‘“It Was A Good Time”,’ I finish for her. ‘Well, I’m going up in the sky in a burst of fireworks while Barbra Streisand sings her classic hit “Don’t Rain On My Parade”, if I have made myself clear enough to Jeff and the kids. How about you, Dad?’
‘Eh?’ he mutters, having emerged from some silent reverie or deafness, before launching into Bobby Darin’s version of my chosen show tune.
‘We just lose so many of the ladies at housie,’ Mum seems desperate to draw this conversation out longer than an election campaign.
‘Well, where do you lose them?’ Jeff asks. ‘Think! Retrace your steps.’
I get the giggles. I hate the term ‘passed’. It’s altogether too reminiscent of gas. I’ve lately settled on the pure pragmatism of ‘no longer living’.
One friend gave the eulogy at his father’s very public funeral, and I was incredibly proud of him for touching on the sometimes-prickly side of his dad’s personality. It was what I knew of his father, having only met him a handful of times, mostly only briefly, or while I (and probably he) was a little less than sober. But simply because his dad was ‘no longer living’, he was expected to wax lyrical about all the lovable sides of his personality and conveniently ignore the proverbial woolly mammoth at the back of the church.
I’m lucky in that both my parents are still around, despite all of their medical dramas. But I’m also not immune to the sting of death and it has served to remind me of how much it is possible to learn from our elders.
Janette was my friend Amy’s mother. But she was more than that for me. I called her my Sydney mum. I suppose I have a lot of adopted family, including my sisters from other mothers, Mel and Kirsti, and my ‘cousin’ Pet. In identifying them as family, I feel that my relationship with them is deepened, the blood running through our individual sets of veins is the same. Janette helped me recognise, then outright dismiss, the patriarchy I’d been born into. Women were cast into certain roles and, in a houseful of men, my mum was often relegated to a ‘less-than’ figure. Janette showed me what women with gusto were like. She was a woman with opinions, beliefs and knowledge, and you’d better bloody believe that she had every right to express them, and you were going to listen. I respected her more than any person I’d ever met, and I adored her for the joy and questioning she brought into my life.
I so admired the relationship between Janette and her daughter that I eventually found the courage to reach out to my mum and attempt to emulate that bond. I wanted my mother to know me. But, more than that, I really wanted to know and understand Mum after all those years of her being cast as the supporting actress in the film of our lives.
It began with bottles of wine and long phone conversations every Thursday night. The rules were simple: you could ask anything you liked, you had to answer honestly . . . and you could never bring up the topics ever again. They revolutionised the relationship I had with Jude, and I have one person to thank for that: Janette. It was an irreplaceable, priceless gift.
I remember visiting Janette on her deathbed. I deliberated for days about asking Amy whether I could go, unsure if it was the best thing to do, given Janette must be tired of people coming to sit with her. How must she have felt, knowing these people were coming to see her for the last time? Are these visits about the one who is dying or about the visitors themselves? Does it matter? I knew, selfishly, I would live to regret not going to say goodbye. Yet I dreaded it. I felt like an imposter. This was family time, not a chance for Toddy to clear his conscience. Afterwards, I realised my paranoia was unfounded.
I held Janette’s hand for close to an hour the day I went to say goodbye. I wanted to tell her how much she meant to me, what a phenomenal impact she’d had on my life. Janette kept squeezing my hand tightly, with all the strength her frail body could muster, and goddammit I squeezed back with every ounce of love I had, as much love as I’d ever had for anyone. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what she meant to me, not in front of the other people in the room. I didn’t want to acknowledge this was it. I couldn’t. Janette knew she was dying. We all knew she was dying. She had a matter of weeks. Yet I couldn’t let death rob her of yet another precious hour.
I told myself in those exchanged hand squeezes that Janette knew exactly what she meant to me, and I to her. I told myself she didn’t need to hear me say how important an influence she was on me, how her unconditional love of me reminded me to stay true to myself, even when that behaviour might have been considered ugly by others. I told myself that it was far more important to make her smile one last time, than to make her weep with pronouncements of love and how inconceivably hollow I was going to feel without her living, even though we’d drifted apart over the preceding years and I hadn’t seen her that often. Janette knew I loved her – but would she ever know just how much, and why? Instead, I made her laugh one last time.
I was so incredibly grateful for that opportunity to say goodbye. Only I didn’t even choose to do that. My last words to her were simply, ‘See ya, Janette.’
It prompts the question of how I will choose to spend my parents’ last years with them or, when it comes to it, our last shared moments. As they more or less dive off the cliff known as ‘having their life together’ and spiral into the deep, dark hole known as ‘surrendering to old age’, as with most things in life, I think I will try to find the funny side of ageing. As Bette Davis once remarked, it ‘ain’t no place for sissies.’ Thoughtfully, Mum and Dad are taking me along for the thigh-slapping, unpredictable trip.
Attention Twilight Waters Residents:
Can the resident who keeps removing notices from the notice board please refrain from removing notices from the notice board?
Thank You,
Management
EPILOGUE
Apples | Trees
Two-way street and all that, without doubt our parents have returned countless favours to us over the years. If anyone’s keeping score, I know I, for one, am massively indebted. What’s challenging, I suppose, is the realisation that the tables have turned. For most of our lives we rely on the generosity of our parents, even take it completely for granted. Then they get to a certain age and can no longer be counted on to deliver on all our expectations, becoming more reliant on us than we are on them. At some point the balance shifted and we became the giver. Isn’t that how it should be? But just how much are we expected to give back, and is it always commensurate with what we received?
Sometimes you find the sweet spot and play to your ageing parents’ strengths. Dad will happily deal with mechanics if I ask him to, due to my innate fear that my ‘lifestyle choice’ will result in me being taken for an over-inflated ride. Mum is also more than prepared to do all of our washing and ironing if I’m too busy to do it myself. This was particularly welcome when we were running a busy accommodation business and the washing of guests’ robes got on top of me. I’d feel guilty dropping them off and yet she took great pride in her work and enjoyed having the task to complete, getting a little kick out of helping us. I wouldn’t have asked her to help with the cooking and that suited her just fine but, whatever the volume of washing, she never gave the slightest hint that we were causing her any inconvenience. In fact, on the odd occasion where I had time to wash the robes myself, I think she was slightly hurt that her services were not required that particular week.
Of course, there are limits to their offer of ‘anything you need’. A few weeks before this day trip to Lambs Valley (not Gloucester!), we were in the middle of a major project, juggling check-ins, check-outs and cleaning, and packing up the house for our big move. One of the unspoken ‘joys’ of running accommodation is the occasional environmental hazard. In this case a bridesmaid had obviously consumed too much red wine, in quantities so great it had melted all the bones in her legs. This in turn rendered her utterly incapable of getting from the bed to the toilet . . . two metres away. I was in a real pickle.
‘Mum, I need a little favour,’ I asked on the phone after explaining I was operating at full capacity and had no room for this little hiccough.
‘Ugh,’ she said. I actually heard the shiver run down her spine. ‘Sorry love, but I don’t do vomit.’
Seniority does give the right of refusal. Not to mention logic. She wasn’t the one who’d chosen to run an accommodation business. I brushed off my disappointment and silently began tallying all the little favours I’d forgotten to do for her and Dad. Never mind. Plenty more would be sent down the pipeline and whatever I’d neglected along the way would undoubtedly be relayed to me by Grant, who would be updated with the list. One day he would come along to save Mum and Dad from impending doom, like when he fixed those screen doors and finished off that pergola! Have I mentioned those already?
Not long after Mum refused to clean up a stranger’s vomit, she and Dad rocked up on the doorstep with arms full of sweet treats. It didn’t take a genius to work out this was an apology.
* * *
Several years ago, I was talking to Mum on the phone. She’d woken with a sore shoulder, which would eventually lead to its replacement in surgery. Though it must be stated the surgery came after about ten years of wincing in pain, refusing to seek medical assistance and insisting that everything was fine. She gave in to it eventually.
‘Maybe you just need some physio on it or something,’ I said. Ever-helpful, always happy to draw from my non-existent medial qualifications.
‘It’s just the next thing in a long line of parts to give out on me,’ Mum said glumly.
At the time, I thought she was being perhaps a little dramatic or the morning blues hadn’t quite shaken themselves from her body. But that was before I turned forty, before my own body decided it would no longer function as it once had. Now I have a perennially stiff and aching neck and my back refuses to do as I ask of it. If I push it too far, it seizes up and sends jolts of pain along my spine for days on end. Since turning forty, there’s also the extra weight that refuses to budge. I also seem to have lost my grasp of certain words and leave my friends hanging in mid-air as I search desperately for that elusive term, the one I really have my heart set on, before I simply give up and say, ‘I can’t think of the word,’ disappointingly substituting it with one that is both inferior, and often entirely out of context. I will then remember the correct word several hours later and say it aloud to my friends to prove I haven’t lost all my marbles, just yet.
These were the days when sleep wasn’t so elusive, when I drank more wine and less tea, when I could be relied on to be the last to leave on a Friday night (we called them ‘Fridays with Toddy’) and could fuel you with stories to tell for years to come. And most certainly, this was before the tinnitus, the high cholesterol, the constant threat of diabetes, the skin cancers, the stray white hairs on unfortunate body parts . . . before catching my own reflection was sometimes like passing a stranger on the street. I don’t feel that old. When on earth did I start looking so much like my mother?
Now I understand exactly what my mother meant. And I’m not even fifty, whereas she’d been over sixty at the time she’d lamented the onset of old age. Yet I also hear my mother’s other words: ‘There’s still life in the old girl yet.’
I stave off the encroachment of old age as best I can by running as often as I am able, eating healthily most of the time and drinking less wine. I push my body as Jeff’s chief labourer and stay active maintaining our property. I keep my mind sharp with books, writing, watching (non-sensationalist) documentaries, playing sudoku and mucking up Mum’s crossword puzzles at every opportunity. Thirty-nine down. Eight Letters. Interfering. M _ D D _ _ N G. I’m not ready to surrender. I’m aware of those niggles in my body and mind, I acknowledge them. Then I pretend I can’t feel them.
My childhood may not have been picture-postcard perfect but I do consider myself one of the luckiest chumps around. I can’t say I loved my school years, but my home life was, more often than not, bliss. Jude and Pete have been (and continue to be) what I can only summarise as selfless, ceaselessly tolerant and immeasurably loving parents. Oh, I might bemoan the odd behaviour of theirs (enough to even fill an entire book, say).
The realities of them being over the hill are that my voice may never recover from all the repeated yelling at Dad nor my ears from Mum’s screaming into the phone. I will spend an inordinate amount of time over the next few years solving their technological issues, speaking to customer service personnel on their behalf, translating technical information for them and harassing them to pay closer attention to what the doctor has said and what they eat. Who won at bingo, who died last week, how many burnt-out cars are on the highway and how marvellous Grant is for fixing broken items or finishing incomplete jobs around the house will be relayed to me ad nauseum (and the same stories more than once).
My parents will continue to find comfort in the things they love and may very well refuse to look to further horizons, choosing instead to stick only to what has been tried and tested. If ever they do find themselves outside that comfort zone, it will probably be me who attempts to calm their anxiety levels and indeed this will likely become an expectation. Whatever is happening in my life should be placed on hold in order to attend to what is causing grief or stress in theirs.
