The Big Issue Australia #660 – How Much to Save the Planet?

Page 11

My Word

by Vin Maskell

M

um died 29 years ago. November 1993. I don’t remember – or perhaps I refuse to remember – the exact date. I remember Dad ringing me. That was odd in itself – Mum was the talker of the two. Dad was never one for lengthy phone calls and this call was no different. What more could he say than what had to be said? He had five children to ring, and Mum’s several siblings, and friends and colleagues, and the funeral director, and the church and… I remember sitting on the couch in the lounge room after the phone call. Not necessarily shocked – Mum had undergone heart surgery two months earlier. Not crying. But shaken, of course. Adrift. I told my wife Julie, whose father had died only weeks before. We told our children, three-year-old Hannah and 13-month-old Jesse. What would they make of it? What would I make of it? The funeral was on a hot December day, but it was cooler inside the suburban church. Symbolic, perhaps? There were three priests at the altar (three!). At Dad’s request – more a signal than a spoken directive – I took communion, even though I’d abandoned religion more than 10 years before: now was not the time to worry about my own beliefs. Some of my siblings joined me in the communion queue. A seeming stranger read the eulogy, turning over the stapled pages of Mum’s life story. Born in the Depression. Seven siblings. One of four daughters of a cranky self-employed engineer. Married to the only child of a horse-trainer. Six children. Another two stillborn. President of the primary school mothers’ club for a year or two. Moved the family with her husband’s work: Melbourne, then Geelong, then back to Melbourne, then Geelong again. An overseas holiday with a sister, cut short by tragedy. A beach house near the Great Ocean Road. The stranger reading the basic facts of Mum’s 65 years was a long-time friend of my parents, but

I couldn’t place him. Neither his face nor his voice were familiar. You can never know your parents as well as they know you. They have lives and friends and history, separate from parenting. Outside the church, after the service, the heat was sapping and the glare was blinding. The concrete of the church’s forecourt left us exposed. Julie’s eldest sister had taken Jesse for a long walk during the funeral mass. Our blond son was now asleep, and a little sunburned, in his stroller. There was shade at the cemetery, a graveyard bordered by a local footy ground and my childhood primary school. I remember the large pile of soil – probably heavy clay – near the gravesite, and wishing there were shovels, wishing I could do something physical, something active, something practical rather than standing calmly. Funerals are so restrained, dignified. The passivity is stifling. Was there afternoon tea at the church hall after the burial? Probably. Of course there would have been. That’s when people start to relax, to tell stories, to laugh a little. But I can’t picture it. Still, I remember not quite wanting to go home. Home was only an hour up the highway, but I wasn’t ready for the drive. I knew we couldn’t return to the lives we led before the day Dad rang. So we visited our friends Bill and Carol. In the shade of their garden they offered cool drinks, snacks and conversation. The children stretched their little legs and sat on our laps. They no longer had to contend with a forest of adults, and neither did I. Bill and Carol, always quiet and gentle, provided solace at the end of a day, the end of a week of not just loss and grief but of newness: of the new experience of being motherless. But, of course, we had to leave. We had to go home. We had to go back. The hot sun was setting but it would rise again. The highway traffic was thinning but life would be busy again. Nappies to change, washing to hang, meals to cook, people to love. And a father to call from time to time. Mum died 29 years ago. I don’t remember the exact date.

Vin Maskell is a regular contributor to The Big Issue and the editor of music memoir site stereostories.com and sport site scoreboardpressure.com.

11

Things will never be the same after losing his mother, but the rhythms of life carry Vin Maskell forward through the days, months, years since.

29 APR 2022

The Days After


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