After

by Nikki Gemmell

  *

  Ticky’s birthday will be scarred from now on as the memory trigger for the final time we saw Elayn. Every year, as another birthday clocks over for him, we as a family will remember the death of my mother too. Can I forgive her for that? For that beautiful boy, now broken at the news that his life-brimmed enthusiast is gone. Elayn gave him unjudging love, as grandparents do. And as much as I love my children, unstintingly and constantly, it sometimes feels like I can never give them enough – that there’s a great open wound with each of them at times that I’m pouring my love into. What is going on in there?

  I sensed, often with Elayn, that there was some great wound there too. But she wouldn’t let me in. My need for some kind of spoken love from her never let up. I was forever the little girl wanting to be loved, butting my heart fruitlessly against a brick wall. Now, I hold my children close. Tell them I love them, constantly; get ‘love you’ back.

  Our little family. This is love. This is everything. All I have now. I’ve parented differently to Elayn. Existed within a marriage differently. Have watched and learnt and spent decades acting in opposition. No, daughters do not necessarily become their mothers.

  *

  Boh cries out in his sleep in whimpery pain. I press closer, jam my body to his; want him to know the solace of maternal warmth even as he slumbers. Coiled anger, wolfish, at what my mother has done on this day. To all of us. So many people to look after here, in the aftermath; so many mysteries to work out. All around us, a wide, uncertain sheet of ice, cracking and bowing, that cannot support our weight. Did Elayn think of the consequences of her actions for all those around her, the children as well as the adults? Children more than adults. Her mother, Win, used to say Elayn had a lack of empathy for some of us. Her theory: that her daughter was always the centre of attention as the stunningly beautiful child; that the world revolved around her, always had; so many of her family enabled it.

  Elayn barely saw Win in her final years.

  11

  I’m not good at being alive right now. I’m not sure I can be pieced together in any way that resembles a former self. My brain is not working properly, it feels like I’ve had an axe blow through the head that will never completely heal. What is needed, a holiday from uncertainty. Instead, there is brittleness. Snappiness. With everything. As I walk the days, pick up kids, shop for groceries, drive. Nervy, jumpy, a collision in my head of too much. I cannot do gatherings, crowds, am abandoning commitments, forgetting to return emails and calls; forgetting a friend’s gallery opening, a birthday lunch. I’ve lost my writing confidence, it no longer sings; sentences won’t come; the brain will not grind into gear. The well of words is depleted, I am bankrupt. In a typical instant I can’t find the name of the type of cheese you put on pasta or a synonym for the word ‘reduced’; it is as if a massive short-circuiting is spitting and fizzing across every aspect of my life. Editors, readers, a wider world knowing nothing. All around me are writers losing their jobs or being asked to work for a pittance or nothing; this is no time to be trashing a column gig. Yet it is so hard to go on; to work through the weekly slog of fresh thought when there is none. I can’t talk confidently at newspaper functions like I used to, can’t find buoyancy. I’m angering old friends who don’t seem to understand the depth of the blow, but how could they? Prickly and shelled, hollowed and felled.

  *

  I should have been at the coalface of the situation, right beside Elayn. And not just ringing and emailing but banging on her door. But I wasn’t. Too busy, distracted, the child always listening to the parent and accepting meekly what they said; the child not questioning and not grown up enough. I couldn’t bear to hear Elayn’s wish to die early, at the time of her choosing. It seemed too easy and defeatist and selfish. I wanted the formal certainties of the old ways of death and life; everything in its time and place. But Mum wanted a different certainty.

  Pain was overruling everything. Veering her destiny. Robbing us of her. Winning.

  *

  Constable B couldn’t spell my suggested cause of death as I was hunched on the bottom kitchen step, rammed into the wall. ‘Euth – in – asia?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s euth – an – asia.’ I carefully sounded the letters out. ‘And I’m only just getting my head around that myself.’

  As the questions bulleted into me, ping, ping, ping. ‘How long had your mother been planning this?’ ‘Do you have any idea of her mind frame?’ ‘Did she talk to you about pills?’ ‘Did you help her with anything that would have enabled her to do this?’

  All these questions fired at me, and darting among them, all the questions I had of myself:

  ‘Why did Mum drop this on us?’ ‘Why no indication of her utter despair towards the end?’ ‘Why didn’t she leave us a note, if only to say she loved us?’ ‘Did she have any idea of the emotional depth charges her actions would detonate within so many lives?’ ‘Why didn’t she let us in?’

  *

  Catapulted into crisis. As surely as a hysterectomy launches the menopause. Ticky, Boh and I watch the film Still Alice, needing a distraction from all of this. An academic specialising in language falls under the bus of early onset dementia. ‘That’s you, Mum,’ my sons joke. I can’t laugh. There’s a creeping sense of panic, a tide coming in. Ahead, a drowning. And it will be a silent one; like a submarine sinking beneath the surface. As I hold myself together for everyone else.

  *

  Perhaps in the end Elayn thought it easier to just go it alone without the shambles of familial complication. To take matters into her own hands without the emotional clutter of all of us.

  *

  ‘What was it exactly: empowerment, or despair?’ I posed the question in my weekly column. A woman who had tried to commit suicide by overdosing with pills wrote in answer:

  Nikki, the reason people commit suicide is simply the suffering is so great you cannot bear it another minute. It’s as simple as that. You don’t think about the devastating effect it’s going to have on your loved ones because of the level of suffering you are in. It’s not empowerment, it’s despair. You don’t think of how it will hurt your family – perhaps for life – because your level of suffering is so great you cannot bear to live another minute.

  Perhaps, perhaps, that is closest to the truth.

  *

  British comedian Caroline Aherne, commenting on her suicide attempt when she mixed three bottles of champagne with antidepressants: ‘I actually have no recollection of it. Finding out what I’d done was like finding out I’d stabbed fifteen people. I would never knowingly hurt people in that way.’

  *

  With her final act Elayn has altered my future. She had been attempting to do this since my teenage years, to mould me into something I didn’t want to be. It was easy for so long to shake her intentions off; I was wilful, stubborn, strong; knew who I wanted to be and was able to veer along my own, very particular, path. But finally, with this, she’s got me. She has crushed me.

  Wanting, now, to shed people, complexity, the cram of chatter and especially questions, so many questions about what happened. I don’t want to talk, to explain, can’t soothe others in their grief because I need soothing myself. My nights are harangued by too much in my head and I’ve never known sleeplessness like this. Then days, the poking and prying of chinwag. As Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.’

  ‘How did Elayn die?’ ‘What did the coroner say?’ ‘When can we find out?’ ‘Why are police involved?’ ‘You must ring me when you have news. I must know.’

  Carry me in on a stretcher from this experience, carry me in. I’ve no strength for it. For them. The village gossips, present and past, poking and plucking, cawing and crowing, from various pockets of Elayn’s life and all out now in fulsome force. No strength for the gossipy beaky pry of them, for their endless phone calls asking if I’m okay but then slipping into the nub of what they really, actually, want. ‘What rea
lly happened? I need to know.’ And not only them but friends, neighbours, colleagues, everyone; overwhelmingly, everyone.

  *

  Flinched. That my mother killed herself. That it reflects too much on me, on our failures as a family. I do not want spectacle, accusation, judgment. ‘Elayn died in her sleep. We’re waiting on the results of the autopsy. Then we’ll have a clearer picture.’ Too easy to say, and technically true. But I’m shying away from flinty honesty. Only my closest mates know the damning details; they’re the only ones I have the courage for.

  *

  Right now, all I want is to be enveloped by our house’s shielding embrace. But the doorbell rings again and again, people drop in spontaneously, there are flower deliveries, scented candles, books, emails, texts. Meals, so many meals, mainly spaghetti bolognese; one friend from school places rose petals on the plastic lid. The bounteousness of community; the reason why we returned from London after all the years of exile, and it is good, so good, affirming. We are strong in this world and this world is strong around us. But I am drowning in the midst of it. No one knows. Not even Andrew. I am holding it together. For all of us. Huddled against the world.

  *

  On the final Sunday evening of Elayn, I had driven her to our house for a shower after dinner. On the way through the rabbit warren of local streets we had paused again and again as neighbours were greeted, out on footpaths and verandahs for the sunset and their dogs. Elayn, in the passenger seat, commented, ‘You have such a community around you, Nik. It’s good.’ Did that drive, like the joyous dinner, enable her final act in some small, accumulative way? Enable her to leave us, thinking this, that we’re strong, we’d be all right? But I’m not. I’m not, Mummy, I’m not.

  *

  Still the flowers come and the candles and the meals that no longer fit in our fridge. A week later, two. I feel guilty, teary, swamped; don’t want to explain, talk, but it’s the expected transaction here. It’s all too much. It’s all lovely and caring and affirming but we’re weighted down by blooms, the house looks like a funeral parlour, it’s crushing in on us, all the jugs and buckets have been requisitioned as vases as well as every surface. A longing for clean, clear space. The known again. That lovely swell of normality when your world feels plumed and I’m not sure that it can ever be back.

  *

  Secrets and lies. No, I do not want my children to know there’s a suicide in the family, particularly the older ones, the teenagers. Will it rub off on them? Unhinge some deep-seated and destructive vulnerability? My eldest sons are on the cusp of adulthood. They were tinderboxes of bravado and vulnerability, tenderness and strop even before Elayn’s death – volcanically hormonal combinations of anguish and explosion under immense academic pressure at a selective school. Elayn killed herself a week before their big end of year exams. And we live by a sheer sandstone cliff towering over crashing surf. One Christmas Eve four men dangled their legs off the edge and jumped. A pact. One survived.

  ‘Nonna died in her sleep.’

  *

  I need to cave our little family, protect all of us from the onslaught of exhaustion, weeping, whispers; want to cave myself. The Victorians had the right idea, retreating and mourning their loved ones for six months or a year or several; as does Judaism, with its one-year period of mourning that is only, specifically, for the loss of a parent, because it believes it’s a particularly striking absence which requires a longer period of adjustment than for anyone else. A clear stretch of time, specifically for immersing yourself in gratitude for all that your deceased parent gave you. Gratitude for all that they did to shape you. I owe Mum that.

  *

  Mothers sacrifice so much for their children and get little thanks for it. What shapes us, as mothers, is whether we’re accepting of this truth or not. Mothers are adept at surrender. Or are expected to be. They begin our story. Shape it like no other. Elayn’s determination to escape her predetermined destiny was the pathway for me to a world of books and writing. I was not to leave school early, not to be denied uni, not to marry a coalminer, not to disappear into a world of suburbia, not to be nibbled away at, the woman’s lot. All, all, Elayn’s gifts.

  *

  The sending off to Susie Elelman’s Deportment Classes in Wollongong to walk with books on my head. The physical straightening of my bookworm’s back with a curt, admonishing hand – ‘stop slumping,’ ‘sit straight.’ The personal business cards Elayn had printed up for my eighteenth birthday which I never used, I was too embarrassed. All this shaping helped me land a radio cadetship at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation because I’d learnt to elocute thanks to years of Verse Speaking Eisteddfods. My brothers speak differently, as if from another world; this was noted, wondrously, by various Sydneysiders at Elayn’s funeral. I was the one hanging on by the coat-tails to the Great Acceleration. Yet from mid-teens onwards, there was no effusive gratitude. There was no passionate cry of ‘I love you so much,’ as I had at the morgue. If I could have one more minute of her, just one, I’d make amends.

  *

  Elayn was my anchor to a world of Home, and the point of resistance to be escaped from. The anchor to which I returned to five years ago after fifteen years in exile. Andrew and I had both loved the freedom of the expat’s life because away you’re the giddy cleanskin, whereas at home you can never completely escape your past. Away, you can reinvent yourself, do what you really want to do; be, finally, yourself – for you’re not constantly judged and admonished by those close to you. The anonymity of the exile is exhilarating and liberating because away, you can step into your true self. I found that. So did Elayn.

  Now she is gone. I am free of her, free of all of it. There is no need to be here anymore. I can go anywhere now, unanchored. The end is the start and I cannot bear it. Do not know where a belonging is anymore.

  Need a skinful of new air. Need to hide. Disappear. Repair.

  12

  Several days later. Wandering through the flat. Paul and myself. Looking for clues, Elayn’s mind frame, a sign. Any subtlety that the police may have missed. But nothing. No grand gesture. No last-minute tidying up, no hidden note just for us. So we search again. Like forensic detectives or debt collectors looking for something, anything, with assessing eyes; and this presses heavily upon us, that we are here, doing this. Struck, too, by how little is actually salvageable here. A lifetime of spectacular living, reduced to this. The flat was crammed with almost forty years of Elayn’s world and now she is gone and it astonishes my brother and I how quickly an entire life can be silenced. Packed up, swept away, a fully lived existence reduced to a few boxes, if that.

  It is bleak work. Weighted with sadness. We are not good at this.

  *

  Clothes, good clothes, hang on Elayn’s cupboard door. Coffin clothes. Right. Yes. A sign, surely? Just one. Or is it? Elayn’s signature red lipstick is on her dressing table as if left there in readiness, or perhaps as the daughter who’d observed Elayn’s life I’m just instinctively stepping into her world here, her thinking. Learning her rhythms, habits, idiosyncrasies of home life, guessing them correctly because I’m a Chinese whisper of her.

  *

  Paul and I work swiftly, checking the kitchen cupboards and garage for perishables. Everything feels lonely now. Elayn loved a bargain and there are stacks and stacks of washing powder cartons and toilet paper packets that have been on special somewhere; waiting for a long future life, a future apocalypse, and now mocking us.

  *

  What is lost: Sunday roast dinners with their perfectly crunchy potatoes in duck fat that we’ve never been able to replicate. Elayn stopped doing big family meals in my late teens, couldn’t wait to dive into another life, a released life. Yet forever onwards she carried the promise of those roast dinners. She did everything well, perfectly, including cooking; yet this doesn’t mean she enjoyed it. Anything involving domestic life. The Chinese whisper, each to each: we both considered domesticity as time stolen from doing something e
lse. A wider life.

  *

  What is lost: The anticipation of what Elayn would be wearing. It was often striking. Beautifully pressed. Accessorised with an extravagantly ruffled jacket, crisp collar, audacious necklace. There was always a pop of colour – usually red – and that increased most joyously with the encroaching years, as if to say ‘I’m still here!’ No slinking off into invisibility for this one. Her style was always instructive to others and myself, meticulously chosen, considered; a sign of inner vibrancy. One must never let oneself go. I was proud of her whenever she was introduced to friends or colleagues who didn’t know her. I felt enhanced belonging to her. She was the cool mum.

  *

  Andrew and I and the kids had not been invited to this flat, as a family, at any time during the last five years of Elayn’s life. I’d only been in it on and off, briefly, if a task needed doing.

  Several years ago, Elayn was in hospital. A seizure had been triggered by an accidental overdose of the drug Thyroxin, which she took every day following the removal of her cancerous thyroid. She asked me to go into her flat and retrieve a phone charger.

  It was the first time I’d been inside for a long, long time. There’d been many years of frustration about never being allowed back into my old teenage world, of resentment building up like silt, because she visited our house for dinner on a regular basis yet never reciprocated. I turned her house key in its familiar, tricky combination involving two locks and a gentle push, a procedure I’d known since my childhood years that was coming back to me as surely as riding a bicycle after decades. I pushed open the heavy door into a world I’d left for good at eighteen.