‘Phil Drummond died last week,’ Dad announces from the dining room.
Not to be outdone by Jude’s interest in disease and death, Dad has recently taken to reading the obituaries in the paper. He scans them, looking for familiar names.
I peer into that far recess of my mind to open the Rolodex of every name I have ever heard my entire life. There, under the subject ‘Cricket Players, Local Club, 1980’, I find Phil Drummond’s card. Club Secretary it says next to his name. There is no photo, but I see his wife’s name, and a daughter’s name. I may have kissed her behind the hot dog caravan at Ridge Park. The ink has faded where his sons’ names once were.
‘Oh, that’s awful,’ I say to Dad, because he isn’t fluent in tsk.
Dad actually has tears in his eyes when he says, ‘Car accident, it said in the paper.’
‘Tsk tsk tsk,’ I sound, this time for Mum’s benefit. I catch her knowing gaze but Dad remains oblivious.
‘How long since you’ve seen Phil?’ I ask Dad, whose solemn nature tells me they must have shared a beer or two just last week.
‘Well . . . he must have left Colyton in 1982, so what’s that? About forty years?’ He shakes his head slowly from side to side.
‘Are you going to the funeral?’ I ask.
‘No, it was in Rockhampton last week.’
‘How old was he, Dad?’
‘Well, if I’m . . . and he was . . .’ Dad calculates the years silently in his mind. ‘He must have been about eighty-five, eighty-six?’
‘Just awful,’ I mutter.
I suppose I make light of death because if I took a moment to think of all of those friends of my parents suffering with some ailment or other it might very well swallow me in a pool of gloominess. I cry at funerals, honestly, I do.
‘He’s in a better place now,’ Dad says, not quite ready to let go of Phil Drummond’s untimely loss.
‘If it exists,’ Jeff says bluntly.
‘Well, what if it does?’ Dad asks. ‘It’s better to believe in god because, when I die, I don’t want to be shut out of heaven for not believing, so just in case.’
‘But what if heaven doesn’t exist?’ I press further.
‘I’ll hedge my bets,’ Dad says, and metaphorically throws a few grand on a thousand-to-one long shot.
I know Dad believes in the afterlife, of seeing out eternity in the golden haze of his halcyon days as a child in the small New South Wales town of Tumut. He’ll be reunited with his mum, Nellie, and all his departed siblings, and there’ll just be simplicity and innocence. A world of uncomplication, before you had to watch what you said, before you had children who grew to correct you on just about every single topic there is, one of whom became something you were taught to fear (that is, an outspoken gay vegan tell-all writer with feminist-leaning ideologies and a couple of tattoos). I should be thankful Dad talks to me at all, when so many parents with his small-town upbringing would (and do) simply turn their backs on their children if they’re anything like me. He never fails to tell me he loves me and I’ve never once felt rejected by him, but I know if he had the choice, he’d prefer a child who was a little less confronting.
In death I imagine he thinks he’ll be returning to the time he had nothing but also everything. I don’t see myself joining him, sliding along the wet rocks of the Tumut River for eternity, and Mum has no vision of that being her reward (or comeuppance) either.
Mum holds a lot of unfounded fears, but the only thing she believes about death is that she will absolutely die in the first week of June. She just doesn’t know which year. Mention any date between the first and seventh of that month and she will visibly shudder, her skin will pale, and you’ll spend the next fifteen minutes listening to her rattle off the list of every person she’s known who died in the first week of June. There’s an extra sting in the tail because her birthday is the ninth of June, so when she does die within the first seven days of the month it will very sadly be just before her birthday.
‘All the important women in my life died the first week of June,’ Mum says, not for the first time this year . . . or this week. ‘My mother, Aunty Molly, Rose.’
More scarily predicted is the fact that she also knows the exact minute she is going to die.
‘Every single time I look at the clock it’s 11:11,’ she adds with an air of foreboding, like it’s worthy of appearing on Unsolved Mysteries.
‘Me too,’ I say. ‘It is for a lot of people. You’ve trained your body to look at a clock at that time, it’s like an in-built alarm, your body clock,’ I say. ‘My friend Andy and I play a game of sending each other a text when it’s 11:11 – we’ve been playing it for eleven years and eleven months. According to my calculations I currently lead 3206 to 2017.’
‘No, but it’s every time I look,’ Mum says like she’s in the grip of a psychic revelation.
This leads me to think that because Mum’s death has been preordained to occur at either 11:11am or 11:11pm on any of the first seven days of June, it must be a huge comfort to know there are therefore only fourteen minutes in any given year she can possibly die. For the other 525,586 minutes she can breathe easy.
Regardless, neither Mum nor I believe the soul goes on, manifested in ghosts, or in any type of afterlife. We’re just flesh and bone and, like any other animal on the planet, when we die, we either get burned to ash or else rot in the ground as the fungi come and reclaim whatever nutrients they can to take some small part of us back into the soil. This is why I believe the here and now is what it should be all about.
I rarely visit my grandparents’ graves. I’ll up Dad’s thousand-to-one bet tenfold and say my kids will never visit my grandparents’ graves. They wouldn’t even know where to look or what names to look for. How many of today’s children don’t even know their great-grandparents’ names? Come to think of it, how many of us do?
In our local town I often run past a very old cemetery (nothing quite like that to encourage you to continue running to stay fit). Some of the headstones clearly fell over a very long time ago and they remain untouched, gathering mould and overgrown by weeds. Who is buried beneath them, I often wonder? And is there no relative on this planet who cares enough about that person to set the headstone right again?
I think you have two generations, tops, to make your mark. Once your grandkids are dead (if you even have any) there’ll be practically no memory of you until the year 2193, when some megastar descendent of yours goes on Who Do You Think You Are?.
‘Did you know your great-great-great-grandfather was a writer?’
‘No! Huh, that must be where I get it from.’
For Mum and me, death just means the end, a firm full stop.
As if reading my mind, Mum takes this opportunity to reiterate her death wishes.
‘Now don’t forget I want my ashes mixed with Bronte’s.’
‘Yes Jude, we know you and that dog will be together forever,’ Jeff assures her.
‘And you want them scattered over The Broadwater,’ I add.
‘No, I’ve changed my mind on that bit. Scatter me over there, on the Hunter River somewhere.’ She points over yonder while tapping her finger on the window in her dining room. ‘And I want the song —’
