Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
It started with a green neck pillow at The Australian Geographic shop. Only I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know that it was the beginning, or really the beginning of the end of things as I knew it. It was just an ugly looking thing on display in the window. Shaped like a U. Green plush one side, green and white stripes on the other. And yet I was strangely drawn to it. I felt like I had to buy it. I didn’t know why I would so I walked on. But then I came back. It was coming up to Christmas and I thought of buying it for mum for a present. It wasn’t her style but I just knew I had to buy it for her.
I remembered that she was going on her first post retirement camper van trip with my dad. They were going to travel around Tasmania. They had worked hard all their lives and it was time to take a break. The business mum had set up and taken from a hobby sideline to a national business was finally sold. It was their time and they were excited to go together, even though she had already managed to drive my dad nuts by writing all over the cupboards what was going to go in them. They were leaving in the New Year. Surely a long driving holiday would need a neck pillow? So I bought it.
She loved it. She thought it would be really handy. She was always a practical woman.
So they left on their trip.
And one night my mum rang really late which was unusual. I was watching an Agatha Christie movie and they were getting to the part where they tell you who done it. So I didn’t want to talk. I was dismissive. She sounded odd. She didn’t realise what time it was. She said that she had been sick with some strange virus and that her neck was aching all the time. She was ringing to tell me that she was so grateful for the neck pillow as it was bringing her some relief.
I never knew what that conversation was. I didn’t know it was the last time I would talk to her. So I said “yeh that’s great, gotta go, talk soon” But of course I never got to. I didn’t even tell her that I loved her. But I sadly never really did back then.
We didn’t know it at the time but the neck pain wasn’t a virus but septicaemia poisoning her blood and travelling around her veins. In a few days she would have a massive fever and by the time she made it to hospital it would already be too late. It would travel to her heart and fire off a blood clot that would travel to her brain and lead her to have a massive stroke. She was already dying but no one knew it.
3 days later I am on the toilet and my partner barges in with the phone. I scream at him to get out. He says I need to ring my dad. He says its urgent. My hand is trembling as I dial the number. My hand is trembling and then all of me is. I am meant to be getting ready for work but instead now I am booking a flight to Tasmania. On the plane my stricken face gives me away and a passenger gives me a pillow. She says “sometimes you just need something to hold onto, it will help”. I am holding that pillow as I ask for my mum to hold onto her life.
When I get to the hospital she is in Intensive Care but I am not shocked by the way that she looks. My stepson had been in ICU after a car accident (because 15 years olds without a license aren’t meant to be driving!) and he was now back playing footy. So everything would be ok. Mum would of course also recover from this. I would move down to the coast and be with her. I would help out with whatever rehab she might need. I would be there. I would dedicate my life to getting her back. And everything would of course be fine.
But it isn’t. The Dr announces to us casually, like its nothing and with a coldness that would always astound me, that the bleeding in her brain is extreme. That there would be no chance of recovery. And then he walked away, leaving us to reel in our shock and grief. I ring my brother who is overseas. All he can do is write her a letter for me to read. I print it off and draw the curtain trying to gain some privacy for the reading.
We need to turn off her life support. We decide to do it the following morning. I spend the night in her room and we watch Lewis on the TV. We always loved British murder mysteries. I will come to name my child after this movie and after this moment. I sleep in a chair by the bed holding her hand. Every now and then I will wake thinking that I have been having a nightmare, only to remember that I am living it.
We flip the switches. I expect it to be like at the movies. The family stands around and the heart monitor beeps slowly then flat lines and we all cry and say at least we got to be here. At least we got to say goodbye.
But that isn’t what happens. In fact nothing much happens at all. After a few hours they finally turn the sound off the equipment as the constant alarms and beeping feels like a chisel in between my eyes.
And so I sit. And I wait. I am scared to go eat. To go to the toilet. To have a shower. I do nothing but listen to every death rattle breath wondering if it will be the last one. I then realise that I wouldn’t even know if it was the last one until she never took another and I would never be able to say that I saw the exact moment that she died. So then I cant take my eyes away from her chest. And the breaths get fewer and further apart. But they still come. When I think it is over, and I hold my breath along with hers, she would eventually gasp again.
I get a lesson in life going on as I get my period. It doesn’t care about death or that I don’t want to have to take the time to go to the shops.
I sit there and my belly button ring gets infected because I am so run down. My mum hated that belly button ring. I think she is having a last ditch attempt to get me to remove it. I laugh and cry at the same time. I tell her its no good and that I’m keeping it in. I talk to her like she can hear me because no one says that she cant.
I am cold and uncomfortable because as I frantically packed for this unexpected journey I packed a nice skirt for a funeral rather than the trackies and ugg boots that I really needed.
I sit there so long that I want to scream “just hurry up and fucking die already!” at the same time that I so hope that it is all a mistake and that she will prove us all wrong.
I watch her lose lots of weight as they aren’t feeding her anything and I worry that she is starving to death. I watch as they put stuff in her mouth and she flinches which makes hope rise in my chest that she is going to be ok. Until they explain that it is just an involuntary movement, like a reflex. That it doesn’t mean anything.
I accidently catch sight of her feet and they are purple as the extremities are dying first. She will come to me in a few weeks time in a dream and we will both stand by her bed looking at her lying there and she will ask “what happened to my feet?” and I will explain it to her as it was explained to me. She was never meant to die. She would never have expected it. My vibrant, life loving, gym going, teetotaller mum who survived breast cancer and who was on her first retirement trip was not meant to be in lying in a hospital bed with her feet turning purple. We all needed it explained.
I rage about the unfairness. I cry about my future children that she will never get to meet. I feel sorry for myself that I have never had any grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins. That all I have is an absent brother and a broken dad. That I am losing the person who loved me the best and held us together. That my first real experience with grief is with the big guns. I sing her “Fly Away Little Bird”, a song a friend had put on my iPod because I liked the Indigo Girls, not because she thought it would ever be sung at a death bed.
And then I watch DVD box sets. I only ever need to get to end of an episode at a time. I never have to plan anything further. If I get to the end and I’m not ready to face life I can put on another. Life is in manageable, episodic chucks. Things get resolved in 45 minutes. Usually the good guy wins, or finds redemption or kicks some vampire butt. And so it goes through the days and nights as they now don’t have any separation. The DVD Box Set Approach to Grief is a strategy that will serve me well over the coming months. And when a friend goes through something horrible I buy them a JB HiFi voucher rather than flowers.
For five days I sit there. For five days she fights on. I honour my mum with my sitting. I tell her how much she meant to me by the way that I stay.
Eventually I of course have to go for a break and the call comes that she has died. When I get there she still feels warm and like she always did. And I am grateful for the green neck pillow. Sometimes you just really need something to hold onto.