Pills too bitter to swallow

My mother had a fall three weeks ago and broke her arm.

 

I did not realize that a broken arm could result in such bruising but my mother’s arm is still purple with spilled blood.  She has been in hospital since the fall, and despite early concerns about internal bleeding she’s doing well and will soon be transferred to a place where they offer transitional care, not so much rehabilitation but care that’s aimed at getting her back onto her feet before she can return to her retirement village.

 

Without two good arms, my mother cannot push her walker and without a walker it’s not safe for her to walk. 

When I was fifteen years old my mother asked the priest at our local church, Our Lady of the Assumption, to offer suggestions about how she might best help her daughters to adjust to the difficulties of our life at home with our drunk father. 

The priest suggested visits to the elderly as an antidote.

 

Every weekend I visited Mrs White at the old people’s home.  

White-haired Mrs White who smelled of age and lavender sat beside her bed in bedclothes covered by a matinee jacket of pale pink nylon.  She was a gruff old thing but mellowed over the time of my visits into someone who seemed to look forward to them.

 

She never said as much but I knew I had broken through when she asked me one day to buy her something for her indigestion.

‘Terrible, dear.  It puts me off my food.’

Mrs White gave me a handful of coins and full instructions.   She wanted De Witte’s antacid in a blue roll, each piece shaped like a lolly, or preferably in powder form which was easier to swallow.

My mother now has a terrible time swallowing the multiple pills the nurses feed her every day.  To watch the struggle is agony.  My mother cannot get the pills past her throat without a battle.  She swishes them around her mouth and sometimes chews on them to make them smaller.  She barely grimaces but it’s easy to see she does not enjoy them.  I can only imagine the taste. 

If the nurses are not careful my mother has developed a strategy whereby she tucks a pill into the side of her mouth and waits till the nurse is out of sight then spits it onto the ground. 

My older sister finds these pills on the floor.  My older sister is attentive to these things and complains to the staff.  I reckon my mother does not realize that these pills help to keep her alive.  She sees them as a nuisance, only to be tolerated in the presence of others.

 

Similarly with food.  The nurses have told my mother she ought to cut down on her sugar.  She takes at least two spoons in every cup of tea and coffee.

‘At my age,’ my mother says. ‘I don’t care.  Why should I?’

The nurse explains to my mother that the sugar gives her a quick energy hit that does not leave room for  any hunger for the more sustaining nutrients, the protein and vitamins from meat and vegetables.

 

At the moment my mother prefers anything sweet, small tubs of ice cream, stewed fruit, custard, but for the rest she cannot be bothered. 

 ‘I’m 94,’ she says.  ‘I can do as I please.’

If only her body would let her.  And her mind.

There is something willful about my mother in her old age, something that is a contrast to the strictures of the past, her concern about sin and the need to do good, which brings me back to my do-gooding days of visiting Mrs White at the old people’s home.

 

In the end I arrived one day and Mrs White was gone.  She had died, quietly just like that, and I could not bring myself to form another relationship with another old person, knowing that there was such a likelihood of death.

Those were the days when I had decided I would like to die at sixty; sixty seemed a decent age to go. 

Then two days ago I played ball with my six year old grandson in our backyard and rejoiced at my stamina despite reaching sixty.

 

Once with the arrogance of my youth I could be cavalier about the notion that there is a good age at which to die, but not any more. 

Why should I worry?

There I was crouched under the weight of the summer sun with a head cold.  My nose ran, my sinuses blocked up and nowhere could I find sympathy from any of the people who occupy my life.  They too were caught up in the heat. 

So I took myself away.  I locked myself inside my study and turned on the fan.  It whirred its way into the day.  No more activity for me.

‘You can’t stop,’ my daughter said. ‘I need your help.  Besides, mothers don’t get sick.  Mothers stay well.’  She stomped out of the room.

   

My mother plans to live till she’s one hundred. 

‘That’s six more years,’ I told her on my last visit.  ‘That’s a long time.’

‘But it’s something special to live to one hundred.  There’s no big deal in being ninety-five. And time goes so fast these days.’  My mother wiped her nose on a tissue and threw it into the  wastepaper basket by her chair.  My mother goes through tissues like they are breaths of air.  ‘I don’t do a thing these days,’ she went on, ‘but that’s okay.  I should be allowed to go slow.  I’m ninety four.  I deserve a rest.’

I do not repeat the mantra, ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it’.  Why not stop still in her chair and do nothing?

Why not sit each day surrounded by books, the trashy Mills and Boon type of novels my mother reads, all are readily available from the library in her retirement village; all she can read these days for the large print? 

My mother reads these books the way she eats chocolate.  I never bother to ask her what each book is about.  I suspect she could not tell me.  She reads books like people read the trashy magazines in doctors' surgeries –  eye candy, fodder for the mind. 

‘Why should I worry?  My mother asks me yet again.  A rhetorical question.   She does not expect an answer and I’m not inclined to offer one. 

‘Why should I worry about my children?  There’s nothing I can do about them.  They have their lives.  They make their own decisions.  I have nothing to worry about.’

When I sit with my mother as I do at least once a week and she tells me yet again how much she fails to worry, does she see the skepticism in my eyes?

Probably not.  She refuses to wear her glasses, except to read.  Glasses do not suit her sense of the fashionable.  Glasses make her look old.  And so she can barely see.  She will not see.

 

Those three wise monkeys come to mind. 

That fine line between optimism and denial.

Before he died, the story goes, my father told my mother he need not leave her much. She would find herself someone else to care for her soon enough. And so she did. My mother remarried within little more than a year after my father’s death.

My mother’s second husband also failed to leave her much when he died some sixteen years later, even so the staff at the retirement village where she has lived these past ten years see my mother as one of their favourites and they look after her well.

When I asked my mother how she thought she might get on with her new carer, a woman arranged through community health and part of my mother’s ‘care package’, she said she’d be fine.

‘I like people,’ my mother said. ‘I don’t have trouble with anyone.’
‘But not Auntie Nettie,’ I said. I did not give my mother time to protest. ‘Why don’t you like Auntie Nettie?’ I asked. ‘What went wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We had an argument once, about the war.’

My mother then told me the story of how one day she and Nettie fell into a discussion about the hardships of World War Two, this from the vantage point of their new lives in Australia during the 1960s.

‘It was very hard in Indonesia under the Japanese,’ my aunt told my mother.
‘It was harder in Holland,’ my mother said. ‘We were freezing and hungry. In Indonesia at least you could stay warm. There is nothing worse than being cold and hungry,’ my mother said. My aunt disagreed.

This is one of those arguments that does not bear consideration – two women fighting over who had it worse, when clearly both had it bad.

It reminds me of Tessa de Loos’ book, Twin Sisters, the story of two women born in Cologne, Germany, before the Second World War but separated as toddlers after their had mother died.

One stayed in Germany and was raised by relatives – a cruel harsh family in a land impoverished by war and hardship; the other grew up in Holland in the care of a loving Dutch family, also related as I recall.

Both women suffered, especially during the war. The book consists of a series of flashbacks to the separated twins’ experiences of growing up into young adulthood.

Each woman tells the other her story after they meet by chance in a spa retreat in Switzerland. In the beginning of the book they are by now in their seventies. The twin raised in Holland seems to me to have had the least traumatic experience, though again such comparisons are not helpful or necessarily accurate.

Resilience is not measured out in equal doses.

As dreadful as my mother’s war experience was, is it fair to compare it to that of my aunt whose father had owned a rubber plantation in Indonesia before the Japanese invasion? My aunt was interned in a prisoner war camp. I heard once that she saw her brother killed by the Japanese. He was hacked to death.

While I was growing up my aunt worked as a nurse, an efficient and well organised woman. She had six children and kept her house in good order. She married my mother’s younger brother, a generous man who tended to his family well.

My mother, on the other hand, had nine children and could not keep up with the demands of housework, nor did she have the support of a generous and loving husband.

Both women competed in some strange unspoken way, but I felt the pull of my mother’s hatred towards my aunt throughout my childhood. An otherwise seemingly loving and generous woman, my mother’s enmity towards her sister-in-law stood out like an exposed blade ready to cut at any minute.

Her mother had always said she was a ‘very happy baby’, my mother told me later after we had made yet another visit to her GP. She was looking yet again at her family photo from the late 1920s, the one she has propped on a low table beside the window. She gazes at the image and all the memories it evokes. The past has become more attractive with distance it seems.

My mother has always had a tendency to look on the bright side, even when certain events demanded a more realistic perspective.

I wonder, is this how my mother attracts people to her, her optimism ,and is this also why she fell foul of my aunt, who tends towards a more realistic outlook and pessimism. My aunt has Alzheimer’s now, and is beyond my mother’s reach.

I am amazed at my mother’s determination to stay cheerful. The doctors have been playing a balancing game with her mediation, between her heart’s need for assistance and her kidneys’ needs for flushing.

Today her heart is winning but her kidneys are falling behind.

‘It’s like this,’ the GP told my mother when she asked him to explain what all the fuss was about.
‘As you get older your kidneys, like your heart, get tired and need to work harder. The blood tests tell us that your kidneys are working too hard.’ He leaned in closer to my mother’s good ear.

‘It’s like you’re travelling towards a cliff,’ he said. ‘While you’re travelling on solid ground you feel fine. You say, “My kidneys, there’s nothing wrong with my kidneys. What’s all the fuss about?”

Your kidney’s might seem fine, though you’ve noticed feeling dry. You’re still heading towards the cliff and we don’t know exactly where the cliff is. So we need to reduce your medication to give your kidneys a fighting chance.’

This explanation seemed to satisfy my mother . I figured she had heard the doctor. Earlier she had agreed to wear her hearing aid for this most recent visit. More often than not these days my mother does not bother. Perhaps not hearing bad news aids her optimism.

When we returned to my mother’s room, at her request I tried to explain the doctor’s concerns once more and again the explanation seemed to satisfy her, but beyond her difficulties with hearing, my mother is also becoming forgetful of the short term.

‘I’ll be back on Thursday,’ I said as I took up my handbag to leave.
‘When you can,’ she said, ‘when you can. Don’t stress too much.’ She smiled, her eyes pools of liquid blue, red rimmed around the edges.

‘I’m happy,’ my mother said. ‘I’m always happy. It’s the way I am. And I can’t understand how it is that other people are not.’

For all her forgetfulness, I suspect my mother’s parting comment was yet another dig at my unhappy aunt.

A psychological sandwich

I am my mother’s daughter. When I was in my early twenties, when I first began to develop a will of my own, when I first discovered the thrill of rebellion and quietly thumbed my nose at my mother’s religiosity and what I then saw as her prudery, and began to favour the company of men – what I have called my ‘promiscuous’ years – my mother took to writing me letters.

My mother writes letters still even though we live less than twenty kilometers apart. She writes to all her children as a means of stating her case.

My mother's letters to me are ‘psychological sandwiches’. They begin with protests of her love for me. The middle carries the sting. What do you think you are doing? Who do you think you are? Behaving so loosely with men. Where are your morals?

Then she might end the letter with a short vignette: her memory of me as a little girl in a yellow jumper and tartan skirt, after she had come home from hospital with my new baby sister, when I was less than two years old and had been left in the care of my godparents, the Kaandorps, for over a week.

In her letter my mother remembers me then as the little girl who threw herself into her mother’s arms and wept for the sheer joy of being together again. If only, my mother writes, if only she could give to me now the things I needed then. It is as if she wishes that I had never grown up, that I had never entered into the world of adulthood, of conflict and of challenge. If only I had stayed little, then our bond might be secure.

I have been reading Nancy Miller’s Bequest and Betrayal:memoirs of a parent's death, a book about adult children who write about their parents after death. Are these memoirs eulogies, songs of praise for parents now gone, or are they betrayals of parental secrets?

I suspect I could not write about my father as I do now were he not dead. Now he is dead, I am safe.

Will the way I write about my mother change after her death? My mother in my mind has undergone so many metamorphoses, from the woman I adored as a small child to the woman I became scornful of, though not in adolescence, even in adolescence I felt protective of her and needy, to the frail old woman she has finally become, of whom I feel protective in a different way. It took a long time before I dared to feel critical of my mother in any way.

It was later in my life, in my twenties and thirties when I had embarked on my analysis, only then did my image of my mother start to crack. Only then did I come to feel critical of her, for her religious intolerance, her manipulative tendencies, and her tendency to pretend that all is well when it is not.

I have my mother’s name, all three names, Elisabeth Margaretha Maria. It is a Dutch tradition to name the second daughter after the mother, and the first daughter after the mother’s mother, a tradition that again alerts us to the significance of mothers in a woman’s life.

I did not name my first daughter after my mother or any of my daughters directly after me, but my husband insisted and I agreed to the idea that they should all have my name as a second name. Equality you might say. Their first names however belong entirely to them.

Even now I can imagine my daughters writing in the future about what it means to them to each share their mother’s name between their first and last names.

In my family of origin, we each bear the name Maria, another tradition, religious this time, a means of asking the Blessed Virgin Mary to look over us all. All except the oldest, who again according to Dutch tradition was given his father’s name in its entirety.

When we were little we laughed at the fact that even the boys carried the name Maria in their collection of personal names, Simon Peter Maria, Franciscus Wiro Maria, Michael George Maria and Gregory Paul Maria. Such odd names they seemed to us growing up in Australia in the fifties and sixties when most people’s names were Celtic and Anglo Saxon with the odd immigrant name from the Mediterranean or Europe thrown in for good measure.

Names matter, they are identifying features, they become part of our sense of ourselves and of our identity.

In the days when I fancied I might write a book in which I had hoped each of my siblings might contribute a chapter, I also imagined a paragraph on each of us, suggesting parallels between our first given name and the way in which our name reflects our personalities.

As usual I am running off into too many ideas, too many ideas to follow. One leads into the other and the track becomes unwieldy. It is difficult to back track to where we have come from. Sorry.

She sees things that are not there

Cabrini Hospital, Sunday.
I sit in a chair beside my hospital bed, my foot propped up on a stool, elevated with a pillow. I cannot get access to the Internet because the server for Cabrini hospital cuts out from time to time and now at nine in the morning is one of those times.

I sit opposite a woman named Doreen, the bane of my life since I arrived here, not only my life, but everyone else’s in this ward, staff and patients alike.

A few days ago, Doreen had a hip replacement that went wrong. It popped out and they needed then to repeat it. Two anaesthetics in close succession. Doreen came out of it all with a new hip and a load of dementia.

She talks to herself incessantly, loud angry conversations.
‘Annette,’ she says, ‘Annette get me out of here. Annette, they’re trying to kill me. Annette they want to cut me into pieces.’

My usual supplies of compassion dwindle. Like the other two women in the ward after Doreen has gone on for an hour or two, particularly in the evening, when we are trying to doze off, we start to chastise her. We know it is useless. She cannot understand. Her mind is not her own. But her incessant shouting and calls for help leave us desperate.
‘Why don’t you just shut up,’ Elsie says. But Doreen uses the insult as further fuel for her delusions. We three other women in the ward are part of the conspiracy to keep her imprisoned. We are her jailers. We must be her jailers, Doreen tells us because we refuse to unlock her from her cage. We refuse to unlock the metal bars that imprison her on either side.

We talk to Doreen almost as an instinctive response to a voice that calls out and she responds because ours are voices in her ears, but she does not know to whom she calls.

I watch a new drama unfold as Doreen demands to go to the toilet. The nurse with the aid of a four-pronged stick tries to get her there but Doreen will have none of it.
‘I can’t get my balance.’
The nurse cajoles.
‘You’ve walked all your life,’ she says. But Doreen refuses. Back in bed, they fetch Doreen a pan.

Doreen, according to her daughter, Annette who visits in the afternoon, has been a strong and independent woman all her life.
‘It’s the anaesthetic that’s done this to her. She’s not my mum anymore.’ Annette turns her head to hide her tears.

Elsie is nauseous for some unknown reason. She has broken her pelvis. Her bed is diagonally opposite mine and I cannot avoid the sound even as I can avert my eyes. Two and a half kidney bowls of vomit, later and Elsie slides further down the bed, her face pale with pain and effort.

Between Doreen’s raving and Elsie’s vomiting, I am ready to scream.

Cabrini, Monday morning.
Doreen has just instructed a nurse to make a phone call to her daughter. Her memory absence is selective. She knew the phone number but needed the nurse to dial for her. She also has macular degeneration and spends a great deal of time plucking at imaginary threads in the air. Her fading vision combines with her paranoid delusions. She sees things that are not there.

Elsie and Lois discuss their belief that although Doreen talks about her son John, he does not exist. She has two daughters only, Annette and Trixie.
‘All I need now is to hear that that woman, Julia Gillard, gets up. That’ll fix my day.’
‘You can’t trust the media,’ Lois says.
‘But when it comes to someone stabbing you in the back or robbing a bank, who can you count on?' Doreen chimes in but the other two ignore her.
I stay out of the conversation. I cannot bear to add politics to the mix.
‘If only they’d say you can stop voting once you reach a certain age,’ Elsie says. She resents compulsory voting. She resents change. She resents the idea that a left leaning government might retain control. It's enough to set her vomiting all over again.

Each night they put Doreen in the corridor so that we others can sleep. From eleven last night was quiet. Quiet until 5am when they came in as usual to take blood pressure, temperatures and fill out their report forms. A typical hospital story.

Doreen is 82, Elsie is 84, and Lois the oldest at 86 has had a successful hip replacement.

Is this the future to which I might look forward?

'Touch wood I’ve never had a broken bone,’ Lois says, and nods at my leg in plaster.
‘Neither have I,’ Doreen says, ‘but I’ve had a broken heart.’ It sounds almost poetic until Doreen begins to rant again about how ‘I got kidnapped and they dumped me here.’
‘You’re here so they can heal you,’ Lois says. ‘None of us wants to be here.’
'They doped me. That’s why I’m like I am,’ Doreen insists.


No Temazapan for me that first night because my doctor, whom I had not yet seen, did not prescribe it. Painkillers only. I am off the painkillers, though they keep offering them to me, but I cannot get to sleep.

The night nurse, who alternates between the strict school madam full of prohibitions and injunctions and a kindlier soul, broke the rules and gave me one on the second night. I had cracked finally. The lights the constant chatter and the noise. I burst into tears, which I tried to hide from her, but even in the half darkness she must have seen.

I can imagine my medical notes – ‘patient distressed and agitated’. If my distress enabled the help I needed to get to sleep that night, so be it. Simply asking did not help.

Last night I felt like one of the three mutineers, determined to stand my ground in my bid for sleep against the constant onslaught of Doreen’s raving.

Cabrini, Monday afternoon.

Annette, Doreen’s daughter, arrives. Once again she goes through the painful process of trying to orientate her mother.
‘I’d rather die,’ Doreen says. ‘Don’t touch me. Who are you?’
‘I’m your daughter, Mum. You’re just floating around in your head, having one of your fuzzies, You’re just not yourself.’

Annette and the nurses encourage Doreen to eat and to walk. She refuses.

Three staff test Doreen’s ability to put her feet on the ground. They confer.

As the day progresses Annette finally begins to get some sense out of her mother. Doreen talks about nightmares that have felt so real she believed them to be true.

Midafternoon and the grey suited doctor arrives.
‘What have you been up to, you naughty girl,’ he says to Doreen. ‘Why didn’t you keep your legs in place? And where did that wedge go to? It’s supposed to stay between your legs.’

He draws the curtains around Doreen, while Annette stands outside. I cannot hear his words to Doreen only mumbles.’ The doctor draws back the curtain and turns to Annette,
‘She’s hallucinating.’ His tone is one that suggests accusation and disbelief.
‘We’ll just have to put the hip back in again.’

The doctor leaves. Annette turns to me.
‘Did you hear that? He blames Mum. As if it’s her fault. And now more surgery. Look what the last two times have done to her.’

It matters not. The doctor orders a psycho-geriatrician. He will keep a check on Doreen's mind post surgery. He will review her medication.

That night after a third bout of surgery Doreen sleeps in the ward. She is sedated and snores loudly. I use earplugs and beg for yet another sleeping pill. I do not need or use them at home. But hospital care calls for drastic measures.

Cabrini Hospital Tuesday Morning, Home ward bound.

The doctor finally arrived to visit me last night after a two-day wait. He checked the results of my CT scan and has decided to keep the cast on for ten days to give the bone - my tibia - time to heal. If it moves, I will need surgery.

So at the moment I am home here on a couch, trusty laptop on my lap, my leg propped up and hoping that my tibia does not move.

I am free of pain, unless I move in particular ways and free of painkillers with all their side effects. I am more able to think, but I am unable to move with any vigour.

Judging by the experience of the other women in my ward I have little to complain of, except perhaps for what the future might hold should I be lucky enough to live that long.

No doubt this applies to all of us.

Not yet an orphan

What a day I have had. It is too busy at the moment by half. Once again I resist the basics, like hanging out washing that has sat in the washing machine overnight. I rationalise it is because of the rain. I have also failed to ring my mother. Every time I try she does not answer. I worried at first until I spoke to my older sister who tells me that in the evenings my mother takes out her hearing aide and turns up the television. She cannot hear a thing. So I must keep trying and maybe during the daytime. My mother does not watch television in the daytime. She is far too disciplined for that.

And busy she tells me, what with activities in the home, trips to doctors, her bible reading group and reading generally, she has no time for television by day but she likes to read in the evenings, once she turns off her TV.


My mother, I think to myself, is the sort of woman who will die in her sleep. Not yet I imagine, but one day soon enough. She will die in her sleep because it is the least painful way to go.

Imagine it. Imagine that last night alive. You follow your usual routine. For my mother the news on television, a few programs till around ten o’clock when her eyes start to feel heavy and then a visit to the toilet and the long struggle into her nightclothes. Finally she will put her dentures into a glass beside her bed and pull out her favourite book. She has been reading Ann Tyler of late.

My mother has always been a gluttonous reader. She will read for sometime, a fresh burst of energy with all the effort getting into bed has taken and in time her eyelids will droop again and she will make the supreme effort of switching off the light before falling into sleep.

She will mutter a prayer under her breath before she slips into unconsciousness, before her unconsciousness slips into oblivion and sleep becomes death.
Then my mother will have made her exit from this world in the same way she made her entrance, oblivious to the hardship and suffering around her, which is not to say she has not suffered. My mother knows intense pain but her way of dealing with her pain is one of looking on the bright side.

And now it occurs to me. This might account for my resistance to those who seek always to create lovely images in life, my hostility to those who resent my efforts to present different and less attractive facets of life, those who might prefer to die in their sleep oblivious to the pain of moving on, from those who rejoice in the struggle. Those who claw at the last vestiges of their lives, those who insist, I’m not ready to go yet. I want to stay.

My mother imagines these days she will live until she is 96 years old. It used to be that she imagined she would die at 86, the age of her father when he died, but she moved past that age. Now she has a little over five years to go on her reckoning.

What this means for me? For me at the age of 57 I am still not orphaned. None of us, my siblings are orphaned. My oldest brother in his mid sixties still has an intact mother. It drags back development. We must wait until we are next in line and by the time we get there assuming my mother’s death precedes that of her children, we will be so close to the possibility of our own deaths age wise, we already are that way, that we will have little time to ponder on the subtleties.

Haunted by Photos of the Dead 1.

In order to spare people great lumps of text I've broken the following into smaller sections which I shall eventually post in full but in pieces.


My mother, now in her ninetieth year, told me yesterday that she had hurt her hand. She had been walking through the hallway to her bedroom when she accidentally knocked it against the doorknob. She must have hit it hard because the top layer of skin came off and it was bleeding. When she looked at it more closely she realised that not only had she knocked off the top layer of skin but also the wound was deep. She could see her tendons down to the bone. She took herself to the office in the home where she lives in the hope that a nurse would be on duty.

The staff took one look at my mother’s hand and called an ambulance. My mother thought this unnecessary. She would have happily called a taxi. Still the ambulance came and took her to the clinic where they patched her up. They could not give her stitches because the skin on her hand was too thin. ‘It would tear,’ they said. Instead they pulled a series of tiny strips across the wound, and then bandaged it tight.

‘It hurts a little when I move it in particular ways,’ my mother said, ‘but I can tell it’s healing.’

I had rung to ask my mother a question about the past. I wanted to ask her about the photo of her dead baby, her first-born daughter who had died during the Honger winter of 1945 in Heilo, Holland. I was curious to know how the photo had come about.

My curiosity has been flamed by two books, Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination and the other, Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, a transcript on the nature of post-mortem photography in America, which includes several photos of dead people. A friend recommended the first book; the second, I found by accident in a used books shop. I could not leave the photographs behind.

Gordon is interested in the notion of the things behind things, the things that lie beneath. She takes notice of the thoughts that haunt her even as she is trying as a sociologist to do research on something concrete and ostensibly evident. Whereas Ruby is concerned to ask questions about why we have become so afraid of death, at least in the western world that we no longer take photos of our loved ones after death as mementos, or if we do take photos, they are kept private, not shared with the public, for fear that the owners might be considered ghoulish. (Ruby, 1995, p. 161)

I struggle to understand why so many things have become unspeakable, that it gets harder and harder to remember. But these days my mother’s memory for certain past events has a sharpness and clarity it never had before. My mother’s thin skin is a sign to me that soon she will be gone and with it her voice, I must catch her memories before it is too late, even as her memories are full of gaps and shadows. I will hitch her memories to mine and look for signs in between, look for the haunting to uncover something of her past.

I follow in Gordon’s direction. She describes how one day she was on her way to a conference to present a paper. She does not spell out the topic but how she had found herself distracted away from her topic by thoughts of a woman whose image she had discovered as ‘missing’ from the photo of a conference group in Berlin several years ago. According to Gordon’s research, the woman, Sabina Spielrein should have been present in that photo, but she was not there. Spielrein is a little known psychoanalyst from Freud’s day, little known despite the fact that she was the first to hypothesise on the nature of the death instinct.

My mother is describing her wounded hand and I cringe at the thought that her skin is so thin it cannot withstand a simple knock, the sort of knock that would leave most of us with a red mark, at best; a bruise, at worst.

‘They peeled the skin back over the hole,’ my mother said. ‘It had rolled itself up and they dragged it back over the wound.’ The image left me squeamish. Why do we wince when people describe their injuries, their own or another’s injuries in graphic detail?

In time I asked my mother the question that had prompted my phone call. She could not remember who took the photo, but she suspected it was the neighbour of her cousin in whose house she had been staying. She told me again the story she has told me many times before, always at my instigation. When I was little I wondered that she could stay dry-eyed in the telling. She seemed so calm, when I had imagined that were I the mother of a dead baby I would find it hard to go on living.

‘It is harder’, my mother said in this most recent conversation to lose an older child. ‘When a child dies so young, you have fewer memories. It takes far less time to get over it.’

For my mother, memories keep the idea of her lost child alive but given that this baby was only five months old, her life so short, there are few memories attached to her.

Still there was a catch in my mother’s voice as she spoke to me over the phone, as if she were re-remembering the feeling of her loss all that time back.

As long as I can remember my mother has checked herself; kept her tears to herself; put a full stop onto her feelings by offering some trite homily, some staving-off comment:
‘Well, that was that. No use dwelling on these things.’