Memory's thump

After she died, my mother left each of her children $8154.94 as their inheritance.  She had wanted to leave $10,000.00 each out of the proceeds of her rooms at the retirement village where she had spent her last decade, but the way these things go, costs and disbursements whittled some away. 

Throughout her life my mother was determined to give each of her children something of significance, and each must have an equal share. 

Ironically, what she leaves can never be equal

For some of us, $8000.00 plus is a significant sum, for others it’s a trifle.  For some it can go into unpaid debts, for others it becomes part of their inheritance to their own children, administered early.

They will give it away.

After my husband’s father died and left a small but more significant inheritance size-wise, he wanted to buy something of substance as a reminder of his father: a timeless piece of furniture that might stand up against time. 

I have not been able to think of anything to honour the memory of my mother other than through words on the page.

One of my brothers has been writing his ‘chronicles’ about his life, which he had wanted to include in the family archive, but has since withdrawn because some family members objected to certain of his statements. 

The response to his writing, which he initially spread far and wide among our extended family, was a bit like my mother’s inheritance.  Some responded loudly – it meant a great deal to them.  Others did not react at all, or at least not in company.

Last night, I read the second section of my brother’s chronicles in which he addresses some of the contentious areas where people have challenged his view of what really happened in our family and I wonder yet again about the nature of fact and of fiction. 

The ways in which one person’s story can seem so very different from that of a sibling, when both occupied the same space in childhood, when both shared the same parents. 

But in many ways, my brother’s parents were not my parents.  All nine of us have different parents, given that our parents – despite our mother’s best intentions to treat us all equally – behaved differently with each one of us. 

My father prized the boys above the girls; at least as far as academic achievement was concerned.  Girls were good for housework and sexual favours. 

My mother, on the other hand, preferred her sons.  Especially, the first and last-born, though the first might say that our mother preferred the second born son. 

These distinctions put differential pressures on each of us as girls and as boys. 

Years ago, Helen Garner wrote a story about her sisters for an anthology on sisters in which she gave her sisters names based on chronology, second sister, third sister etc.  I have a similar impulse in relation to writing about my brothers, given there are five of them, and each is unique. 

Here, too, I try to protect their identities in order to make a point about family experience, but this emphasis on family chronology can make for dull storytelling, so the critic in my head pulls me up and says ‘fictionsalise’.

Does it matter that my brother writes in blunt words, that my father penetrated my sister and raped her on a number of occasions, both for its factual nature and that the statement seems to take it further than my understanding of events. 

Did my father actually penetrate my sister? 

Does degree matter?  My father penetrated my sister’s mind.  He penetrated mine.  He penetrated all our minds but in different ways. 

See these words on the page.  See how they disturb, even as I put them down. 

See how much the reader wants to say,

‘No, don’t write that’. 

Don’t say that.  Don’t speak of these events, they are too awful to consider.

Embellish them in a story.  Give the reader some space in which to imagine.  Don’t leave it too open-ended. 

My brother writes about his own memory of seeing my father go into my sister’s bedroom late at night.  Sometimes my father was naked.

This one hits me with a thump.

My brother as witness and given that he himself did not go into my sister’s bedroom, given he did not watch my father with my sister, but could only imagine it, he may have taken his memories to this extreme.

When we witness events, we take in certain aspects of that event and our memory and imagination then kicks in and rearranges the images over time. 

When I read about my brother’s memory it puzzles me.  Only in so far as I do not remember my father walking naked through the house until I was in my teens, by which time this brother had left home. 

But when this brother still lived at home, it is possible that he saw my father in ways I did not.

Does it matter, the truthfulness of all this, of who saw what, of who did what to whom? 

I suspect it does.  But when it comes to sexual abuse, the facts become murky, simply through the overload of sensations that accompany our understanding.

When I read about the three year old boy who went missingfrom his home on the mid-north coast of NSW several months ago and of how police later recruited the aid of Interpol to look out for a paedophile ring, I cannot get it out of my mind: the sight of this little boy in the grip of a group of paedophiles. 

In my imagination, they are a blurry group of dark clothed men standing in a ring around this small boy, preying on his body as if they are dogs fighting over a bone.

This is as much as my imagination can bear before I want to snap it shut.  Stop the images.  They are too unimaginable.

My mother was a person who could not bear to see what was going on around her, under her own roof. 

She could not contemplate what was happening to her daughters, most particularly her oldest, even though she tells the story of finding my father at my sister’s bedside and of telling him if she ever saw him doing this again she would kill him. 

She thought that was enough to stop him.

It was not enough.

My father continued to visit my sister in the night and my mother continued not to see, until it was too late. 

Even now in my family, and in the community at large, it is hard to want to see these things. 

Perhaps this is one of the reasons I write about them.  I pick at them like an old sore, and there are some who say, stop it, get over it.  It’s done now.  Get on with your life. 

There are some who might put our mother’s inheritance into the bank – just a few extra dollars and nothing of any substance – and there are others who might like to make the most of our mother’s inheritance, some who might want to use some of the talent she passed onto her children, both for observation and her ability to write, but also to fight against this tendency of hers to turn a blind eye.  

My hips are still agile

Christmas Eve and I’m well again.  At last.  Only a few days of ill health but enough to have me imagine I would never feel okay again, never my normal self.  Last week I copped a virus of some sort, presumably one I caught from my grandson after he had stayed with us.  I held myself together until the final day of my work and then collapsed. 

It’s always the way.  I’ve come to expect it: go on holidays and fall ill, mostly with a minor ailment but I tend to imagine it’ll be worse, as if I’m waiting for the final diagnosis that signifies my pending death. 

I’ve said this before, I’m sure.  When I was young I thought sixty would be a terrific age at which to die.  When I was young, a child at primary school, old age seemed such a foreign country.

Last night I visited my mother in her retirement village, the centre of that foreign country.  I arrived at the end of dinner and walked with her as she shuffled back from the dining room.  There was a bottleneck of people hunched over their walkers as we entered the corridor that leads back to her room, three old people staggering on the slight incline that leads from one part of the corridor to the next, my mother at the rear.  I looked down at my mother's legs visible under her skirt, at her angular though shapely ankles, on her unsteady feet.  And I shuddered.  

It was hot yesterday, and yet it had stayed cool in the nursing home as my mother proceeded to tell me while she manoeuvred her walking frame behind her fellow residents.  Her hips swayed from side to side as if without the frame she might totter to the ground. 

My hips are still agile.  I can walk without difficulty, though yesterday while I was shrugging off the last of the virus, still feeling queasy, I went with one of my daughters into the city for a dose of last minute Christmas shopping, and thought otherwise.

            ‘Why do you need to stand around like that?’ my daughter said to me after she came out of the change room where she had tried on a new dress, a potential Christmas present.  ‘Like you’re a person with special needs?’

I was not aware I had been standing around in such a way.  I imagine she expected me to look purposeful but by this time of the year after more than one such visit to David Jones's women’s clothes’ department – four daughters after all, two of whom have particular tastes in clothes – I found myself looking for a seat while I waited for said daughter to try things on. 

 I have noticed, in this department store at least, there are no seats available for the likes of me on which to sit.  There was a sort of cabinet in the Ted Baker section with a British flag painted on top – Ted Baker must be an English label, not one my daughters choose – so I sat on the edge of it.  None of the sales staff seemed to mind.  But my daughter found my sitting there troublesome.  

I did not find my mother’s gait troubled me yesterday, not at my age now, other than as a reminder of what is to come.  My daughter on the other hand is in her mid twenties still in that place where old age is foreign territory and not worth considering in terms of self yet.  

After my mother had reached her arm chair and flopped down into it, I sat on the flat seat of her walker nearby.  Proximity makes it easier for her to hear me.  

For the first time I noticed a bracelet on my mother's wrist, one I had not seen before.  She told me she had bought it in Holland.  It was silver with delicate incisions cut into the surface like lace.  I knew at once I wanted it. 

There is not much that my mother leaves behind that I desire other than her bracelets, this one and another, a gold bracelet, an heirloom left to her by a long dead aunt, also from Holland – a thick gold chained bracelet that is linked to a single guilder.  I would be happy to settle for one bracelet only, if I could choose, but how could I tell this to my mother? 

So far it has been easy to tell her that I’m okay about most things she leaves behind.  She can choose.   Though I once mentioned a particular preference for the crucifix on her mantlepiece, not for religious but for sentimental reasons, as in it revives memories of the time it sat on the mantelpiece throughout my childhood.  

The crucifix will no doubt go to one of my mother’s more religious children.  Sentiment is not a good enough reason to inherit a crucifix. 

Bracelets are different. We daughters might fight over them after our mother has gone.  Not that we would fight.  Not openly at least.  We never fight, not these days, not as we fought when we were young.  

To speak of wanting something was forbidden from my earliest memories, only hinting would do.  But it is no longer in my style to hint. 

Next time I see my mother I will ask outright.  It’s not as hard as asking her other questions about the past whose answers she holds so close to her chest I fear she will never part with them. 

A bracelet is easy to give away even if to speak of it again is to signify death.  And then I imagine myself wearing my mother's bracelet.   I imagine my skin brush against the bracelet that my mother's skin now brushes against and feel a mixture of pleasure and of revulsion.  Such these days is my attitude towards death.  

And here for good cheer is the Lemon Myrtle my youngest daughter and I dragged in from our garden for this year’s Christmas tree.  My daughter decorated it with her nephew.  Together they basked in that lovely place where old age and death are almost unthinkable.

My grandfather's clock

My mother does not have much by way of a literal inheritance to leave her children,  but she tells me each of us can have one of the 'precious' items from our childhood that now take pride of place in her living room. 

‘I don’t want you to fight over them,’ she said when I visited last week.  

I don’t see that we would, at least not overtly, but there is one single item that to me stands out above all others - the grandfather clock - my grandfather’s clock, the one he sent to my mother in Australia from Holland way back in the 1960s. 

‘It’s the only thing of real value,’ my mother said.  ‘It’s an antique.’

I’m not sure I can speak for the clock's actual value but its sentimental value to my mother and to her children is great, or at least I imagine it is great for my siblings as well.  

My mother has elected to give this clock to one of my brothers.  It is the only item that she has itemised specifically for one or another of us, except for her piano, which goes to my older sister, the only one who ever learned to play properly.  That is a given. 

I don't know where the idea came from, but for several years now I have lived with the belief that one of my younger sisters coveted that grandfather clock since we were children.  

You know how it is, in those conversations children sometimes have with their parents: ‘When you die, Mum, I want you to leave me your banjo…’

In this way, my daughters divide up my jewellery - what there is of it - again not for its actual value, but for its emotional value, particularly my wedding ring.  Given the fact I have four daughters and only one ring, a ring created and cast in gold by a friend now long dead, we have thought to make a fresh cast of the ring so that all my children can have a copy.  But that’s another story.

My mother says she wants to be buried with her rings, or else they will need to be cut off.  

That’s fine, my older sister reckons, but to her it seems a waste to bury diamonds. 

There seems to be a debate between the actual value and the emotional value. To me, my mother's diamonds hold little value.  They come from the rings her second husband gave her.  I care only for the rings and things that come from my childhood, narcissistic as that might seem.  

The things that existed in my childhood that live on in my memory, they are the things I desire most:  the paintings of windmills in Holland, and of Europe in the winter, the wall hangings my mother hand embroidered, the statue of the blessed virgin Mary, and the crucifix.

I sensed my mother was a little surprised when I asked if I might have the crucifix, not for religious reasons - though I did not tell my mother that - more for its significance as an icon from my childhood that sits in my memory like a beacon.  

‘Take it down now then,’  my mother said.  ‘Write your name underneath.’  I suggested that - with help - she might like to write behind or underneath each object or painting the name of the person to whom she wants to leave it. 

‘But I prefer to give each of you something you like.  I want you each to choose.’

All except the grandfather clock, and I told my mother then how much my younger sister had always wanted that clock, she perhaps more than any one of us.  But no, my mother still wants to give it to my brother.

Why, I asked, why this brother?  

‘He never married,’ my mother said.  ‘He lives alone.’ 

A clock like this could make his home homely.  A clock like this belongs in a cosy house.  A clock like this would keep him company.

My mother went on to tell me how she had stopped the clock from working when the grandchildren came along.  She did not want any of them to get hurt playing with the brass metal weight on the end of the chains at the base of the clock. 

But my brother could reassemble it, she said.  He could get the clock working again.

And so he could measure the passage of time, tick tock, tick tock, the grandfather clock his constant companion.

I do not know what will happen to the clock or the crucifix or any of the other memorabilia of my mother’s life, but at least I can write about it, as I did once in a short story - literary license and all that: 

The girl hesitates at the front door as she pulls it shut behind, long enough to catch a glimpse of the statue of Jesus hanging from his crucifix on top of the piano in the front hall.  His feet are cracked where the nail has been driven in and although someone has tried to glue the feet back in place the plaster has split up to his knees and he now hangs loosely from his arms and swings in the updraft from the open door.

Her father's beads

Nursing my mother has become something of a preoccupation. Not so much to keep her alive as to make these last days comfortable. She is not in pain she tells me time and again, but her legs weep. I never knew this. I never knew that legs could ooze liquid as if they have become my mother’s eyes and she cries all the time through tiny holes and blisters in the skin around her swollen ankles.

It is a side effect of congestive cardiac failure the doctors say and there is not much they can do apart from reducing her fluid intake and trying to keep her fluid retention down. But my mother could not survive on a single litre of fluid a day.

I notice she does not even keep a tally on the number of drinks, cups of tea, juice and water she consumes and to my way of thinking why should she? It will not make a huge difference. This slow grinding down heart will only get worse.

Late on Friday night when I unpacked my mother’s bags after she had finally returned from hospital to her retirement village, I noticed a set of wooden rosary beads.
‘Do you want these nearby,’ I asked.
‘Put them there,’ she said and she pointed to the table beside her chair.
‘My father carved that crucifix out of wood,’ my mother said. ‘They were my father’s beads.’

Even to the end my mother has her father in mind. She was his favourite. He was hers. Strange then that my mother should marry a man such as my father, a man who could not/did not make her his favourite, or at least not in so far as I could ever see.

I have yet to work out the psychology behind my mother’s choice of husband, or should I say her husbands, for there were two.

The second husband puzzled me even more, but she was happy with him and although he seemed to me an uncouth, ocker sort of bloke who often put her down, he also treated her well to a degree, though not sufficient to cater for her well enough after their seventeen-year-old marriage ended in his death several years ago.

He left almost everything to his own children and very little for my mother after he died apart from the choice to live in his house for as long as she wanted before it was turned over to his two remaining children.

My mother refused to contest the will. She did not want to make trouble for anyone and so she eked out the last of her days on a pension and the good will of some of her children, leaving only the money she had invested in her room at the retirement village, which will be distributed between all her children on her death.

I have often been jealous of friends whose parents leave a huge monetary inheritance. I know I should be satisfied with my inheritance as it stands from both my parents, my education, my sense of myself, my capacities in most endeavours, but I cannot help but think what a wonderful help it would be to become suddenly rich as has happened to a few of my friends on the death of their respective parents.

Not so for my husband and me. We have been, as far as wealth is concerned, self made. We paid for our own wedding. We have worked hard to support ourselves throughout the years of our marriage and now at this stage I am not so confident that I have not repeated history, managed my affairs badly and will not leave a large legacy to our children, only debts that might consume whatever assets we have gained. I hope this does not happen.

I do not live to leave my children huge wealth but I’d like to think there might be more left over for them when we die than has been left for us, for both my husband and I. His parents were not much better off than my parents and they too had a large family of six.

There is something in this forward looking to my own death which relates I am sure to my mother's slow and steady decline into lifelessness, but as I drove back home last night from the retirement village after I had tucked my mother into her recliner chair where she now plans to sleep each night - she sleeps better there, as her heels do not rub - I thought I am grateful for this time, this time of nursing my mother, this time to make peace with her.

I have not always been such a faithful daughter.