As I was attempting to get him into bed that night, he was not very cooperative. As he finally lay down, I asked him for a hug and he declared that he was now too tired to hug me. I sat down on the side of his bed and told him that I wished I could hug my mum one last time but I can’t. I heard my husband walk up behind me and ask me to step outside for a moment. I thought he was going to step in and talk our son around, explain to him that this would be a really nice opportunity to make his mum happy when she was clearly very sad. As we stood outside his door, my husband looked at me and said in no uncertain terms, ‘It’s too early to play the dead mum card’.
I was shocked. How dare he say that to me. How dare he accuse me of using a recent traumatic event in my life to my advantage and in turn use it to force my son into performing an act he clearly wasn’t in the mood for? The problem here was that he was absolutely right. I had just lost my mum and I wanted my own child to hug me—and if I wanted to play that card, then that’s exactly what I would do. I continue to play that card occasionally right up until this day. I’ve earnt that card and it’s my right to play it whenever I choose. Don’t judge me. I walked back into that room and got my hug, although I had a sneaking suspicion that even my son knew the score that night.
The next morning I decided to go into work to take care of the emails that were piling up in my inbox. A few hours at work would clear my head—and I could access the music library while I was there. More flowers greeted me on my desk, and everyone was very supportive, but also a little surprised to see me there the day before Mum’s funeral—I just mumbled something about how cathartic is was to be around friends.
At my desk I started searching for music tracks that might be appropriate for a funeral ceremony. Whenever you use music in a television show you must pay a nominal amount to the performer and writer and record company for its use—and often obtain permission, depending on how you will use the music. Did you have to do that funerals? Are there musicians sitting around deciding whether to grant permission for someone to be farewelled by their song? Do some musicians purposely write a song hoping that someone will choose it for a funeral? Whoever wrote ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ must be high-fiving at the current world mortality rate. I had no idea what the protocol was here.
As I looked around my office, I admired the makeshift florist that was rapidly growing there and thought it might be a nice gesture to send some flowers to Mum’s nursing home. They, like our family, were grieving, and I wanted to show how much we appreciated all the care and support they had given Mum and Dad over the past six years. I called a florist and told them I’d like a nice bright arrangement—somewhere around the one hundred dollar mark. When they asked what message I would like on the card, it all turned pear-shaped. I managed to utter, ‘To our dear friends at …’ and then couldn’t speak at all. The voice at the other end was trying to prompt me, but I couldn’t say a word. My throat was tight, I could barely breathe and I felt light-headed. I hung up the phone as my assistant came in to my rescue. Perhaps coming in to work wasn’t the smartest idea I’d ever had, but I didn’t foresee that something as simple as ordering flowers would have such a profound effect. I managed to scribble down some notes for my assistant, who mercifully took care of it all for me.
I checked out of the office for the rest of the week and headed home to continue with the funeral planning. I needed to talk to Dad about the music. Mum had passed three days before, and the most he had managed to do was sit on the couch in the lounge room in his dressing gown and doze on and off. I think it was hard for him seeing us up and about, going about our business. His world as he knew it had ended, and assimilating back into normal life wasn’t going to be easy. He was definitely struggling with the fact that we weren’t outwardly paralysed by sadness and grief, but the truth was, we had been grieving for years, as the woman we knew had left us years ago. It was as if he now had nothing to do, nobody who needed him, nowhere to be. All of this buzzing about around him was making him very grumpy, and every time I started to get frustrated, I had to take a deep breath and put myself in his slippers (his desired footwear of the moment) and make him feel part of the arrangements.
Dad and I talked about what songs were significant to them throughout their marriage. We all knew Mum’s favourite song was ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ by Judy Garland, so Dad was happy for that to be the first song of the service. Even while Mum was alive and well, we always knew that we’d use that song at her funeral one day—which made it completely impossible for me to hear it without bursting into tears. At their wedding 58 years prior, they had played ‘Because’ by Mario Lanza, so that seemed an appropriate choice to slip in somewhere. Then my sister and I started talking about what songs we would hear Mum regularly sing along to. Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera, Sera’ was one we agreed on. I knew the words to that song before I could walk, and whenever I heard it I always thought of Mum happily swaying along in the kitchen while doing whatever she was doing. It would be nice as the final song of the ceremony, leaving everyone with a happy piece of music as they farewelled our mum. I floated the idea of having the words appear on the video screen with a bouncing ball, but Dad shut that one down pretty quickly.
‘I don’t want you turning this into a bloody circus.’
Note to self—cancel the elephants and acrobats!
24
The final curtain
The morning of the funeral, I woke with a sense of purpose. This was going to be a tough day, but we were going to get through it as a family. My husband took our son off to school (sorry, I am not a fan of kids at funerals) while I got myself and Dad dressed and fed before heading over to the funeral home to set some things up. When I returned my sister and brother had arrived, and an hour before the service we were all sitting around my kitchen table laughing, even Dad. It was like we were all avoiding the emotion that was about to take over—and the moment I looked up at the clock and said it was time to head out, the mood changed. It was a sombre walk up to the end of the street, and we all stopped before we walked inside. I turned to Dad, who was looking very composed, and put my hands on his shoulders.
‘Today is a celebration of Mum’s life—let’s think about all the happiness she brought to this world, and to everyone she met, and send her off with a smile.’
At which point I started to cry. Dad grabbed my hands and gave them a squeeze. He was as calm and stoic as I had seen him in a long time.
‘Come on, Shelley,’ he said, ‘no tears today.’
Of course him saying that ensured there were tears.
We stood as a family at the entrance to the funeral home and started to welcome the guests in. It was so comforting to see friends from my childhood I hadn’t seen in years—all of my friends loved my mum and it was evident today that she was a popular woman. Dad was amazing, shaking hands, hugging, kissing babies—very presidential.
Everyone started to make their way inside and take their seats. We all sat in the front row, Dad between my sister and me, with my husband next to me on the end. I sat there saying to myself over and over, ‘Don’t cry, Don’t’ cry,’ and when Dad offered a hand to each of his girls, to help us through the bumpy ride ahead, I laughed and said, ‘Here come the waterworks’—and of course started crying.
I looked down at the order of service. Why had we decided to start with ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’? There was no coming back from the emotion of that song, and at some point I would need to be composed enough to do a reading with my sister. Now I will never be able to watch The Wizard of Oz, a movie my son loves, ever again. We should have chosen something less emotional, maybe something instrumental without words. But then somebody pressed the play button and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ was off and running.
And then there was the brown wooden coffin with the silver handles, sitting only ten feet away, with my mother’s deceased body lying inside. I couldn’t look at it, and wished it wasn’t there. I was expecting a white coffin and she was much more a go
ld person than silver, and the frame that held her photo was gold edged, so it clashed quite badly with the design my brother had selected. What were we thinking? We really should have coordinated that better. And what happens to the coffin after the ceremony? Mum was to be cremated, and I had not spent a single moment in my life thinking about what happens to coffins when people are cremated. Do they recycle and resell them? Does the coffin go into the furnace—and if so, how much of the ashes would be Mum, and how much would be wood? And how do the silver (not gold) handles work in an urn—surely they would just melt? These were the thoughts that were running through my head while Judy Garland’s voice filled the room, to the accompaniment of sniffles coming from somewhere behind me.
The celebrant walked up to the podium and welcomed everyone to the service. He started off with some nice words and a few anecdotes about my mother that we’d shared with him over coffee earlier that week. If Mum was sitting next to me, she would have leant in and whispered, ‘Is that so and so from that old television show?’; I wondered if anyone else had recognised him from that popular soap opera. Still I couldn’t look at the coffin and instead became fixated on the program in my hands. I wasn’t entirely happy with the font I had chosen—it might have been a bit flowery for such a solemn occasion. I wondered if there was a special funeral font designed just for this type of thing. Not too flowery, not too bold, and definitely not too Comic Sans.
I was startled out of my font deliberation by my brother standing up and heading to the podium. He is the kind of guy that keeps his emotions in check. Always the life of the party and the joke teller—a lot like Dad in so many ways—but I could see he was going to struggle with this. I was hoping he would get through it all, because if he lost it, then I was really going to lose it.
He started by talking about what it was like to be a kid in our family. Everyone felt loved and safe, and our house was always full of friends and family, having loads of laughs and loads of cake. He talked about cake quite a bit in his five-minute spot, and kept the congregation laughing as much as he could. Every time he started getting emotional, he brought it back with a zinger. He even managed to throw in a ‘my sister was adopted’ joke and I actually started laughing at the surprised whispers that rippled through the crowd. Then, finally, it got to him. Halfway through a sentence he stopped. He looked down, cleared his throat, and tried to speak again. Nothing. It was really hard to see him up there in such a raw state. If he couldn’t get through his bit, what hope did my sister and I have up there?
My nephew was next up and his memories about the best nana in the world were doing nothing to moderate my emotions. He also talked quite a bit about cake.
Then it was our turn. My sister generously leant over and offered to go it alone if I wasn’t up for it, but I needed to do this. My sister had selected a poem called ‘She is Gone’, by English painter and poet David Harkins. I still can’t manage to read it without sobbing.
We made it through, sobbing.
We went back to our seats and Dad stood up and kissed us both on the cheek. He was more composed than anyone during that ceremony. Then came the playing of Mario Lanza’s ‘Because’, the song Mum and Dad played at their wedding. I remember it going for a long time—one of those songs where you think it has finished and then comes another verse.
The celebrant returned to the podium to farewell everyone who had turned out to farewell Mum. He then announced that as a fitting final tribute, we would be playing ‘Que Sera, Sera’, and encouraged everyone to stand, link arms and sing along. As I started to sing, I looked around at all the people in the room: every single one of them was singing. Singing and smiling. We had managed to turn this into a celebration after all. Mum would have loved it.
The song finished and everyone sat back down while the celebrant said a few final words. During this time, a huge beige velvet curtain began to move off to the right of the celebrant, making its way around the coffin, encircling it in a farewell tribute of its own. I realised that it probably wasn’t going to clear my husband seated at the end of the row. Still, I was powerless to do anything about it. As the curtain came closer and closer, there was nowhere for him to go, so I leant over and whispered, ‘I think you’re going with her. Send me a message from the other side.’
He smiled and then, just like that, he was gone. Engulfed by a huge beige velvet curtain. What’s the best way to reappear from behind a huge velvet curtain at a funeral? I probably would have barrel-rolled out and jumped up with my arms out, like I’d just landed a triple-pike inverted full-twisted somersault. He sensibly just walked to the end of the curtain and assimilated back into the crowd. I almost called out, ‘Here he is, back from the dead!’ but didn’t.
We had requested that Mum’s ashes be divided into four equal parts, so we’d each be able to treasure her. She had never talked about wanting her ashes sprinkled anywhere in particular—once again confirming that we weren’t the kind of family that planned ahead.
Mum’s sister, who had passed a few years before, had, as previously established, been a diehard Collingwood fan, and in 1990 my brother and I went to the AFL grand final with her. As the siren sounded to end the game, with Collingwood victorious, my aunt handed my brother a small container and asked him to climb the fence and tip the container onto the middle of the ground. When he enquired what was in the container, she replied, ‘Your uncle.’ My uncle, who had passed a year or two prior to that game, wasn’t much of a football fan, but it was where she wanted his ashes scattered, and she had waited and hoped that the opportunity would finally present itself, which it finally did.
My husband’s grandmother, who died at the age of 98, wanted her ashes scattered at Columbia Gorge, a spectacularly beautiful spot in Portland, Oregon. She was quite a character, and when I first met her she was well into her nineties and still living at home in Atlantic City. She was also a smoker, and whenever I tried to remind her about the health risks of smoking, she would always respond the same way: ‘Don’t you tell me not to smoke, I am 94 years old and I will smoke if I want to.’ She had a point.
Shortly after she died, my husband and I drove to the gorge with his parents, to scatter her ashes. As we all stood together on the edge of a bridge overlooking the most breathtaking view, my father-in-law tipped her ashes out of the container—just as a gust of wind hit. Grandma’s ashes took flight and flew back up into our faces. Now there’s a nice slice of karma for you. I guess Grandma got the last word on the smoking argument.
So Mum went off to be cremated, and everyone came back to our house for a party. It was good as it kept my mind occupied with serving up food and drinks. Every room I walked into was full of laughter, with stories about Mum flying around. By the time my son came home from school the crowd had dwindled a little, but my two cousins (daughters of my mum’s sister) were still in fine form, helped along with a few bubbles. My poor boy didn’t know what hit him when he walked in the house. I hadn’t told him we were having a funeral—but he knew that he was in a house full of people who loved his nana and he sat and listened to every last story. Including one from my uncle, who revealed that Mum’s grandfather was a travelling performer who apparently toured the world with a performing rooster, in a show called George and His Performing Cock. I did think about Googling him for more information, but I’m pretty sure an internet search of ‘George and his performing cock’ would see me end up on some national watchlist.
Everyone finally left, and the house felt very empty that night. Even though Mum had never set foot in our current house, she had always been with us in spirit, and much of our existence for the past thirteen years had centred around her care—but that night, something was different. A chapter had closed on our family life. A long, painful and exhausting chapter. Mum was finally at peace, and free of that hideous disease that had robbed her of a full and happy elderly life with her husband, children and grandchildren. She would have loved our son, and he would have adored her. She was everything you would expec
t a nana to be: generous, funny, caring, loving and a bit crazy.
That night as I was kissing my son goodnight, he asked if I missed Nana. I told him I did, sensing we were about to have an emotional conversation about how Nana is no longer with us in person, but will always be with us in spirit. He got up from his bed and hugged me.
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ he said, pulling away to look at my face. ‘She’s up in heaven with Michael Jackson and he is looking after her now.’
I excused myself and walked out to the kitchen to talk to my husband.
‘Have you ever mentioned Michael Jackson to Sam?’
‘Nope,’ he replied, looking justifiably confused.
I walked back into my son’s room, gave him another kiss, and told him that I thought Nana would probably prefer to have Frank Sinatra looking after her—but I’m sure Michael Jackson would do a fine job too.
25
Life goes on
We have a little shrine for Mum on the mantelshelf. It’s the same photo in the painted gold frame that adorned her coffin. I keep a little vase of fresh flowers next to it, and on special days I’ll light the candle that sits on the other side. Our share of Mum’s ashes will also go on the mantel in a smallish urn, which I am yet to purchase as I am yet to find the perfect container for such an honour.
Not Right In The Head Page 15
