After

by Nikki Gemmell

  *

  At the end of her life Elayn lost her sense of joy. Pain crushed out everything that had characterised her. Optimism, independence, vibrancy, audacity, glee.

  *

  Elayn and I were the only two females of the family and should have been allies. We never were. It was more competitive than that; about allegiances, with my father most of all. My raw, wounded soul, too big and hurting for all this; years and years of aching soul. Because mothers weren’t meant to be like this.

  *

  She never said I love you. Even in her final email couldn’t bring herself to say it. Perhaps she felt it would reduce her, diminish her. Cause her to cede, just a touch, a cherished sense of control.

  Our entire life together, as mother and daughter: a battle for control.

  *

  Stories start here, in the abandonment of the child by the parent, in the pulling away of the child from the mother. My journals only record the hurting times because stories inherently seek drama. But there were bounteous times too, and I have not recorded those. As Philip Larkin wrote, ‘What will survive of us is love’, and I have to hold on to that. Non-fiction is never as neat as fiction. There is so much that is inexplicable, that doesn’t follow known patterns, that trips up and surprises. Elayn had the capacity to buoy me like no other person. That was her secret and her power. And she did, oh she did. All it took was the gift of attention.

  *

  I couldn’t understand the tricks and barbs of a maternal terrorist. And then, of course, she’d come back. Like my last birthday with her, when she asked me to be there for her during the foot operation. And I was, of course I was. To be needed is a fundamental human desire.

  *

  Whatever happens with my own children, I never want them to be unsure of my love. Elayn was not so vigilant. ‘I raised you in the Dr Spock era,’ she told me once, as if by way of apology, ‘it was different then.’ Doris Lessing wrote of her mother, ‘We were engaged in bitter warfare all the time.’ Elayn and I didn’t have the relentlessness of that, there were periods of great mateship, but we were two strong women battling for ascendency. Yet I loved her too much during the fraught times to let her go entirely. Do problematic mothers brew writers? The anger that first flint into finding your voice. But I am conscious of the fact that this book only tells one side of a story, as women have so often only told one side of this story. Simone de Beauvoir, Helen Garner, Germaine Greer, Miles Franklin, Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante.

  *

  Paul thinks Elayn suffered from depression on and off throughout her life. That she would have been a different woman – would have parented differently – if Prozac had been available in the sixties and seventies. And we all would have had different lives.

  *

  I was scared to come too close to her. My mother bewildered me. But mothers aren’t meant to do that. Our adult relationship, for much of it, could be described as ‘thinness’. Thinness of coming together, thinness of bonding, a tragedy of thinness.

  *

  I struggle to write, for months after the death. Columns, novel, this book, anything. It feels like Elayn has hijacked me. I can no longer work like I used to. She was never sure of my writing and this felling, now, feels deliberate. I struggle to find cohesion, unable to piece anything together, losing flow. Failing, falling.

  *

  I’d always mute myself with apology. Didn’t have it in me to attack with that most wounding weapon of all, silence. With her final act Elayn has destroyed me. I fought for so long not to have her get to me. She has triumphed. I have lost. I am blindsided.

  By love.

  15

  An elderly woman’s fear of nursing homes. A model’s fear of aging and all its irreversible failings. Elayn rarely visited her own mother, Win, when she was placed in a home in her late nineties. I had put Win there, along with my two brothers and Win’s daughter-in-law. We were tasked with determining her care as Elayn wanted nothing to do with it. And so Winnifred McNee, the Barnardos child who went on to be a jillaroo, nanny and lift operator in an exuberantly lived life, did not go gentle into that good home. And suddenly, after a lifetime of chuff towards her grandchildren, there was anger. How did it come to this?

  *

  Win was born in London’s East End while her mother was in service. Her mother struggled to raise her and when Win was five she sent her off to a children’s home in Hackney. Aged eleven, Win was shipped across the world to Western Australia’s Fairbridge Farm School. She hauled herself away from the expectations of the powers that be – that she was destined for a life of domestic service – by using a fine mind and an inclusive sociability. After two husbands, three children and varied, satisfying work she found herself alone, deliciously, in her own flat, purchased from hard-earned funds; the one thing to show for a life fully lived.

  Yet in Win’s final years, she often returned to that sense of bewilderment she felt as a child. She couldn’t release the past, and suddenly her beloved grandchildren were reminding her of it most cruelly with their actions. Because at the very end of her life we were putting her back in an institutional home. From ninety-eight onwards she had been in hospital a lot. Could barely get out of bed by herself, struggled to dress and shower; her mind was sparky but the body failing. ‘There’s no dignity in getting old, Nik.’ During a lengthy hospital bout, mainly for constipation, medical staff told us it was time for a nursing home – Win could no longer use the hospital as a nursing facility. She indicated to all of us that yes, it was time.

  But the day before Win was due to go into the home: nightmare, she dug in her heels. Snapped that she didn’t want it, we weren’t listening. The hospital called a family conference; all the way through it Win covered her ears, crying out, ‘Stop talking, too loud, all of you.’ The mess of it. Over days, weeks. Doctors and social workers explained she couldn’t go back to her flat; Win had reached a critical stage in her care regime and needed a lot of help. We family members were swamped, couldn’t think straight, wanted to do the right thing by Win but also her carers. I was shovelling baby mush into a stunned five year old’s mouth and only realising my mistake when I caught my daughter’s expression; the food was meant for her little brother. Elayn had no idea of the enormity of the stress the rest of us were under; she kept her distance. But she was hearing dribs and drabs. Dreading no doubt the moment when her time, too, would come. Like this.

  *

  What was learnt: That extreme stress, at any age, can be caused by a loss of control. Win had lost control of her life. Momentous decisions were being made without her say. What was also learnt: that strong, intelligent women can still be pleasers, right up until the end. As people in medical coats started suggesting a nursing home, Win acquiesced out of a sense of duty, but it was only when push came to shove that the enormity of the situation hit. And a submerged anger over a loss of control burst to the surface.

  *

  Win went off to her nursing home. We told her it was just for a month, a respite situation, because we couldn’t bear to see her unhappy. If she still wanted to go home after that we’d do our best, with professional help. (I’d offered to have her with me: ‘Only if you can give me a flat, Nik.’ Wise words – I wouldn’t have wanted to be crammed in with the mad, cacophonous lot of us either.) But as a woman whose early years were blighted by institutions she deserved a choice; she’d stayed active her entire life and we all dreaded the stasis of a nursing home. Of what it might do to her.

  I felt like a failure. As a feminist, a woman, a granddaughter. Because an elderly female had declared she wanted to remain in her hard-earned flat for the rest of her life yet here she was now, in a nursing home. In a process of traumatic rupture. At ninety-nine.

  *

  Our family’s lives were hijacked for months because we cared deeply about Win’s wishes. Yet it was all becoming too vexingly complicated. How to respect the fierce independence? I recognised it, championed it. Knew it would keep her alive.
Both of us dreaded the idea of a nursing home, a holding pen to death, where all control and choice is stripped from you. The institution we eventually admitted our beloved Win to, after weeks of research, had a ‘high dependency unit’ and it was a shock to pad through it on our way to her. The silence of the patients, the faces of ruined stillness, the staring into space, the endless television seemingly unwatched. All those unvisited hours, all those days ticking by. The modern way of death.

  *

  But Win wasn’t in that section. She was in a room of her own that she quickly made her own. She had lived an impressively active life of hard work, community service, tennis into her nineties and her giggly secret, a shot of brandy every night, and after several weeks in her new environment the question of returning to her flat became, miraculously, redundant. She was getting in-house care for relatively simple things that had hospitalised her previously. Head massages, hair care, day trips, tai chi. After several weeks of dipping in her toes, she plunged. Didn’t looked back. It became hard to track her down when I phoned – she was never in her room. What to call her when I rang reception: client, patient, inmate? Our family referred to the place, jokingly, as ‘the hotel’, so it was ‘guest.’

  Peace of mind at last. That Win was not spending lonely days of nothing-much in her flat, staring at the telly; or worse, that she’d fallen and blacked out by herself. The low-level hum of worry – it had become a constant feature of our lives – was gone. We were all released.

  *

  What was learnt back then: If we let go and embrace change it can take us to unexpected places, like acceptance, discovery, delight, even at the age of ninety-nine. Eugène Ionesco spoke of the power of replenishment: ‘there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal” . . . all history is nothing but a succession of “crises”, of rupture.’ Win had her own triumphant moment of renewal by surrendering to the unknown. At her one hundredth birthday party she looked healthy, engaged, present. She hadn’t looked like that in the last months in her own flat; she had looked pale, ill and painfully thin because she wasn’t eating enough. Yet Elayn had missed much of this journey.

  *

  As a daughter I get that you’re sometimes screaming inside to disconnect, yet I remain shocked that Elayn spent so little time with Win in her final years.

  Of course, as a mother you’re sometimes screaming inside to disconnect too. Reclaim something of yourself. But now, with my own little brood, there’s a determination not to repeat vexatious patterns of family-ing.

  For example, my request to them all was modest: a Mother’s Day sleep party. By myself, in a nearby hotel, to have one night of the deep, replenishing alone, after years of not. ‘Can I come too?’ my bouncy Biahbi, aged six, had asked. Gently I explained a sleep party involved me, a bed and no one else – for a very long time. Cue anguish, tears, confusion. Mummy, all by herself? At a party my daughter’s not invited to? And she’s the one who sleeps jammed up against me whenever she can, limpet-stuck, as if it’s the only way she can sleep, as if she’ll never let me go.

  But she must at some point, of course, and how I dread it; dread it with all of them. Yet mothers let go too, some viciously. I’ve seen parents and children living in horror of each other’s potency, each side knowing the other’s Achilles heel too well. Yet I think of the urgency in W.H. Auden’s plea, ‘We must love one another or die,’ for with those great familial silences, surely the most bitterest rifts of all, can come a sapping of the spirit, a corrosive bewilderment, a heaviness that’s carried through life. You can’t be hurt by someone you don’t care about. And so Biahbi came with me. And so a sleepless night of wriggling and jiggling, elbows in the head and stolen blankets. We both loved it. Have done it often since.

  *

  No mother is perfect. No child. As parents we have to use our power wisely, with restraint and empathy. Sometimes it’s bloody hard. Sometimes I feel more childish, less restrained than my kids; that they’re better people than me. Motherhood is all-consuming, a condition of giving, continually. The love is voluminous, extravagant, greedy; it varnishes with light, it dulls; has me dancing around the room with exhilaration then exhausted on the ground, fists pressed at thudding temples, lost. And no matter how much love mothers have to give we’re sometimes screaming inside for alone. To unfurl, to replenish.

  That’s why I’m always hoping for a sleep party. Sometimes insist to the children that I need one, alone. It won’t last for long, just a night or two. And then the tribe will all come gleefully tumbling back into my world and I’ll gather the small, bright wonder of them close and breathe them in deep. And when they leave in adulthood this giggle palace of a house will wait for them, breath held, as I too will wait. For the gift of their attention. For their understanding love. Despite all the faults.

  16

  Everywhere, as the funeral is organised, little biting reminders.

  Ordering new glasses, the optometrist brings up Elayn’s details rather than mine on his screen. ‘My mother has died.’ Can’t bring myself to use the ugliness of that term ‘passed’. Passed by, or through, what? After the insincere platitudes the optometrist goes back to his records. Types in laborious capital letters, DECEASED. The arresting baldness of it, still.

  She is in her old shopping haunts, on her street, in the outline of a bowed body as a plate glass window is passed, in the curve of a wrist as I buy a new watchband, in the flowers and cards still coming in. My face is souring with the shock, my skin has lost buoyancy, it drops in despondency as does my step. I share her age spots, her smile, her clearing of the throat. She is taking over. I walk barefoot now, a lot; trying to thwart destiny’s insistence, to veer my feet’s fate. An excruciating pain curdles in my right hip. I know it’s caused by stress and tension, but it’s as if Elayn is haunting me: see, now you know chronic pain. Now you will understand. Pain’s vice tightens.

  *

  A migraine holds normality hostage. Then another. As a teenager there were Saturday mornings of Elayn in bed; the blinds drawn, a flannel over the forehead, a face set in pain. Now it is my turn. One of our last conversations was about migraines. She said hers vanished after the change swept through her life at fifty-two. I, no doubt, will mirror that. So alike, so apart.

  *

  Through it all life goes on. From decades ago Elayn’s friends are tracked down to break the news of death, then details of the funeral. The shock, the questions, the tears. Friends from Elayn’s Wollongong world, her Hunter Valley world, her multiple working worlds. She was good at seeding, reaping, nourishing mateship. Always punctual, a sign of respect; and rarely letting mates down with commitments. A lot talk of her cards; the beautiful, cursive writing. Elayn existed richly in a world apart from her children; we’re only realising the extent of it in her death. Many express guilt at not calling her in her final months, at not being there for her. Then the pause. As the importance of checking in is noted, dropping an email, a quick text. Small gestures. Big rescues.

  *

  An Anglican church near Elayn’s flat will do for the service. The great fingers of Sydney Harbour on one side reach in to grab their lovely land, the ocean pounds sheer sandstone cliffs on the other. A little fist of a colonial church overlooks it all from its high vantage point, scoured by wind and sun. Water, water everywhere, and wind-toughened bush ringing the sandstone. Kookaburras and cockatoos, rosellas and bluetongue lizards among banksias and paperbarks, and a cram of ferns in the still clefts of rocks. Nature presses close. A faded ensign of old England hangs above the church’s altar, stretching back to convict days – Elayn had two Second Fleeters in her family and was thrilled by that. It’s all her. It’s right.

  *

  The night before the funeral. Dressing the church hall for the wake, after adorning the church’s pews with Elayn’s scarves. With Andrew and my best friend, A, who has known my mother since she was ten. As we’re coming clean to A about how Elayn actually died – the suicide, booze, pills
– there’s a splintering crash of thunder and a furious burst of torrential rain, tropical and tetchy. We jump, laugh. Nervously. ‘Yep, that’s Elayn.’

  She told me once that there was nothing beyond death and no, she wouldn’t ever be looking down from heaven at the grandkids. Yet she feels present in spits of ferocious energy, goosebumps prick their way up our arms in a daddy-longlegs haunting. When Paul and I went back to her flat for some additional tidying up, her radio had somehow turned itself on and the electricity for her freezer had shorted, leaving us with a tub of spiteful rotting food. Shivery laughs as we got on with the clearing up, battening down into normality. But, but. Elayn, is that you? It sure feels like it.

  *

  The morning of the funeral, scrubbed and meek after the night’s storm. A sullen, biblical sky. Standing room only. Numbers are difficult to estimate, we run out of memorial booklets. The funeral director, G, tells us Elayn has attracted an enormous number of single women, which is why we’ve been caught short. ‘It’s not like a funeral where there are a lot of families needing just one booklet between them. Your mum had a lot of friends. And most weren’t attached to blokes.’ A modelling shot is on the cover and many people are startled to see Elayn’s beautiful auburn hair in her youth – she’d dyed her hair blonde from her twenties.

  The music during the service is Gurrumul, the Aboriginal soprano from Arnhem Land with the achingly spiritual lament of a voice. Elayn loved his yearning, had his albums and a book of his life, had seen him live at the Opera House. Many of Elayn’s friends have never heard of him. For a woman approaching old age she was effortlessly modern. Contemporary. Up to speed with the latest restaurants, plays, singers, and ways of death.

  *

  Elayn never felt old, in the way women a generation or two ago were little old ladies from their fifties onwards, faded into invisibility by the years. People in their seventies now dress like middle-aged people or younger; they drive, travel, they’re on Facebook and vigorously socialise. It’s a reason Elayn’s death felt so shocking. She gave up. We weren’t used to that.