by Peter Wells
‘How are you, Pete?’
‘How are you getting on?’ I counter.
She is mellow today and we manage to make a small picnic of chat. It feels, in the circumstances, like one of those days you unexpectedly go out and find the perfect spot, and the sun comes out, and you feel relaxed as time expands all around you.
I mention various family members and she knows who they are. She maintains eye contact and is philosophical.
‘You have a good time,’ she says to me when I stand up to go.
(Translation: I have had a good time, why don’t you?)
Then she says: ‘Look after yourself, Pete.’
(I translate this as: Be wary, I can’t look out for you any longer.)
Then she says, just before I go: ‘You go and do whatever it is you have to do.’
11 APRIL 2017
‘I’m going to die.’
Bess said this five times to the nurse this morning. They tell me this when I come in. I sit with her. She is barely conscious. She is in pain, can’t get comfortable. Is nauseous. I sit beside her, and when she becomes conscious of me it is to deliver her verdict, typically plain and straightforward: ‘I’m buggered.’
She doesn’t even add my name. She has no time for courtesies. Time is running out.
She turns away and tries to sleep.
It’s time she is on morphine but we have to wait for the doctor to come to insert the morphine drip. He is busy, and when he arrives he indicates I may not want to stay in the room. I go and sit in the main room.
I listen to the quiz the nurse aide gives to the variously damaged old people sitting in a circle. None of them is in pain or even apparently unhappy. They exist in the tranquil now-time of childhood. It’s only their old bodies or rather their brains that have betrayed them. I try not to look at an old Pākehā man — he could have been a builder or a carpenter — who holds a doll in the shape of a baby. He hugs it to his chest.
‘What bridge was opened in 1959?’
There is a note of good-tempered belligerence in the nurse aide’s voice. She repeats the question at least four times.
BESS IS GIVEN MORPHINE.
We hold hands.
‘Owww, your hands are so cold,’ she says in the voice of a spoilt little girl. I weep. We keep holding hands. She sinks into a morphine sleep.
I take my hand away when I realise she is in an uncomfortable position. I hear the nurse asking the old people in the lounge if any of them can sing a song. And suddenly a woman’s voice, surprisingly melodic, starts singing Cockles and mussels alive alive oh.
I find this very emotional. When she sings She died of a fever / and so no one could save her / and that was the end of sweet Molly Malone, the nurse aide says loudly, ‘Oh we don’t want to hear that’, but the old woman’s voice continues to the end: Now her ghost wheels her barrow / through the streets broad and narrow / singing cockles and mussels / alive alive oh.
It seems beautiful to me.
Bess is in her own world now, travelling inwards. I take one or two pictures of her. I don’t know quite why I do it, or even if it isn’t tasteless. But some other part of me is more basic. Storing up nuts for the coming winter.
I realise I’m exhausted. I’ve had two terrible nights of sleeplessness in a row. I can’t explain what’s happening to me. It is as if her soul is being wrenched physically from my body.
Maria, the matron, goes home, saying she will deliver a chair for me to sleep in. It doesn’t arrive.
The young doctor comes by, turning the light on. He says, ‘Bessie’s face still has a good colour. I don’t think anything will happen tonight. Of course we don’t know.’ (He doesn’t say the word ‘die’, which is somehow forbidden — too naked, too real.)
I look at her face in the light and see it is still quite pink. I suddenly feel intensely grateful: I might be able to go home and lie down flat on my bed and sleep. I know her ability to last. And I cannot take another night of sleeplessness. I’m a wreck.
I arrange that they will phone me immediately if there is any change. And as I walk outside I’m aware of the intense sweetness of the living world: plants, grass, sky — all seem miraculously alive, as they seem when you’re tripping. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. As is she.
12 APRIL 2017
The phone goes at 3.40 a.m. ‘Come immediately.’
I get up, dress and drive down there, but can’t get into the building. The doors are all locked; nobody answers the phone. I drive around to the closed front door, which has printed directions to go to ‘York Wing’, but there is no map of where it could be.
I go to the next door, knock on it and wait.
A nurse, passing by, sees me and lets me in.
‘My mother Bessie is dying.’
I get into special care where there is a nurse I have never seen before. She is on the phone.
‘She’s just gone.’
Do I imagine I see a flicker of guilt on her face?
I run into the room and Bess is lying there, so tiny, her mouth wide open, jaw slack. I kneel down by the side of the bed. I find I’m weeping, as if in a separate action which is not related to me. The words I say don’t make sense to me. ‘Oh Mum, Mum, oh Mummy.’ I touch her arm. It is warm. How could I not be there at the final moment? I sit there for a long time, incapable of leaving.
Aggy is in the corridor outside. ‘Phew, what’s that?’ one of the staff says. Aggy says, ‘Do you want to see it?’ The staff member says, ‘Come on, Aggy, we’ll go and clean you up.’
Throughout the morning various staff members come into Bess’s room to say goodbye. I’ve draped one of her coloured scarves over her face. It seemed wrong to leave her like that, her mouth gaping open. (Later I read that you are meant to prop a cushion under the dead person’s chin, so it stays closed. Why did I not have information like this? Because I never thought I would be in that situation.)
‘What a noble woman!’ one of the staff says to me after a hug. This pleases me, and seems to resurrect a Bess who was alive in the world. The young nurse who was so kind to Bess and to whom I was rude gives me a fierce hug. ‘She was so delightful.’ Anabel comes in, and I thank her for looking after Mum so well and for telling me that she was near death not so long ago, so I was better prepared.
I chide myself for not being there. It seems very cruel — I who have watched over her and guarded her to the last moment was not there when she died. I don’t know what happened — why I was called only at the very last moment. But I have to accept it.
Later I tell the two women funeral directors about her being only nine days away from her one hundred and first birthday: ‘She was tough, she was of pioneer stock.’ The funeral director, searching for a suitable cliché, says, ‘They don’t make them like that anymore.’
LOOKING AT HER FACE IN the funeral parlour, I can’t believe it’s the last time I will ever see her — the familiar shape of her cheekbones and forehead, her neck and nose and mouth. The space she fills, very particular and unique to herself, will now forever lie vacant — be a blank. This is so obvious, but it has never occurred to me before with such precision, and I linger there as long as I can, just looking, as if to imprint her face on my mind. Accepting I will never see her again is the hardest thing. I kiss her on the brow. She is repellently chilled. Yes, she’s dead.
I leave the room.
Notes
1 Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (New York: Vintage International, 1997), 56. Botton quotes Proust as saying: ‘My mother wanted to live in order not to leave me in a state of anguish which she knew I was in without her …. all of our life had been simply a training, she for teaching me how to do without her the day she would leave me …’
2 Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009), 4.
Afterword
This book is dedicated to my mother, Bessie. I did not understand that I was writing the book to commemorate her life until a few
days after she died. Then I had a sense that there had been a hidden pattern behind all this writing of which I was, at the time, completely unaware. It is the final bone I lay at her feet, aware it is not a bone, or tribute, she would want.
‘YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL people that,’ I can hear her say. ‘You want to be proud of your family, not let other people know all those secrets about us.’ But in the end they are not so much secrets about us as mistakes, u-turns, defiant gestures we all falteringly make as we seek to understand the conundrum of life. It seems to me there are many different ways of trying to make sense of what may in the end not make sense.
We’re a life form granted the grace of intelligence or consciousness, which also carries its burden of being ill at ease, unhappy, greedy, lustful, all of it underlain by a search for happiness, for balance — for the grace of understanding. I don’t know the way. All I know is how to be conscious and to listen and to look and to make my own conclusions, which may yet be completely invalid. But what I can say is I have looked at the evidence — lived the evidence, you might say — and these are my thoughts.
I had been through the long and exhausting experience of caring for someone who was dying. At the same time I recognised that looking after my mother answered a profound human need in me. I had cared for her as I would have cared for a child. In one sense I was just returning the love that she had lavished on me. It was her due. But I was also educated into understanding myself, my own needs, even into a closer understanding of who I was and who she was — this perfectly ordinary woman who, like all humans, once you look at them, was extraordinary in her own particular way. I seemed to see the past in her, partly because, up until she lost her connection with it, the past was so intimate with her. She lived with the past, as indeed I do now.
I saw in her the hardiness of her pioneer background. It was there in her stoicism and also in her essentially democratic point of view — to which was added, like the curlicues of the veranda of a Victorian villa, a filigree of courtesy, and her own brand of kindness and shrewd humour. She was, just as I am, a conduit of all the genetic aspects of her past, yet she was also her own individual exploration of that experience.
I had felt infinitely enriched by knowing her, just as I accepted I was to some extent crippled by her. I had tried to live with a degree of dignity, and deploy the wry sense of humour she used as a weapon against the knocks that life had delivered to her. Her sheer survival was both depleting and enriching.
When I re-read the personal parts of this book, I flinched before the cruelty of my own perceptions, as well as my complex feelings of love and hate. I wondered if I had put enough in this book to signal my deep love for her. In the end I decided that simply my proximity to her — the alertness of my looking after her — signalled what she meant to me. I was also aware, very clearly, that some people would view this as pathetic. Yet if one looks at things with a clear gaze, I see no pathos, only a kind of strength.
I asked myself, too, if it was the ultimate in disloyalty to reveal to the world the last confused moments of her life. At the same time I had to quiz myself: I am a homing pigeon to guilt because of my past. I feel at home there. Yet the fact is that many of my generation have to live with parents or partners with dementia and Alzheimer’s, and there is nothing in my experience with Bess which was unique.
But after Bess died, I came to a different understanding of what lay behind her undressing. I think she had a primal sense her life was ending. She was, at the finish, like a tree about to die, dropping its leaves. She was casting off the outer wrapping, undressing as a way as saying goodbye to all that was exterior. Just as when she herself said, ‘I am going to die’, she was trying to determine her own role in what was happening to her. Control freak to the end, I suppose you could say.
I had tried to guard her and keep her safe and look out for her, and be her advocate. But in the end there is a space in life wherein that fails, necessarily. When you have to stand aside and let nature take its course.
It seems very cruel I was not there with her in the very final moment of her life. But that is how it worked out. It was a strange time for me, as it all happened during the lull and magic of a full moon. Then the day after she died an immense hurricane swept across Hawke’s Bay, uprooting trees, lifting roofs, flooding rivers. Her death seemed part of an intensely living world.
We are all mysterious to one another, and if this book has been partly about the obsessiveness of a mother towards her child — and a child towards his mother — about how the past dwells in us as we make it into stories and the stories become us, it is also, I hope, about the enduring power of love.
WHY DID I WRITE THIS BOOK? ‘White people don’t know their own history,’ James Baldwin has asserted, and I believe this is true for Pākehā in Aotearoa New Zealand.1 Part of this may have to do with a sense of discomfort with the straitened circumstances of so many Pākehā migrants when they crashed into the earth of Aotearoa. There is little sense of heroism there. I would assert, however, there is a kind of quiet heroism in the endurance required in setting up a new life, beginning again in another land. But who would know if we do not know our own stories? Too many have been lost.
Michael King’s understanding of the process of loss of memory is key here. The first generation had to work so hard they could not afford the luxury of looking back. Besides, there were painful things there, the curvature of the past as well as that fundamental melancholy which goes with a loss of a cultural homeland. The second generation, energised by a sense of risk and opportunity, was anxious to get on. They weren’t interested in looking back. But it was the third generation who began asking questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where did we come from? By that stage there was usually an eerie silence. The vital links had been lost.
Diaspora marked, one could say savaged, my mother’s family as it did most migrant families travelling into the unknown. We are not used to seeing the Pākehā experience investigated in terms of psychological dislocation, yet my argument is that the experiences of migration, and exile, are profound, and this needs to be acknowledged. The commonality of the so-called pioneer experience has allowed us to overlook the extremity of its condition.
I believe the new migrants were subject to unexpressed anxiety — grief at losing their past, the landscapes that had nurtured them, their kinsfolk, everything that was familiar to them. All this had been ripped away. Their exile was voluntary in one sense, but implacable economic and population factors were so extreme they had few other options. And it was these migrants who — to give them a little aura of heroism — stepped out into space.
But then they bumped down into a world formed almost entirely ‘other’ to their expectations — of language, landscape, culture. The temperatures were different, the way the land was formed was different, where the sun set in the sky was different, and certainly the indigenous people were profoundly different in their tribal structure, the way land was owned, and their cultural and sexual mores. Even their gods were different.
This shock produced an almost endless psychic strain on the migrants’ nerves. They had by and large to scratch for a living at the most basic level. There was hardly any infrastructure; they had to build it themselves. Very few migrants brought capital with them. Most had to live in struggle street, often for years — sometimes forever. This combination of constant nervous tension and hard scrabbling day by day, year for year, in unfamiliar surroundings, made for a weirdly taut and strained universe.
I think if you want to put into context some of the very strange decisions made in the colonial period you need to factor in the strain of this anxiety, leading to hair-trigger responses, misdirection and even a kind of spiritual blindness: it was as if the migrants’ spiritual compass was severely disturbed or misaligned. They weren’t at home. They weren’t comfortable in their skins. They were walking in the dark, a little like being in a never-ending McCahon painting, with stark religious warnings daubed in white brush-strokes.<
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British empiricism and materialism aim to filter out the deeper emotions involved in being human, but they don’t stop them being experienced. The extremes of homesickness, and attempts to blot out reality with alcohol, were how this sense of dislocation was expressed — just as it was, more agonisingly and with a greater depth of deprivation, among nineteenth-century Māori. (This might have been why New Zealand was such an unhappy place at the time of the land wars: two cultures experiencing a shock of dislocation, a veritable sink of misery.)
Part of the problem for Pākehā wishing to understand our own history is that we were, until recently, too close to it to get any perspective. From the 1890s we were the dominant cultural group, so lacked self-awareness because ‘everybody was the same’. This was in fact an illusion created by residential clustering and in-marriage. There was no looking out because there was not enough space to look back. This numerical dominance is changing, will lessen and then vanish as more cultures pour into New Zealand, and indeed as Māori, Polynesians and others increasingly intermarry with Pākehā. The specifics of our own cultural condition stand out more sharply the further away we get from it, and the closer we are to losing it.
One of the remarkable things about this story is how little intermingling of any sort there appears to have been between my family and Māori. There was no intermarrying at all for at least four generations of direct descent. For one hundred years we kept to our caste, carefully guarding our whiteness as if it were a precious asset, an essential aspect of who we actually were. One can say this is how racism informally works — it’s a form of tacit agreement about boundaries and borders over which you do not cross. You keep to your kind, just as the Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics kept to their kind, both fiefdom, fort and prison. The prison gates were there, and in fact were so powerful they did not need a name, or even a physical presence. It was and is a psychological construct, seemingly native but actually a form of learned behaviour. Within the fort or fiefdom, it hardly needed mentioning or addressing.
