*
Her funeral feels inclusive, funky, fun. I’m so tied up with making sure everything is just so that it passes in a blur of colour and singing and tributes; too fast. I want Mum to love it; want her to be proud of me for getting all the details right as a mark of my love for her; and it is right, it works beautifully. I’m so busy looking out for everyone else – guests not seen for decades, young children, elderly neighbours, old family friends, my father, a babysitter for toddlers – that I barely have time to cry. In fact, don’t. I’m cried out, there’s nothing left in me right now.
*
Elayn had been due for a casual shift at Parliament House the Tuesday following her death; a colleague speaks movingly. She concludes with a tribute from a Parliamentary sitting that had the State’s politicians rising to their feet.
The Speaker: ‘It is with sadness that I report the passing of Elayn Gemmell, who was a valued casual member of the switchboard team for the past 13 years. Elayn passed away suddenly on 23 October 2015. Elayn was the mother of Mark, Paul and Nikki and known as Nonna by her much adored six grandchildren. She was a beautiful, fun-loving and gentle person. Elayn always approached her work with professionalism, dedication and enthusiasm and was extremely proud to work for the Parliament of New South Wales. She will be sorely missed by all who knew her.’
The colleague explained that members and officers of the House, the entire chamber, then stood in their places as a mark of respect for Elayn.
*
In the churchyard afterwards the grandchildren release balloons that match the riot of flowers on Elayn’s smart white coffin, into a tall blue sky. G, the funeral director, and B, the vicar, walk slowly behind the hearse, side by side, as it’s driven solemnly out the iron church gates by a woman in her broad-brimmed hat. It’s a deeply moving image. The couple from the local restaurant, where we’d had Ticky’s birthday dinner less than a fortnight before, do the catering for the wake. We offer up Elayn’s favourite celebratory tipple, bubbles with orange and mango juice, her tropical Bellini. Elayn would have loved it. All of it. We got it right.
*
Yet Boh cannot stand up to do his poetry reading. He’d insisted on speaking at the funeral but broke down when he saw the confronting sight of the coffin at the altar. I hadn’t prepared the children for that: Nonna dead in a box, with us yet not. My boy is a heave of weeping throughout the service. For months he’s been the thirteen year old going through all the normal, clanging, hormonal changes, and now this. Various family members hold him; most fiercely, myself. Without a word Boh’s older brother, Ticky, takes his poem and reads it for him when it’s his turn and he cannot. With all this, the family is growing up.
Gleaning a truth here: of the imperative to be more tender with family members, only that. Everyone has their struggles. I looked across often at my fragile, broken Boh during those days, lost in a place I cannot completely reach. Know that I have to learn to give up the children to the wild places; the wild places that are not mine. Every parent does.
*
R – a friend of Elayn’s in her eighties – grips my fist after the service, tighter than it’s ever been held. ‘You’re now a part of the S.W.S.,’ she whispers.
‘What’s that?’
‘The Strong Women’s Society.’ She speaks as if this is a highly secret, select organisation to which I’ve suddenly, finally, been granted honorary membership. Mum was a member of it too, R declares; she had been for decades. Holding on to that. Seizing her interpretation of the unknowable; still, the unknowable.
*
At the service’s conclusion, Boh breaks down once again. Stays in the church, embarrassed. His godmother, C, locks him in stillness. When everyone has left the church she brings him out to Andrew. Our boy is too distraught to let go of the balloons with the rest of the children. His father takes him behind the church hall with a yellow one, his favourite colour. Boh stabs it and stabs it, with all the fury of a child whose grandmother has abandoned him.
*
In the five years we’ve been back from London we’ve been to a lot of funerals with the children. Uncles, a great-grandmother, old family friends and now this. It’s anchored us here, to death as well as life; in England they never experienced them. Suburbs and streets, in several Australian cities, are now solemnly marked. Before this funeral we had Win’s, Elayn’s mother. She died peacefully in her nursing home in a pneumonia-triggered coma, with soft music and candles and strategically placed booklets about the changes the body undergoes as it enters the final stages, and slips away. But there was one funeral the children didn’t go to – Lexi’s, Bob’s mother. Their other great-grandmother’s.
She was 101. Had started sleeping a lot; a sign, I’ve learnt, that the end is near. Her funeral wishes were beautiful in their austerity but singular. Just her son and daughter were to be present as she was lowered into her husband’s grave at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley; her old stomping ground. No church, no priest. A bush taut with sound around her. Her children’s loyal spouses were not to be present, nor any of her grandkids or great-grandkids; we were to remember her in our own way. Bob, as the new head of the family, was stubborn despite protests. ‘The services aren’t what they used to be, when they were big community events. It’s what she wanted. And none of her friends are left.’
Elayn, so many decades younger, had plenty of friends left and most of them turned up. Twenty more years of life left in her and at her funeral, a lot of bewilderment.
*
Lexi was a sharp old thing: she knew what would work. There’s something so sad about the funeral of an elderly person with pews pockmarked by emptiness. She didn’t want the accusation of that. Lexi knew of the curse of elderly loneliness, a modern blight. As she was being lowered into her grave I was sitting on a jetty with a thermos of tea, her favourite tipple, and her beloved art deco teacup; remembering the old, broad, Hunter Valley vowels. The way she’d call a scourer a ‘scratcher’ and movies ‘walkie-talkie photos’. The way she’d scorn a neighbour, ‘As silly as a wet hen,’ and hoot, ‘It’s snowing down south!’ if my vintage petticoat was poking from under my skirt. As she was being lowered into the ground I remembered the bicarb soda she’d use to green the veggies up, the dishes never quite clean enough and the choko vine growing over the back fence. But most of all I remembered her lightness as the aging took hold of her, and the raucous laughter with it, as if growing old was a process of becoming more light-hearted, and wondrous, at the beauty of so much around her. Lexi was all wonder towards the end. The opposite of Elayn.
*
Lexi had been specific: she was non-church going, didn’t want an unknown priest. I’ve been to funerals where grief is compounded by anger at the seeming indifference of the religious figure before us, as if they’re thinking more about the roast dinner ahead of them than the people around them. Anger, not only for the person who’s died but for the church itself. Because it’s a captive audience. Many in the congregation rarely go to church and it’s a moment for the big sell. So, do it. Embrace the mystery of the institution you represent, win us over. We may have read our Richard Dawkins but we could, possibly, be partial to seduction.
*
What is loved: the family and friends who speak at a funeral, who distil a life to its essence of goodness. Rabbis often end a memorial service with ‘May his memory be for a blessing’ – meaning, what lesson can we learn from this person? A man I was in love with: To live vividly and with passion. A fellow school mum: The tonic of her joy. An old school mate: The gift of her friendship, the grace in her living. A near neighbour: The shine of him near the end, as if his last years were spent in a perpetual state of chuckle. So many aphorisms picked up during services and jotted on scrabbled receipts: Never suppress a kind thought. Be generous of spirit because it’s bloody hard, for all of us. Pick up that phone. Check in. Love well.
Lexi loved well. ‘People living deeply have no fear of death,’ Anaïs Nin said, and Lexi ha
d no fear about living deeply, no fear about doing things her way. It’s the lesson I learnt from a life driven by love and laughter, the hoot of which I’ll carry forever in my head. She wasn’t bound by what other people thought of her – and with that, achieved an extraordinary lightness of being. And like choir boys reaching a heartbreakingly higher purity just as their voices are about to break, she became piercingly perceptive towards the end, telling us what’s what. She sang ‘My Way’, loudly, delighting in its message. I wished I’d recorded her. Voice lodges longest in memory, can plunge us searingly back. I cannot bring myself to scrub Elayn’s voice on my mobile messaging service. It’s all I have of the sound of her, and it’s a good, warm sound bite.
*
The funeral does not cauterise. My mind is still full, still churning. I catch myself talking to myself for days, weeks afterwards. Is this madness, a swamping, a great unhinging? I lose my keys and wallet and my phone crashes and the world has been made awry, nothing is calm, nothing in its place. I am existing in a maelstrom of wrong and need to get on the other side of it. Need stillness. The cleanness of it. I’m still waking every 3 a.m.; oh for a good night’s sleep, the sated sleep after sex. I fear my back cementing into a stoop, can feel the concrete clench of it even in slumber. Fear becoming preternaturally old through stress, through the body’s uncanny mirroring of the parent via excessive trauma. I sleep on my back at night, trying to iron myself out. Who will unlock me now – if not myself?
*
Several weeks on, I collapse. At another funeral for another mother of a school friend. It’s too soon after my mother’s, too soon. I am hollowed out by grief. Can barely walk into the church. Am wound, just that. Have to leave halfway through. Everything is wrong. I am a peril to myself and to others. Need to be there for my friend but can’t. Am knocked sideways by this new world. Boh and myself, Ticky and Paul, each of us struggling. All needing a cloistering from this.
*
Panic attacks, in the early hours. About so much ahead. So many years of parenthood to push through before I’m out, clear, on the other side. Before I’m allowed my life back. Sixty-four by the time my youngest leaves school; straight from motherhood into old age. Too old, too tired for this, a thirty-year stretch of active mothering; I did it wrong. I need a break from this life to get the energy to dive back into it. No pension arrangements, no superannuation since resigning from the ABC several decades ago and we will most likely have to sell our family home to fund our later years yet our children will still be young. That is our future. The price we paid, that the whole family will pay, for creative freedom during the adult years. Living the heart-in-mouth life of a freelancer with four children under sixteen. I have let my kids down with this scrabbling, creative, indulgent life. Four little people crowding into all corners of my existence, never needing me more and a hum of anxiety now staining all my days. No longer the energy for disrupting and never did enough of it anyway. Everything defeating me. In crisis. Mid-life crisis.
And Mum is now the finest of builder’s dust. Everywhere. Cannot be clear of it. I have been the unneeding, the un-wanting, for all of my life but now, but now, I am vanquished. The funeral fixes nothing, just clears the people away. Ahead, a desert of grief to be crawled through. No end in sight.
17
Tilting full on now into what is feeling like madness. Becoming someone else entirely. Exploding with anger at close friends, severing relationships, plumped with tears. Elayn is infecting me, weakening me, could destroy me in the end. Now I know why the traditional period of mourning demands a necessary disappearing. It is to save you from yourself.
*
Favourite shoes vanish. No idea how. Where have I kicked them off? A café, a beach? The laptop slips off the bed while Jages is bouncing on it. It lands on the floor, an almighty thud. Everything lost of course. Because that is the way of the world now. The horror of a blank screen. No hard drive, no data. A month’s worth of columns, including one on Elayn’s death, plus a novel not saved. The Apple store cannot help. They give me the name of a spyware company that extracts data lost in flood and fires. No guarantees. The damaged hard drive is sent to Brisbane. I wait. At great expense, everything is retrieved. And then, of course, the most distressing loss of the lot.
The ceramic lanterns. In a furious gust of wind from the Gods, sweeping through the house with its energy of disquiet.
*
I’ve never liked that Le Corbusier maxim, ‘A house is a machine for living in.’ For me it’s more ‘A house is a mooring for living in.’ A necessary sanctuary of stillness amid the great gallop of life; a place that loosens you as you step across the threshold; releasing you into a space where you can relax into your true self. This house is my lair, now, as I crack.
*
And now, now, the line of porcelain lanterns. The final straw. The lanterns that have spread their calm over every living area of whatever house we’re in, in whatever country. They feel like love itself, childhood and memory. All the history of the children’s growing up in their scratches and pin pricks. Gone.
*
To remember: the concept of Kintsugi. The quiet salve of it. An accepting of the old and imperfect, the forgiveably human. Years ago, Elayn and I had holidayed in Japan then Cuba. We’d slept in the same bed in the tiniest of Tokyo hotel rooms, always at our best when travelling, slipping together like hand into glove. Had the same food habits and bedtimes, the same love of shopping. When we were good we were very, very good . . .
In Japan, we were introduced to Kintsugi. Marvelled at healed cracks with their threads of repairing gold. The practice first arose when a shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, accidently smashed a favoured tea bowl. He sent it to China for repair and was horrified by the crude fix that returned. The careless ugliness. In anger, Yoshimasa commanded his own craftsmen to devise a different means of repair. They came up with a technique involving resin and gold powder, which gave the shattered, cherished object a new watertight strength.
With the Apollonian concepts of symmetry and perfection there’s the absence of messy, warm, irrepressible life. With Kintsugi, the repaired object bears the scars of existence and is made even more striking because we can suddenly relate; an all too human story, from an all too human hand.
*
In Japan, some ceramic objects are broken on purpose so they can be mended using the Kintsugi method. The lacquer takes on the form of waterfalls, cascades, drips. The result, a startling new look. More intriguing than the bloodless, bland original.
*
The love demonstrated in the Kintsugi object should encourage us to respect what is damaged; find beauty in it. That should begin with our parents. I never saw beauty enough, with Elayn. Others did. I never let her know I saw her beauty. I did not love her well enough. Do those whose sharp edges have been softened by sorrow love better? I will love better now. More empathetically.
*
Standing, frozen, at the top of the stairs. Staring at the lanterns shattered beyond repair. Rushing to the bin as Andrew is about to tip the jagged pieces into it. Gathering them up, spilling them onto the dining table. Keening at all the tiny, slivery bits, so many, too many, that don’t seem to fit anywhere. Impossible, everything impossible. ‘Keep them,’ Andrew says.
*
Elayn would throw out any piece of broken crockery. Discard it at the slightest chip. She said germs nestled in the crevices. She loved the new, the smart, the dazzling. Everything was about public image and perfection. She couldn’t bear the almost-solid matter in a cracked egg – the gelatinous sliver of an embryo – and would meticulously pick it out; everything had to be right. I did not fit into her carefully curated world. I was awkward, shy, stroppy. Loved my uni-black and vintage tat and my ugly Blundstone boots. When I lived in the Northern Territory, as an ABC radio correspondent, Elayn would say, ‘When are you going into television?’ Alert me to ads in the Sydney TV newsrooms. Interpret my lack of interest in television as a fatal flaw that sign
ified a lack of drive. Saw radio journalism as a stepping stone to the glories of the small screen; whereas I saw radio journalism as a stepping stone into writing.
Elayn flung at me once that my living in Alice Springs was about being ‘unable to cope’. She had no idea that it was a place of expansive uncurling. I felt alive there, within the desert hum. In Sydney I felt judged, hemmed in, reduced. I always needed to put a little distance between myself and the world. And always there were Elayn’s admonishments to step out into that world, get my head out of a book and stop hiding behind glasses. ‘Me’ wasn’t what she wanted. In Alice Springs, I felt the potential of release.
She had so many opinions about my life. About how I looked, who I went out with, what job I took. I’ve always walked a singular path into happiness – it was not my mother’s idea of happiness. So, the flinty alone. The desert hum. The Holden ute. Clothes she did not understand I needed to wear, life choices she did not understand I needed to make.
*
I’ve not spoken to Mum for many weeks, since I told her I was thinking of moving to the desert. And she told me she wants a Jana Wendt daughter. We hung up. I am lost, mother. This has to be done, this move. I’ve half of a first draft of a novel in the computer. I have to see. Just have to.
Journal entry, mid-twenties.
*
Elayn’s fear of being stained by who I’d become. To me I was strong with my own voice; to her, I was unmouldable. She didn’t speak to her own mother for months, years, after Win wore a tracksuit to a family wedding. My grandmother was in her nineties and wanted comfort; Elayn was mortified. ‘It’s an embarrassing fact,’ philosopher Susan Neiman wrote in her book Why Grow Up, ‘that we are often more afraid of embarrassment than a host of other discomforts, but it isn’t less true for that.’ So much of Elayn’s existence was tethered to public image. She couldn’t control all the strong women in her life. Win. Me.
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