The Healing Party

by Micheline Lee

  There was much to be done before the funeral the following day. I sat on the bed in my old room. Just two more minutes, I told myself, before I face the others again.

  The funeral program was shiny and gold like a Chinese New Year card. On the front was a photo of a young woman with sparkling eyes and alluring lips, posing in a silk cheongsam. Bust out and shoulders back, she held a long-stemmed rose in one graceful hand. Her rich black hair was gathered up in a bun, a few tendrils falling loose around her face.

  Of all the photos we had of Mum, Dad’s choice was this glamour shot taken when they were courting in Hong Kong almost forty years ago. My sisters agreed with Dad’s choice. The photo I would have chosen for the program was taken at Mum’s last outing to St Kilda beach. When they rejected this photo, I blurted out that choosing an image of her as a 23-year-old instead of the person she was before she died was like saying she was no longer beautiful. Dad looked away, hurt. Anita told me to shut my mouth, that I never had anything constructive to say.

  I liked Mum’s hair in the St Kilda photo. It was before she got the wig. Sea winds had tousled the thin tufts, giving her a messy, boyish charm. Her face was beautiful and determined, though age and illness had sucked the vigour away and left her skin worn and pale. Only her eyes remained bright. ‘You should always make your eyes look big for photos,’ she had said. Exaggerating, she had widened her eyes as Maria clicked the camera. I picked up the photo and held it to my face. I couldn’t stop crying.

  Dad was to give the eulogy. He would tell the congregation that when he married Mum, she had been the belle of Hong Kong. He would say that her life was a testament to faith, a faith as strong as rock, and she was truly a saint. He was going to have me read out a passage from 1 Corinthians 13 that he said embodied her saintliness: ‘Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.’ I scribbled notes in an exercise book. There was something I needed to say. But my notes were incoherent. I flung down the pen.

  I placed side by side in front of me the program photo of Mum at twenty-three and the photo of her taken at St Kilda beach. Both photos captured her beautiful lopsided smile. But now I could see the essential difference. When she was young, the tilt in her smile was born of uncertainty. When she was older, it had deepened into a quality of eternal endurance and hope.

  She smiled most at prayer meetings, but her eyes were glazed, her shoulders stiff and raised. There was an overwrought quality to it. That was her public smile. I never trusted it. When she caught my eye, I would demonstrate this to her with a withering, resentful expression. I regretted that now.

  I tried to think of the times I had seen Mum happy. I could recall her joy when Dad gave his life to Jesus, and when Anita gave birth to Will. I remembered how in our early teens, when Dad was in his studio and we thought Mum was watching TV, Maria, Patsy and I would closet ourselves away in my bedroom. On went the radio, tuned into one of the stations Dad disapproved of. Maria would start thrashing around like a lunatic to the music. When Patsy and I weren’t on the floor convulsed with laughter, we were trying to follow Maria’s moves. On two or three of these occasions, I saw Mum standing outside in the dark night, peeping through my window at us, thinking she couldn’t be seen. How happy and at ease she had looked, watching us!

  I had dreamt of her last night. She was sitting shyly by the altar in our large rectangular church. Wearing a shawl over her patient’s gown, she looked just as she had the last time I saw her in hospital. This time, however, her face and body were relaxed, without the stiffening that pain forced on her. The line to greet her travelled down the centre aisle, all the way back to the doors of the church.

  I stood in the line as well, not too far back, my eyes always on her. I was content to wait and admire the poise and the sweetness with which she greeted each parishioner. When I reached her, she smiled and gently raised her hand to my face. With the back of her hand, she brushed my cheek. I could feel her touch. Immersed in my dream, I felt joy that she was still alive, that we had another chance to put things right. But then I saw the sadness in her face and I became aware that she was dead. I woke up, my face wet with tears.

  Since Mum died, I’d had a stone in my stomach, weighing me down with the knowledge that I’d let her down.

  I could hear Anita in the kitchen. I made myself go in there to speak to her. She was taking baking pans from the oven and counting them. I could tell from looking at her that she was angry. After tomorrow’s funeral, the congregation would come back to the house for lunch. ‘Twelve baking pans. That should be enough. We won’t need as many as we did for the healing party,’ she said.

  Traces of the party from six weeks before were still all through the house. No one had taken down Dad’s handmade posters. ‘Don’t remove them, they’re so cute,’ he had said. Stuck to the front gate a faded poster with an arrow said This Way for a Miracle. We hadn’t even returned the crates of glasses borrowed from the parish hall. In the backyard, the ramp to salvation leant against the back fence.

  Anita clanged the pans down on the table. ‘Line these pans with alfoil, will you,’ she said over her shoulder, her voice sharp. ‘Then mop the floors and make Dad a hot drink and some banana loaf with butter.’ I lined the first pan. ‘You’re using way too much foil!’ she barked. She wouldn’t look at me.

  Realising there was no right time to talk, I forced myself to begin. ‘I was wondering if something happened at the hospital while I was away that I don’t know about,’ I said.

  Anita gave a dismissive snort.

  My voice was shaky. ‘I mean, it sounded from the phone calls that everything was pretty much the same as before I left. Did anything change – her diagnosis, her medication, anything?’

  She opened the freezer and started rummaging through its contents. ‘Probably not,’ she finally said.

  I picked up the pan I was lining and moved closer to her. ‘What about her pain level?’

  ‘Same, I guess.’

  ‘She was up early as usual, greeting visitors all day, going to mass, was she?’ I was nervous and speaking too fast. ‘You still had the prayer meetings and someone always stayed the night with her?’

  ‘Yep.’ Anita’s tone was mocking.

  ‘Was she eating normally?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And what was her mood like?’

  Anita slammed the freezer door shut and swung around. ‘Look, what’s this about?’ she said. The bitterness in her eyes stunned me.

  I took a step back. ‘I just wanted to know if Mum was going downhill,’ I said. ‘Because if she was, why didn’t anyone say anything to me?’

  Anita exhaled loudly. ‘Don’t think you can just come back and start interrogating us.’ She paced back and forth, opening and slamming cupboards. ‘You think we had the time to report back to you? Who do you think you are? If you’re so concerned, you shouldn’t have left, should you!’ Picking up a stack of plates, she stalked out of the kitchen.

  I brought Dad his afternoon tea in the family room. He was sitting in the easy chair with Maria behind him, massaging his head, her fingers weaving in and out of his hair. If we felt compelled to protect him like a child when he was happy and rejoicing, the drive to protect him when he was sad was even stronger. None of us could bear to see Dad lowered by grief, that urging voice quietened, the blaze in his eyes dulled. We offered him his favourite foods, said the things he liked to hear, and my sisters, particularly Maria, gave him the treats he craved. Now his hair was dishevelled, his thick lips softly open and his heavy-lidded eyes wet and sensual from the massage. At the sight of his pleasure, even though I knew it was unfair, a jolt of hatred shot through me.

  Maria rubbed Dad’s scalp with clinical detachment. Her lips were pursed, her jaw was tense and her eyes were on the alert for how she might be useful next. There was something particularly distant and dissociated about her, and I thought about the strength and control she had needed to be alone with Mum while she died, to be the one to
tell the rest of the family and wait for them to arrive.

  ‘Sing it again,’ Dad said to Patsy, who was kneeling on the carpet next to the altar, playing her guitar. Patsy looked lost, her voice was thin and eerie. When Patsy wasn’t singing, she was eating – bread, cakes, chocolate, all the things Mum had wanted her to enjoy.

  The phone rang. Anita spoke to the funeral director. Mum’s body had been delivered to the church. ‘I want to see her,’ I said. Maria volunteered to go along with me.

  *

  The coffin was in an annex on one side of the church foyer. We waited for the caretaker to arrive with the keys to the door of the annex. It was cold inside the high brick walls of the church. The light was bleak, but we were hidden from the gaze of passers-by. Outside, the wind blew and we could hear the pop of balls and an occasional exclamation from the tennis court next door.

  I was grateful that Maria had come along to support me. She walked around the foyer, picking up pamphlets and hymn books that parishioners had scattered on tables and benches on their way out after mass.

  ‘Can you sit down for a minute and talk, Maria?’ I said. I sat on a vinyl padded bench next to the annex door. ‘You were the only one with Mum when she died. Can you tell me what happened?’

  ‘Why do you ask me? No one else has.’ Maria said. Holding a pile of hymn books, she walked over. I slid across the bench so that she could sit down. She remained standing.

  ‘I wish I had been with her. I need to know,’ I said. ‘I spoke to her that morning. It was just our usual conversation. She didn’t say anything about feeling worse.’

  Maria looked down at the books. We avoided each other’s eyes, as we usually did in my family. ‘The nurses that day were not nice. They kept wanting Mum to have more morphine,’ she said.

  ‘Why? Was she in pain?’

  ‘No. Well, she might have been, but she wouldn’t know because they kept giving her more drugs.’

  ‘What? Do you mean topping up the dose? I was with Mum once when she complained to the nurse about that. The nurse said you had to do it to stop breakthrough pain.’

  ‘But maybe her pain had gone and she didn’t need any morphine,’ Maria said.

  ‘What makes you think her pain would have gone? Obviously the doctors didn’t think that.’

  Her eyes flickered. ‘You know that’s the way they euthanise people in hospital – morphine?’

  Euthanasia. That was on the Charismatics’ list of pet issues, along with abortion and homosexuality. ‘What are you saying? That they euthanised her?’

  ‘Maybe …’ Maria wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Not really.’

  I rubbed my face. I wanted to shake Maria out of her fog. ‘Then why did you bring it up?’

  ‘Hospitals do it all the time … Never mind.’

  ‘If you seriously think that the nurses were giving Mum too much morphine, then we should talk to the hospital.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Maria said, and walked to the other side of the foyer. She wandered around, arranging the books on the trolley and the pamphlets on the wall shelves.

  When she was done, she walked over to me. ‘What did you want to ask?’ she said. Her eyes were more focused, her voice less dreamy.

  ‘What happened when she died?’

  Maria looked down at her hands. ‘Mum woke up coughing blood. I called the nurse.’

  ‘What time was it?’

  ‘Around three.’

  ‘How much blood was Mum coughing up?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She was coughing into a towel. It was soaked red with her blood.’

  I was too shocked to say anything. My heart raced.

  Maria did a half-turn and gazed out at the foyer. I worried that she was going to walk away again. ‘Did the nurse come?’ I asked.

  ‘Two of them came. They checked her airways, gave her something to stop the coughing, cleaned her up.’

  ‘Was she suffering? Was she in pain?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. She started to panic at the coughing and the blood. But I got her to hold my hand and told her that God loved her and everything was all right. She calmed down. She became unconscious.’

  ‘How long was she awake before that?’

  ‘I’m not sure. An hour? The nurse told me to ring the family. Dad and the others only arrived after she died. We sat around her. Her mouth was still wide open from trying to breathe. I held her face and forced her mouth closed.’ She cupped her hands around an imaginary jaw and pushed it.

  I was finding it difficult to breathe. Maria turned around, about to walk away.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Did Mum say anything before she became unconscious?’

  ‘We started to pray the rosary together, then she couldn’t say anything more.’

  ‘Do you think she knew she was dying? Was there anything she said that day, before she went to bed?’

  Maria hung her head. ‘After evening prayers she asked if Dad could stay the night as well as me. But I said no, Dad needed to be well rested so he could be in good health for her.’

  Voices outside startled us – cheery voices. The caretaker was talking with a tennis player.

  ‘Thank you, Maria. You gave Mum a lot of comfort. I’m so glad you were there when she died. Thank you,’ I said.

  Emotion filled Maria’s eyes for a moment. She sat down. For a while we were silent, seated side by side. Then she coughed, stood up and started searching again for things to tidy.

  We heard a quick step and whistling, and the caretaker, old but sprightly, bounded up the entrance steps. He apologised for being late, commented on the warm, windy weather and unlocked the annex.

  The room was small and dim. Chairs stacked high up against one wall tilted forward. It struck me how the casket gleamed. The wood of the box and the steel handles were so polished that they looked wet.

  Maria and I lifted the lid. It was surprisingly light. We stepped back. Mum’s body lay stiff and straight, dressed in the same gown she’d worn at the healing party. Her hands were clasped below her breast. A white sheet covered her lower half. The skin was hers, so were the brows, the hair and lips, the hands, the shape – but it was all wrong. I wanted to close my eyes so that this false image would not infiltrate my memories of her. At the same time, I could not look away. The funeral worker had somehow wrested away signs of her sickness and pain. Her twisted neck and torso had been smoothed out, the bloat in her stomach flattened and her legs stretched out, straight and firm. Loud, awful sobs erupted from me.

  Calm and dry-eyed, Maria hugged me and I held onto her. ‘Now I remember,’ Maria said. ‘“What beautiful children I have!” That’s what Mum said before she died.’

  She poked through her handbag, pulled out a tube of Mum’s pale-pink lipstick and told me to put it on her lips. First I touched Mum’s cold cheek with my hand, then I drew the lipstick over lips that were as hard as cured clay. I apologised to Maria for being unable to stop crying.

  *

  Sitting next to Maria as she drove us home in her car, a realisation grew in me. I turned to Maria. ‘Mum didn’t really say what you said before she died, did she? I mean, she didn’t say, “What beautiful children I have,” did she?’

  She kept her eyes on the road as if she had not heard.

  ‘I know you mean well. But there was no need to say that.’

  Maria put her window down all the way and then back halfway up. She started to cough and wipe her face. I had forgotten how much hayfever affected her.

  ‘I’m not saying that she didn’t think we were beautiful,’ I continued. ‘It’s just that it’s not the kind of thing Mum would say.’

  ‘She did. Something like it,’ Maria mumbled. She wouldn’t say anything more after that.

  Before we turned into the driveway, I asked her another question. ‘Are you moving back into your place after the funeral?’

  ‘Dad wants me to stay,’ Maria said.

  ‘You’d be mad to move in with Dad,’ I said.


  She didn’t say anything.

  *

  As soon as we got home, Anita told me to mow the back lawn. Tomorrow would be a fine day, and we planned to set up tables in the backyard. I went outside. The neat, open spaces of the backyard surprised me. In my thoughts, it hadn’t been cleared; it was still the backyard of my childhood, impenetrable and infested with weeds, cacti and junk. I dragged the mower out of the shed. On the open stretch of grass, it moved steadily, cutting the lawn into long, neat strips. Then I got to the back fence and had to struggle, pushing and pulling back and forth and sideways to skirt around the cacti and the ramp. The old mower was powerful in my hands, its clatter and roar loud enough to obliterate thoughts, but still they came – a towel soaked in her blood, her mouth open and gasping for air, a premonition that made her ask for Dad to stay.

  The wind was dusty and irritating. I lunged too close to the cacti and fantasised about slamming into their evil thorns. Instead I rammed into the ramp. The impact cut the engine, dislodged a plank and threw me backwards. I ran to the shed and grabbed the first tool I saw, a pick. I liked the feel of the long wooden handle in my hands and the weight of the metal head at the end.

  I returned to the ramp and raised the pick above my head. Chop, chop, chop, it hacked into the ramp. One plank started to cave in. Anita was out of the back door in a flash. She strode towards me.

  ‘What do you think you are doing?’ she shouted.

  ‘It’s hard to mow around the ramp,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t just destroy it. It’s Dad’s ramp.’

  ‘It was supposed to be Mum’s salvation ramp, actually.’

  Anita’s eyes narrowed. ‘Just shut up and put that pick down.’

  Patsy came out and stood next to Anita. I dropped the pick. ‘I don’t know why Mum died,’ I said. ‘Why did Mum die?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Anita said. ‘She had cancer.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But no one was expecting her to die. You all said she was getting better. I need to know how this happened.’