Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time I saw my mother as a separate person was in the late 1960s watching her peg washing on the line. My mother standing there, pegs in a bag laced around her waist over her apron, arms stretched up performing her daily ritual. Pegs on her line always matched the colour of the washed item in question: tea towel, dress, socks, blouse. The two pegs the same colour, the colour matched to the tones and the hues of said washing. White pegs all along the white sheets.
Pegs identical. Always. My mother as archivist, librarian, scientist, artist. My mother in the middle of the back yard in suburban Sydney, thirty feet from the laundry window, thirty feet from her watching daughter. It was the 1960s when I disconnected her from myself, when I realised that she was making choices different from my own.
The next time was years later, when I held a pen in my hand, watching, waiting for her to leave the room where my father, her husband had just passed away. I was meant to be writing a list of things that needed to be done – song titles, photos to be found, food or rather refreshments, myriads of phone calls – all the practicalities which accompany recent death. For me death was an unknown entity. I was writing memories.
Eventually she stood and her face was as resolute as faces can be. My mother’s life was now her own, separate from all that had been before. We walked to the hospital lift together without a glance back. I hesitated but only in my mind. My feet dragged but as they say only metaphorically. I wanted to stay and not leave him there alone, but she never hesitated and we walked out, out into the light of the afternoon and got into our car and drove away.
Is that your story, your experience of death?
It is mine and one now with emotions so deeply interned that I have never gone to my father’s grave. Twenty-five years later this is still so overwhelming that my voice can’t utter any of this above a whisper. I am lost and unable to go to the place that I want to though now wonder if I need to.
Should I ask a friend? No one has heard my desire, no one has seen me this way. In sixty years I have never broken down in front of any one. Who could I take to my father’s grave?
My lover? My granddaughter? My mother? Each one attracts complicated emotions.
Do you have a blue one asked my mother at the funeral home. A blue coffin, don’t ask me why, a blue draped cloth surely would do. What did she know, what did she want to match this time?
This was not a wedding I thought, something old something blue – time was collapsing and the bad joke in my thoughts was not lost – weddings, funerals, christenings, blue for boys, for fathers wounded in wars, for fathers suffering the blues.
Blue haze certainly swirled in the days that marched on in those years after my father died. I probably needed to be told, you have permission to cry, you have permission to die a little inside.
It’s called disco dingo my mother said at the funeral home, he would like it played when we leave the service. I was no longer listening, I was merely surviving and hovering above it all.
Can you smell that? I said when we left the crematorium, the eucalypt in the air? I think he would like that. Even since I have looked out for a delicate scented candle to bring it all back but eucalyptus oil could never be deemed ephemeral, it’s far too potent for the business of grief.
A few days after my father died, a kookaburra flew down and sat under the clothes line, the line that still stands thirty feet from the laundry window in suburban Sydney, and I knew that my father was back.
Kookaburras now follow me wherever I go, turning up in any place where I need to know that I am safe, at retreats far from home, at times when I just needed a companion and once at a cancer healing centre in the hills outside Melbourne. I have learned not to be surprised.
I don’t pin up washing using clothes pegs of the same colour, chosen to perfectly match the colour of each separate tea towel, dress, sock or blouse. I am less patient than my mother for that task. I do however never put two pegs of different colours on any piece of washing. Whenever I rush and tell myself this is ridiculous, I always sigh and reach into the peg bag laced around my waist and change them to make it so.