of the world? When am I not going to have a sick mother and a violent drunk for a father? When am I ever not going to be responsible for Alison and Steve and have some fun and achieve something for myself?
In this selfish frame of mind, I didn’t visit Mum in the hospital as much as she would have liked me to. It was a relief to be away from illness. I turned twenty-one on 25 December 1981. Mum was in very bad shape now and in palliative care full time. Alison and Steve, aged thirteen and sixteen, were both staying with Mum’s sisters and, as you’d expect, proving a handful. Steve’s natural wild side was fuelled by the despair he was feeling over Mum, and he was getting into strife in the neighbourhood. I was angry that our circumstances meant I couldn’t have a coming-of-age party, like my mates were having. My twenty-first … a big event in any bloke’s life. The day when I officially became a man, when I figuratively got the key to the door … but, you see, I’d had the key for a decade by then. I was an old man at thirteen.
I went to the hospital on Christmas Day, for the first time in a couple of weeks, and I was angry when Mum gave me my birthday card. Instead of the long, loving inscription I’d hoped for, telling me how much I meant to her and what a good son I’d been through her illness, the card, with a picture of a vintage car on the front, contained just a few feebly scrawled words that I could scarcely decipher: ‘With lots of love & best wishes – From Mum xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx’. It actually hurt me to read it. I wanted a treasure and this was all I got.
What she wrote reflected how sick she was, but also, I think now, it betrayed her disappointment in me for staying away. I think this and I am ashamed. I still have that card. In its way it really is a treasure, and I look at her spidery writing, words that she wrote even though it must have been terribly hard for her to do so, and I reflect on it a lot.
It was Monday, 11 February 1982, when I was summoned to the hospital and Mum’s doctor told me that she did not have long to live. The doctor took me to her room and I sat beside Mum’s bed, holding her hand and talking to her even though she was full of drugs and could not hear me. She lay there still, wasted, tiny as a sparrow, breathing raspily, eyes closed, eyelids flickering. After a while I said, ‘Mum, Mum, it’s me, it’s me, James, and I love you.’ Suddenly she opened her eyes and stared straight into mine and she said, ‘Would you pass me a glass of water?’ By the time I’d run to fetch one and returned she was unconscious again. I couldn’t get another response from her. ‘Would you pass me a glass of water?’ were the last words my mother ever spoke. For a couple of hours more I sat there, until there came a gentle knock on the door and a priest entered and delivered the last rites. I didn’t want him there. I wanted to be alone with Mum. I stood as far away from him as I could get, wedged into a corner of the room, saying again and again, ‘Oh, my God … Oh, my God.’ Watching that ancient ritual, as the priest blessed this courageous dying woman, my mother, was unbearable.
Mum died the next day.
I noticed that there was a hospital cat lingering around the corridor by Mum’s room. I learned it had been hanging around for the past few days. They say that cats know when someone is about to die.
My mother’s funeral was at Sacred Heart, Darlinghurst. The day Mum passed away, John Ireland, my friend and mentor from St Vincent’s Hospital, said to me, ‘What will you do now? Where will you go?’
I told him that the first thing on my agenda, as the head of our family, was to arrange Mum’s funeral. John was magnificent. He came with me to the funeral home and we sat with the funeral director while he explained to us all the options. Few things can be as hard as trying to make important decisions when you’re consumed by grief. When the fellow showed me the range of coffins, I told him, ‘I don’t want an expensive casket, I just want Mum to have a decent funeral.’
She didn’t get one.
Two days after my mother died, and just before her funeral, my father telephoned me at home. I hadn’t heard from him since he had made a surprise visit to Mum’s hospital bed and I’d threatened to kick his arse, and the last time I’d seen him before that was when I threw him out of the house all those years ago. I recognised his simpering voice. ‘What have you organised for her funeral?’ he wanted to know. His attempt to pass himself off as a grieving widower was pathetic and unconvincing.
I was blunt. I didn’t waste time saying hello, just snapped down the line at him, ‘It’s all organised. That’s all you need to know.’
‘Well, where is it being held?’
I told him.
‘And what’s it costing?’
‘It’s eighteen hundred dollars,’ I said.
There was silence, then, ‘Eighteen hundred? Couldn’t you get anything cheaper than that?’
I exploded. ‘You bastard! You fucking pig! I don’t want you to pay for a fucking thing. I would never accept a cent from you! I never want to fucking lay eyes on you again.’ I hung up.
My father turned up at the church for the funeral service. He sat right at the back. He did not even have the guts to sit with Mum’s relatives, let alone his children. Not that he would have been welcomed by me. He was shaking, dishevelled and his eyes were red. This would have been caused not by sorrow, but by drinking
The priest who performed the eulogy had never known Mum. This did not stop him blathering on about what a good woman she had been in life, how she’d be missed, and that her death was all part of God’s master plan, and a bunch of other meaningless, perfunctory nonsense. The worst insult, though, was that he referred to her as ‘Mrs Dacks’, not Dack. He got her name wrong, he called her Mrs Dacks. I thought, You bastard … how dare you stuff up the name of the person you’re burying! How slack are you!
I sat in the pew with Steve and Alison and our relatives, and I tried to be strong and keep my emotions under control even though my mind was reeling with grief for my beautiful lost mother and the wrongs that had been done to her by life, by my father, by that priest. As he droned on, I was raving to myself, I hate my name, it’s my father’s name, the name he gave us all, and I hate it because I hate him … and now this prick of a priest can’t even get right the name I despise … The name Dack has a lot of respect attached to it today, thanks to Steve, Alison and me. We have dragged it kicking and screaming to some kind of honour and respectability, but then, to me anyway, because it was my father’s name, it was a curse.
Somehow I kept my emotions bottled up that day at the funeral because I have never wanted to impose my feelings about my father on Steve or Alison. What they felt when he was alive and what they feel now he is dead is their business. But they never saw the worst of that bastard.
I’m told some kids from my old school attended Mum’s funeral, but I honestly wouldn’t have a clue if they were there or not. I was too distraught and furious to notice anything. At the end of the service, we all split up. Mum was taken to the crematorium in a hearse. My brother and sister went to different aunts’ homes. One of Mum’
s relatives held a wake. I didn’t want to go, but I did. It was a disaster for me. People laughing and chatting and drinking beer and eating little sandwiches. I thought, This is not a celebration, for Christ’s sake … it’s a nightmare, a tragedy.
It was early evening when I left. Our house was empty. I made myself a cup of tea and sat quietly, thinking of Mum. All around me were reminders of her mighty struggle: her little bed by the table, her medicine, her plastic bucket. Maybe now she’s gone, I thought, there’ll be no more pain for us. Maybe Steve, Alison and I can move ahead and have a little serenity in our life. There was the matter of whether we’d be turfed out of our Housing Commission house but that was something I’d come to grips with tomorrow. I had a cry.
Emotionally and physically exhausted, I decided to get a good night’s sleep. I climbed the stairs to my bedroom at the front of the house and went to bed. Just as I was dozing off, I was startled awake by the sound of jack-hammering in the street below my window. This, of all nights, was the one the council had chosen to repair our road. I didn’t sleep a wink. At one point I began to laugh. How fitting is this! I thought. It’s fate. This is a cosmic shit storm. Then I said out loud, ‘Whoever the fuck you are out there doing this to me, mate, I am not going to break.’
[STEPHEN]
farewell to an angel
A month or two before Mum passed away, she had a final, useless bout of cobalt treatment to try to zap her cancer. James, Alison and I piled into her hospital room and found her sitting up in her bed looking for all the world like a plucked chicken. She was still beautiful to me. By then we were used to her shorn, battered, emaciated appearance and soon we were rubbing her head and making chicken noises at her, and she laughed and laughed.
My father, who was absent through most of my mother’s illness, was not used to seeing her like this and one day when he turned up at the hospital out of the blue it was too much for him. He buried his head in the bedclothes and wept. ‘I can’t stand seeing you like this,’ he wailed. My heart went out to him. James’s did not. He turned on Dad in a rage. ‘Look at you, you weak bastard! You’re responsible for Mum being sick in the first place. Now piss off out of here before I kick you out!’
The last time I saw Mum was a Tuesday afternoon after school in early February, 1982. James didn’t allow me to see her in her last days. One of my aunts – not the one who broke the news of my mother’s illness to me when I was eleven and told me that she was going to die – said that whenever she visited Mum in hospital, she’d be lying asleep with a smile on her face. I think she was saying that for my benefit, because apart from the plucked chicken day, Mum didn’t do much smiling. She died a horrible, painful death.
Over the years that she was on the downhill slide, I tried to put her plight out of my mind – refused to accept that she was dying – and was more concerned with living day to day, running riot in Woolloomooloo, rather than being with Mum in the time she had left.
My mother had hung on for so long, much longer than her doctor’s prognosis when she was diagnosed. Then, I think, after fighting cancer for over five years and realising she just didn’t have the strength to fight any longer, she said to herself, ‘You know what, I can’t do this anymore. I’ve reached full circle. It’s time for me to go,’ and she simply gave up and slipped away.
Of course I’d known that Mum was crook. For many years she’d been a tiny wraith of a woman, always sick, always tired. When I was a kid I had trouble remembering how she’d been before that. Fortunately today, when I think of Mum I don’t conjure up an image of a dying woman. I remember the happy, beautiful, sunny-faced Mum who hugged me and took me on outings and read me stories and kept a stiff upper lip even when she was copping hell from my father. The Mum who sang ‘Red Roses For A Blue Lady’.
The day she died, 12 February, was a blazing hot school day. When we were let out in the afternoon, a group of us ’Loo boys were hanging out and we decided to go into George Street in the city where there were video game arcades and multiplex cinemas, and with them the chance to meet girls or get into a rumble. I was running up William Street to catch the bus into town when I tripped and fell and twisted my ankle. I hobbled to one of my aunts’ homes, she lived nearby, and she sat me on her lounge and put ice on my ankle. While I was sitting there the phone rang and a chill ran through my body.
I knew this was bad news about Mum. Then my aunt confirmed it. My mother had passed away. I cried my heart out and fell asleep on the lounge.
Next morning I didn’t go to school. I went to Bondi Beach and lay on the sand and felt Mum’s presence flowing all around me, as warm and comforting as the summer sun.
That period between my mother’s death and her funeral and cremation was hard to bear. I could not help but picture her lying cold and alone and still on a morgue slab.
Mum’s funeral was on 16 February, my birthday, and I’ve not had a happy birthday since.
Sacred Heart was packed. There was Mum’s immediate family and her extended family, a weird and disparate assortment of people, many of whom I’d never laid eyes on. Many seemed to be limping, on crutches or otherwise incapacitated. Mum’s friends from Camperdown and Woolloomooloo and her many workplaces turned up to pay their respects. Dad sat alone at the very rear of the church, sobbing uncontrollably. About what? Mum? His shame? The happy life he had thrown away? He didn’t approach James, Alison or me, nor did we approach him. My whole school came to the funeral, and I felt embarrassed and a little self-conscious that they had. Next day at school, no one referred to it. I acted tough. In the ’Loo you play your cards close to your heart.
As if the day was not tragic and traumatic enough, when my godmother was dressing to come to Sacred Heart, her six-month-old son fell into the gap between his bed and the wall and suffocated.
After Mum’s funeral and cremation, I felt relief, for her and for me and James and Alison, that her long battle with cancer was finally over. Just knowing she was out of pain made her death easier to bear. I remember thinking, That’s a terrible stage of my life that’s over. Now it’s time to take on the game of life. I was ready for the jungle. I threw myself into my sport and my study. I partied like there was no tomorrow and was pretty much out of control. I often slept at mates’ homes or in the park. I was not going to die wondering what life was about.
I felt it was a sign that he believed I was growing up when James confided in me that we might be out on the street very soon. The Housing Commission was saying they would not let us stay in the house if we couldn’t pay the rent that Mum’s pension had covered. They wanted to evict us, have Alison and me put in some kind of official care, and let the house to someone else. To this day I despise government departments for their callous attitude to us after Mum died.
Florence Dack’s life didn’t amount to anything in terms of financial or social status, but she was one helluva mum.
My sole consolation when Mum died was that she knew how much I loved her, and how much James and Alison loved her. And we knew she loved us. My mother has been dead now for twenty-seven years and there is not a day when she has not inspired me and been as close as my heart.
The way I treat my loved ones today and will treat them as long as I live is the way she treated me. She taught me how to love. My memories of Mum are inviolable and give me what strength I have. I could not have succeeded in rugby league and boxing, in the law, in life itself, without her example and without her love. She still warms me like the summer sun.
[JAMES]
family enforcer
The showdown with the Housing Commission happened in the days after Mum’s death. I rang them and told them that Mum had passed away and that I intended to take over the house. The official I spoke to abruptly informed me that when my mother was alive our rent was subsidised. We paid $5 a week and the Housing Commission paid the balance because she was ill and had three dependants and was a single mum. But now that she had died, Housing Commission regulations decreed that I, as the head of the h
ousehold, would have to pay the considerably larger sum of one-hundred and twenty dollars a week. This was about all I earned at the hospital. It would leave no money for food, clothing, electricity, water, gas or anything else.
‘Now you’re going to have to pay proper money for the house,’ this bastard bureaucrat said, with a sneer in his voice. He was speaking to me as if we had committed a crime and he had caught us out. He showed not a shred of sympathy for our bereavement. My blood boiled and my immediate instinct was to slam down the phone and go to his office and rip his throat out. Instead I took a deep breath, put my hand over the receiver, and told myself, James, stay cool. Don’t blow this. Losing my temper would achieve nothing, except getting us tossed out onto the street. I said calmly, ‘ That’s fine, sir, you’ll get your rent right on time. I’ve had a steady job at St Vincent’s Hospital for more than three years. I guarantee you I won’t miss a payment.’ I replaced the receiver and thought, I can do this.
I did it by putting my head down and working long hard hours at the hospital. And there were times over the next few years when – without, of course, letting the Housing Commission know – I had to take in a lodger to make ends meet when we were more than usually strapped for cash.
This was incredibly stressful. Avoiding eviction was a week-to-week proposition, and I confess I resented that I wasn’t able to do a lot of the things that young men do, like take a holiday or, just for one night, be irresponsible. Alison and Steve, in particular, were not always easy to keep in check. Sometimes Steve took off for days and wouldn’t tell me where he’d been. He was running wild. Alison was spending more and more time with our mother’s relatives. When she was at home with us, she showed plenty of attitude, and after all she’d been through who can blame her?