by Tony Kelly
‘All you need to do is move a bar fridge and a little TV into that room of yours, Mum, and you won’t have to leave at all,’ I joked to her.
Mum laughed, but I could tell she didn’t find it particularly funny.
I tried to make inroads into clearing away some of the clutter while I was there. I spent as much time as I could cleaning, but what Mum wanted was company. She didn’t care about the house. She wanted to play Upwords, do crossword puzzles and go out for coffee and drives out bush. We did all these things, but late at night when she was in bed I would get out the cleaning products.
I made a general enquiry to the aged care facility. While I was on the phone to the manager, Mum called out, ‘You can make an appointment but I won’t be going!’
I put my hand over the receiver. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked her.
‘I’m telling you I won’t be going for a meeting, or to live there!’ She stormed down the hall and slammed her bedroom door.
I was so surprised: Mum never behaved like this. She was the doyenne of good manners.
Finally we talked.
‘I’m worried, Mum,’ I said.
‘You don’t need to be,’ she replied. ‘I have everything under control.’
‘What about Betty?’ I asked.
Mum’s good friend had recently been attacked in her home. It was an awful story. A young man came to the door and asked for a glass of water. He then pushed his way into Betty’s house, hit her around the head and fled when she collapsed onto the floor.
‘I keep the doors locked,’ Mum told me.
‘What about the man selling vacuums?’ I asked. ‘You let him in the house.’
Not so long ago a vacuum salesman had come to the house, and wouldn’t leave until Mum bought a new vacuum. When she went to write him a cheque, he said he could only take cash. Mum didn’t have cash so he drove her into town to the bank to get some. She then paid him and he left, taking her perfectly good old vacuum with him. When Mum told us this story, we were horrified.
‘I don’t like that you have to step over the side of the bathtub to have a shower,’ I said. ‘It’s dangerous.’
‘I’ll get home help to put in some safety rails.’
‘You have an answer for everything, don’t you?’ I said with a smile.
Mum gave a little grin.
‘Are you lonely?’ I asked.
Mum did not answer.
Dad died from leukaemia in 1996, and since then Mum had been living alone. On some level I knew that, for Mum, this was almost a luxury, as to my knowledge she had never lived alone before. I got the feeling that she enjoyed having the space to determine her own routine.
‘I am not depressed,’ she said, ‘I know that for certain. But, yes, sometimes I am lonely, and sometimes …’
‘Sometimes?’ I prompted.
‘I feel sad.’
This was all I needed to hear.
A few days later I flew back to Melbourne, and Tony picked me up at the airport. ‘We need to move to Mount Isa,’ I said straightaway.
Tony nodded.
‘I think we go there for a year, get the house sorted, sell it and then move Mum into the aged care facility or bring her back here with us.’
‘Is that what Diana wants?’ he asked.
‘Not really,’ I admitted, ‘but if we’re there with her we can do it slowly and methodically. She’s lonely. I don’t want her to live her last few years like that.’
‘Okay,’ said Tony. ‘I’ll ask around about work.’
‘Great!’ I said, and left it at that.
A few weeks later Tony told me, ‘I might have a job in Mount Isa.’
‘Oh?’
‘That is what you want, isn’t it?’ he pressed.
‘Yeah,’ I replied as convincingly as I could. Of late, I realised, I had let the whole Mount Isa situation slide to the back of my mind. ‘What’s the job?’
‘I met the CEO of a native title organisation that has an office in Mount Isa,’ he explained. ‘He told me they’ve never been able to recruit a lawyer there, and that he’s open to a serious conversation about work.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘What about your job here?’
‘I spoke to my boss and he’ll approve two years’ leave without pay.’
I could feel my heart beating faster. I had said we needed to move there, but had I just been blowing off some steam? Did I really want to ‘up stumps’ and move back? It was over thirty-five years since I’d lived there. Also, I was having a fab time in Melbourne, and was just about to launch a small theatre company with one of my best friends. We had all sorts of projects lined up. Could I live in Mount Isa and continue working on them?
Our daughters had finished school and were doing their own things, so it felt like we were almost ‘empty nesters’. But did I really want to become my mother’s carer? Could I backpedal and say I’d changed my mind?
A few weeks later Tony announced, ‘I got the job in Mount Isa!’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘So I guess that means we’re going?’
‘Looks like it,’ said Tony.
‘When?’ I asked.
‘End of the year works for me.’
‘End of the year it is.’
After this, things moved pretty quickly. I contacted Mum and told her we were coming. I explained the plan, and she was surprisingly open to it. I even picked up a sense of relief in her voice.
From my townhouse in Clifton Hill it all seemed so doable. Tony would have a job and I would continue to work on projects back in Melbourne, flying in and out. I’d also cook up some work in Mount Isa. I knew I had good skills and was very employable. Too easy!
Tony and I told the girls.
‘You’re going to live there?’ Georgina said.
‘Yeah,’ I replied.
‘Why?’ asked Lucille.
‘To look after Mum – you know that.’
‘But can’t you live here and do that?’ Georgina asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well, don’t get any ideas that we’ll be doing that for you when you get old!’ she laughed.
‘That’s the only reason I’m doing it!’ I told her.
‘They can live with you, Lu,’ Georgina said to her sister.
‘No way,’ said Lucille. ‘We’ll be putting you both in a home.’
God, I thought, young people are brutal.
I told my work partner, Joanne.
‘A year?’ she asked.
‘That’s the plan.’
‘But your mum’s well, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll be up there for longer than a year!’
Joanne is an actor, theatre producer and palliative care nurse. She knows about the hard yards of looking after people. Although I told everyone that we were going for a year, already I suspected that it would be for much longer. I just didn’t have the guts to say it.
Joanne and I drew up a list of projects and tasks, and scheduled some Skype meetings and phone calls in our diaries.
‘I think it’ll all be manageable,’ I said.
‘Except that I’ll miss you,’ she replied.
‘I’ll miss you too.’
Slowly the reality of the situation started to sink in. We began packing boxes of things we might need, like our camping gear, and organised to truck them up to Mount Isa.
We told other friends. Most people were full of praise, saying that what we were doing was virtuous. Others challenged us: ‘Move her to Melbourne and put her in an aged care facility … Move back to Daylesford and get a good house with a granny flat.’
Lots of people asked me about my siblings – couldn’t they take her? Why was it always women who ended up doing the work of caring for aged parents?
I am the
youngest of four children, and the only daughter. My eldest brother, Michael, died in 1994. My next brother, Paul, lives in Jacksonville, Florida. He and his wife have three sons who are still in school. Paul works as an engineer for a company that does a great deal of their business in Mexico, so it simply wasn’t possible for him to uproot his life and come back to Australia.
My other brother, David, lives in Mackay and works as a contractor in mining and construction. He has three teenagers, all in school, and his wife had only recently recovered from cancer. He was also in no position to uproot his life and move his entire family to Mount Isa.
The only other people who could possibly take on the role were my brother Michael’s four adult children. The eldest, Belinda, is married to Seppo, and they and their three daughters – Madlyn, Ashley and Jorja – live in Mount Isa. They’re very close to Mum and offer lots of support, but they work and have a busy household to run. Michael’s youngest daughter, Samantha, also lives in Mount Isa. She’s an electrician at the mines and works long rotating shifts. She and her boyfriend, Thomas, have a full life. Samantha is also very close to Mum, but it isn’t her responsibility to look after her grandmother. Michael’s two sons, Brian and Michael, live in Toowoomba with their partners. They are carers for their own mother, who has a debilitating muscular disease.
To me, it was a no-brainer.
And so, on Friday, 13 February 2015, Tony and I pulled our newly bought second-hand Prius into the driveway of my family home in Madang Street, Soldiers Hill, and began the task of looking after Mum.
I sit at the table and make a list of things I need to do today. Living in Mount Isa but continuing to work in Melbourne is doable, but not ideal. I look at my diary and can see only looming deadlines.
I’m working on a set of treatment documents for the film adaptation of my play Home for Lunch. I haven’t worked in film before and am finding the task pretty slow going. I have an excellent mentor in Melbourne but I feel self-conscious about how long everything is taking me. This, unfortunately, just slows me down more.
Joanne and I have received funding to do a two-week season of my play HERE later in the year, and it requires lots of production. We’re also working on getting support for the development of a new project called Resting Bitch Face. I have made a connection with JUTE Theatre in Cairns, and will go there soon to do some development on my play Hypoxia. I also have work coming up later in the year with the Victoria Trade Union Choir to tour a play I wrote and directed for them called I’ll Be There.
In between all this we’re writing funding applications, organising the incorporation of our company, and making future plans. All fairly standard work for freelance artists, but the tyranny of distance does make things more difficult. Skype is good, and I spend hours writing emails and making phone calls, but I know that I’m missing some of the nuances that happen with face-to-face meetings and discussions.
In our first few weeks in this house, it had been impossible to do anything other than sort through the chaos and try to make ourselves comfortable. Tony and I moved into Mum and Dad’s old bedroom – and their sixty-year-old bed. Although the mattress was fairly new, the base was well and truly spent. We discovered that it was held together with short pieces of rope and propped up with bricks. Each time one of us would move, something would slip and we’d sink into the hollow in the middle. After a couple of sleepless nights, Tony pulled the mattress onto the floor. ‘Let’s think of it as camping,’ he said. We quickly bought a new bed.
The house is quite small, and Mum and her giant recliner dominate the lounge room. Tony and I both felt the need for a little ‘space’ for ourselves, so we set up a sort of cubby arrangement in what used to be the car port under the house. ‘Car port’ is probably too fancy a name, as it’s just a dirt space between the house stumps where Dad used to park the car. The sides are covered in chicken wire, and around the stumps are workbenches with numerous bottles of screws and nails, old fishing line wrapped around faded beer cans and an extraordinarily large collection of burnt-out elements from old jugs. Mum and Dad were both products of the Depression, and though their methods of organisation differed, neither threw anything out.
We bought fake grass from the hardware store and used pieces of worn-out carpet to cover the red dust. We surrounded the entrance with a nice array of pot plants, and set up a small table, a couple of folding chairs and a bluetooth speaker. I found a collection of old tools and other metal implements and hung them around the space in what I think is a rather Rosalie Gascoigne–inspired installation. We named the space ‘Dinky Di’s’ in honour of Mum, and retreat down there on the weekends to have a beer, listen to music or make phone calls to family and friends.
We’d also managed to sort through lots of things in the house to make it more liveable. If we were not doing activities with Mum, we’d spend our evenings and weekends sorting. I found it difficult to determine what was treasure and what was trash. ‘All trash!’ said Tony.
Some things frustrated me, like discovering that all Dad’s clothes were still in his cupboard. ‘Why have you kept these?’ I asked Mum.
She had no answer.
I pulled everything out and bagged it up for the op-shop. We all lightened up when I found two old fifty-dollar notes tucked into one of the jackets Dad used to wear to the races. Sly old bastard, I thought.
I looked everywhere for Mum’s old artworks – her ink drawings and pastel works. I looked in old suitcases and boxes, and went through drawers, but I couldn’t find anything.
‘Where are your drawing books, Mum?’ I asked her.
‘I threw them out,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘No one wants those old things.’
‘I do.’
‘They were amateur, underdone … poorly executed still-life pieces.’
I was so disappointed. I love Mum’s art and kicked myself for not saving some of her work years ago. I couldn’t understand why she had kept so much rubbish and thrown out what I think are gems. To me, Mum was so good at everything, but to her own critical eye she was no more than average. Her lack of confidence has at times run deep.
I discovered that Mum had spread her clothes across every wardrobe and set of drawers in the house. ‘What’s the system here, Mum?’ I asked.
‘The system,’ said Mum, ‘is freedom of choice.’
My choice was to ignore her.
We ordered a skip, and when the bloke delivered it, I instinctively said, ‘Oh no, that’s way too big! Do you have a smaller one?’
‘I’ll give ya forty-eight hours,’ he said, ‘and I bet you’ll be calling me to come and pick it up, empty it and bring it back for round two.’
He was right. After two days the skip was full, and he came and emptied it.
My nieces and great-nieces popped in and out and looked at what we’d done. Like Mum, they were not so enamoured with change. This house had been a constant in their lives, and I had to be careful how I approached things.
‘Oh, that’s different,’ one of them said when she saw how I had rearranged the kitchen cupboards.
Yeah, I thought, different from chaos.
I went to great lengths to explain that we needed to create order so that we could live here and care for Mum.
‘What do you think, Grandma?’ they asked.
Mum gave them the thumbs-up and said, ‘Awesome!’
We all thought this was hilarious, but it was the only endorsement the grandkids needed. If Grandma said it’s awesome, then all is fine. Though at times I would have liked it if they said, ‘You’re doing a fantastic job, Aunty Beck,’ I knew that their compass points only towards Mum. Their own mum was not very attentive, and, without a father, Grandma has been the primary stable figure in their lives. I don’t mind. I’m pretty thick-skinned and have other people to stroke my ego. My job is to look after Mum, and to allow the grandkids as much
space as they need to be a part of it all.
The thing that causes the most tension is the air conditioner. I can’t believe how much of my time is spent both thinking and talking about the cooling of this old four-bedroom fibro house.
There are two devices. The first is the ‘swampy’, which is slang for a water-cooled evaporative air conditioner. The swampy works by blowing air through cooling pads. It doesn’t get as cold as the second system, the splitty.
At first Tony and I decided that we would keep only the swampy on at night. Its carbon footprint is less than that of the splitty, and so in our minds it was a more attractive option. However, swampies work best if windows and doors are left open so that the air can circulate and mildew doesn’t grow. At night we close the venetians and the doors, but this causes an air lock to form and makes the venetians rattle incessantly. This drives us crazy.
The other problem is that the swampy is a large unit, with its main switch in the bedroom we sleep in. It has vents that blow cool air into every room in the house. The splitties, however, are individual units, and we only have these in the bedrooms and lounge. If I turn off my splitty and put on the swampy but don’t turn off Mum’s splitty, she’ll have both the splitty and the swampy going in her room.
So we do what everyone does in North West Queensland: hermetically seal the joint and crank up the splitty.
I’m menopausal, so I have to confess that I love the splitty. It makes the bedroom nice and cold, which helps me sleep. Tony finds it too cold, and throughout the night increases the temperature. I wake up in a pool of sweat and change it back to arctic.
This goes on all night until Tony gets up, turns the splitty off, opens the bedroom curtains, venetians and louvres, and gets back into bed. After a short time of listening to the rattling of the louvres and blinds, he usually gives up, gets up and goes to the pool. Unable to bear the heat without some form of cooling device, I too get up, make a cup of tea and begin the grand opening of the house.
I open the front and back doors, then the curtains, venetians and louvres in the lounge and kitchen. I turn the louvres to the best angle to catch any morning breeze.
