Up Front: Giving Me Grief
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sally jones, in reply to
He passes me in the street. It’s just something that happens. I don’t worry about it.
I'm glad you don't worry...
My father was a Kingfisher watching over me from the exact same spot on a wire every afternoon when I was busting a gut rushing to finish my thesis.
He would have been a Kingfisher had he been a bird, I thought.At the time I was quite prepared to believe this, though my father had been dead several years.
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I never talk about it here, really, but I'm spooky. Just so you know. It's why I don't find death horrifying, or talk of dead people sitting in a room unnerving. Megan's right, Emma. Keep talking to your Mum. She won't talk back straightaway, but if you listen really carefully, she will talk back.
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JLM,
Thank you so much for letting us know her, Emma. You inherited more from your mother than her great legs.
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Sacha, in reply to
I'm spooky
a bit secret service
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Jackie Clark, in reply to
you could say that
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People have been asking to see the infamous Swimsuit Photo. So here it is.
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Sacha, in reply to
mum's the word, in more ways than one
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It's like I carry your death around inside me, and it is so heavy. Don't worry, it's not like I'm sad all the time, or I cry, or I think about it all the time. I'm just always aware of it. I'm still working out how to live my life carrying it.
So damn true. Thank you for putting words to the music.
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Oh Emma,
I started reading your post at work this arvo, thinking 'Great, long time since I've read something from Emma' but I only got about 3 sentences in before I realised I couldn't go on without tears streaming down my cheeks. (Not a good look for a 50-something cynic).
So here I am at home in the evening, with tears streaming down my cheeks and wanting to send you another of those woefully inadequate virtual hugs that do nothing to diminish the sense of loss but help to shave away a little of the pain.So many others have earlier expressed, far more eloquently than I could, the sentiments and support that I would like to whisper gently in your ear as I recall the deaths of my father and mother (separately and several years apart, but your wonderful piece has tapped a lot of the suppressed emotion) and our lovely dog Jake who had to be put to sleep just a month ago.
But the existence and immutable inevitability of death is what gives us life, so be sure to honour your darling Mum by living your life as fully as you can.
You have touched my heart.
Arohanui.
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The human condition. Nothing like the honesty of it to connect us all.
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I cannot write eloquently about the death of those I love: it just hurts too much.
Emma, your wonderful paean for your mother - because it is a triumph song and a praise chant- moved me beyond glib words. It moved me into that dark place I never want to be in - because I'd much sooner be extinct than have my mother predecease me-
but Mary has already had one of of her children die, and her parents, and both her brothers, her 1st (my father, when she was 31) and 2nd(whom all her children hated, and who she divorced at 70) husbands, and most of her cousins - my wish is both selfish & stupid.
So after finishing with the taki-aue bit, I reread what you have so beautifully, cogently, heart-piercingly written, and onsent it to various family. It will well-serve, in the (I hope distant) future.
I dont do hugs, even cyber ones but - arohanui mai na- n/n Keri
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Islander, in reply to
Craig, you come from a very different perspective: grief, for me & mine, is not at all healthy – to the contrary, it kills.
What I deeply appreciate about this ongoing thread is the different perspectives all of us mortal humans have, so please dont see this comment as any kind of attack.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Oh, not at all.
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Deepest sympathies Emma, and thank you for introducing us to your mother.
Im glad you were able even to just sit with her as death approached. And prepare in some way for the inevitable.Something we as children did not have the privilege of doing.
All we got at my mothers sudden demise was a young cop sitting rather impatiently to call the ambulance to take away the corpse.
(Perhaps his dinner was getting cold) oops was that bitter and cynical... sorry. -
Thank you, everyone, for your very kind words.
Im glad you were able even to just sit with her as death approached. And prepare in some way for the inevitable.
This was the up side of the cancer (not, possibly, a sentence that's been used very often). Mum had time to come to terms with her approaching death and start to prepare, and so did we. She'd been up to the hospice while she was still well and decided that she was perfectly happy to go up there when the time came. That was immense for us, because by the time we got to there... my mother was largely gone. She started to go mentally. She was very easily confused, panicky, occasionally she lashed out. From that point, things were very simple for me. Not so much for one of my brothers.
But then we had a couple of weeks where she would get a little better, and we started to think about how long this could drag on, this up and down. We've been having huge problems with our daughter, and I was trying to be a mother and a daughter at the same time, in two different cities. So, yeah, it was difficult, too.
And yes. She'd outlived her parents, her sister, two husbands, the rest of her generation. She took her last curtain call in October, in Who Wants to Be a Hundred? I'm grateful she didn't live too long after she could no longer learn her lines, because that wasn't a life she would have wanted to live.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
You’d’ve liked your funeral.
My mother's was only a few weeks ago. I sent pictures to someone who couldn't make it, someone who'd long ago lost both of her parents, and who has a habitually interesting take on most things. When we next caught up she said "That was terrible what that funeral director did, making you carry your Momma's coffin! You could report them for that."
I explained that it was a privilege that we'd requested, and that we'd been offered the option of having the coffin wheeled out. More than anything though I wished that I could have told Mum, it would have really cracked her up.
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I'm glad I saved my mini Picnic Bar for the end or morning tea I need a little morsel of solice after that.
Emma you write comedy and tradgey so well. Thank you for sharing with us.
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
Condolences to you, too, Joe.
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She took her last curtain call in October, in Who Wants to Be a Hundred?
Beautiful. Quite the elegant epitaph, in fact.
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Sacha, in reply to
My mother's was only a few weeks ago.
Sorry to hear that Joe. Thinking of you.
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Emma Hart, in reply to
Wow, Joe, that is quite a different perspective. Everyone just assumed that Mum would have pall-bearers, I thought it was pretty much universal. With Mum that might partially have been because she had three six-foot-plus sons. She'd said, "Well I have three sons and a son-in-law," and there was still... something of a "discussion", and we ended up with six, including my son and a cousin of my brother's. I found it a bit odd that she'd been such a traditionalist about it, given how delighted she was when I asked her to give me away at my wedding, but in retrospect pernaps she was just giving the men something to do.
My daughter and I went up with them. I put Mum's 80 year old teddy bear on her coffin, Rhiana placed and lit a candle in front of it. (My partner apparently spent the entire service watching to see Bear didn't catch fire.) At the end we took the candle and the bear and walked out with the boys behind us carrying the coffin. Then we girls stood by the hearse with baskets of flowers from Mum's garden so people could put a flower on the coffin and take a moment to say goodbye. It was good.
Beautiful. Quite the elegant epitaph, in fact.
I really should thank Roger Hall for writing all those wonderful parts my mother played. She was in Middle Aged Spread, Social Climbers, The Share Club, Market Forces, Prisoners of Mother England... At the end of Dirty Weekends, her character died, and went to Heaven on a ride-on lawn-mower.
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recordari, in reply to
Sorry to hear about your mum Joe.
I explained that it was a privilege that we'd requested,
A very close family friend requested I be asked through her surviving partner to be a pallbearer. It is one of the most humbling and rewarding, albeit grief-stricken, experiences in my life. It also helped me with my grief, and the process of 'letting go', although the full significance of this became more apparent over time.
I put Mum's 80 year old teddy bear on her coffin, Rhiana placed and lit a candle in front of it.
You really should go into the tissue business, cause you are just getting too good at this. But don't stop, it's quite wonderful.
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Sacha, in reply to
It is one of the most humbling and rewarding, albeit grief-stricken, experiences in my life.
I found the physical impact quite beyond words
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Megan Wegan, in reply to
It is one of the most humbling and rewarding, albeit grief-stricken, experiences in my life.
I did a reading at every one of my grandparents' funerals, and I will always be thankful for that. If nothing else, it gave me a reason to not cry for the whole time.
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When my partner’s sister died she had a plain wooden coffin and partway through the service everyone came up to write or draw on it. She’d died suddenly and there had been little chance for last goodbyes so it was lovely to have this chance to send a final message. Spending the second half of the service looking at “I will miss you” in my seven-year-old’s best hand-writing shredded the last of my self-control though.
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