1. As soon as she gets sick, start calling her every day just to check in. Be grateful for the years of therapy and the births of your own children that it required for the two of you to get close. (Unfortunately this is also a worst practice, since after she has died you will miss her daily at the time you used to call (as well as at all the other times.))
2. Be privileged enough that you can take ungodly amounts of time off work to spend just sitting with her. Watch documentaries about the Queen. Knit. Do needlework. Talk at length about the extreme cuteness of her cat.
3. When you get The Call, purchase boxes of Kleenex in many sizes and distribute them around your office, car and home. Future self will thank you, through streaming snot.
4. Although it may feel like tearing off your own limbs, go to the funeral director before your mother has died and make arrangements. Be grateful, again, that she is a person who has made her wishes as to the disposal of her remains known for the last thirty years. If you are lucky, the funeral director will be hilarious and kind, and it will not be as excruciating as you had feared (although still plenty awful.)
5. Immediately afterwards, go straight back to your job and immerse yourself in hard, complicated work. Or lie in bed in the fetal position for three months. Either way, it doesn’t seem to make any difference.
6. Remember that book you read once that said that most people are psychologically resilient, and recover from grief faster than they imagine they will. Wish you could put your hands on that book so you could throw it across the room. Notice, eventually, that the only books you can read without skimming impatiently are hurt/comfort slashfic or narratives of surviving PTSD. Call your therapist.
7. Finally, finally have a dream about her that is not a nightmare, a dream in which you are shopping for a camping trip and mutually decide to it is necessary to have Magnum ice creams, and the treehouse in the shopping center has a swing rope and you dare her to swing on it and so she does.

*more like least worst

…when I haven’t blogged for a while that I have been miserable. Couldn’t sleep, had headaches and gastric distress. Tweaking my thyroid and crazy meds didn’t cut it. Finally dragged my sorry arse to therapy and am the better for it.

Good things: July 4th at Oz Farm, a red woodpecker, three mule deer, snakes and frogs; Claire working as a junior counsellor at Heather Hill’s summer camp; picking Claire up today and getting to go on a trail ride, her on Gemini and me on Bethan. Out riding after work with my kid, no big deal.

I keep forgetting to blog my gratitude for the technology of palliative care: the bed that breathed, so that Mum didn’t get bedsores; the syringe driver that kept her on a constant dose of morphine; the lift sling. I can almost kid myself that her ghost is still in the machine.

Haddon asked how I was and I admitted that I am not doing very well at all but added, for form’s sake:

“It gets better, right?”

“No,” he said. “Look, I loved your mother very much. She was a rare and dignified soul. When you lose someone like that, it never gets better.”

I was so grateful to him for coming out and saying it, I can’t even tell you.

—–

I mean, I’ll be fine. I am functional. Stuff gets done. I’m busy and engaged and tired. I love my kids and my cats and my Mister.

The trouble is that I continue to love my mother in the present tense.

…luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience…

It seems very straightforward when I say “I.”

…when I look closer I seem to see cracks everywhere. Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all other units on the ship, indeed in the fleets? Perhaps. Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

I spent six months trying to understand how to do anything—not just how to get my message to the Lord of the Radch, but how to walk and breathe and sleep and eat as myself. As a myself that was only a fragment of what I had been, with no conceivable future beyond eternally wishing for what was gone.

It’s hard for me to know how much of myself I remember. How much I might have known, that I had hidden from myself all my life.

I grew to love her in ways I never had. Some of the new intimacy came from finding myself in a caretaking role where, before, I had been the one taken care of.

One day I understood I had stopped believing that knowledge could save her or help me. I just wanted her to be comfortable.

I am still looking for the alternative outcome to this part of the story—as if had I pushed harder at one of these moments, had I been more aware, all would have changed.

Perhaps my mother’s death would be not unlike a divorce, I found myself thinking, wishfully: I would see her less, but now and then be granted a reprieve like this. It would be a reunion like those in The Aeneid or The Odyssey, when the heroes go down to the Underworld to see their dead parents and embrace them three times, waking to their disappearance.

As she sits on the couch, I bring her yogurt and rub her feet with lavender lotion. She sighs. It is the only thing I can do that brings her pleasure.

Sometimes I just sit on the couch with a quilt and a book and read beside her. I want to be next to her as much as I can.

I kept touching the skin on her face, which was rubbery but still hers, feeling morbid as I did it, but feeling, too, that it was strange that I should think so. This was my mother. In the old days, didn’t the bereaved wash the body as they said their goodbyes?

In the past, I had been good at keeping track of details, but now I couldn’t. Often it took all my energy simply to get to the office, and at meetings I found it hard to concentrate. Instead, my brain ran through my mother’s last days over and over.

I miss her laugh, her sarcasm, and the sound of her voice saying my name.

I miss her hands, which I shall never see again, for we have burned her body into fine, charcoal ash and small white bones, and that is what is now left of her voice and her eyes and her fingernails.

I am becoming someone whose mother is dead.

Jean Eileen “Gemma” Chalmers

Jean Eileen Ellison was born in Victoria House in Warrington, Cheshire in 1935. Her grandmother Ruth Bramhall ran Victoria House as a gentleman’s boarding house; she also ran a corner shop. Jean said that Ruth was very much the businesswoman, way ahead of her time.

Ruth’s daughter, Jean’s mother Doris Bramhall, met Jack Ellison at the local church where they both taught Sunday school. Doris and Jack were married in August 1929. They had two daughters, Ruth and Jean.

Jack was an inventor. Jean remembered his workshop full of gadgets, including a haybale-lifter that he sold to a local farmer for a pittance. The farmer registered the design and sold it to Massey Ferguson. “They made a motza out of it,” she said.

During WW2, Doris and Jack ran The Lamb, a traditional English pub in Whitchurch, Shropshire. When the family dog Dandy had puppies with a neighbour’s dog, Monnie, Jean adopted the runt of the litter and named her Victoria Plum. Vicky Plum loved to ride into town in Jean’s bicycle basket.

At school, Jean enjoyed Latin, history and French. She played tennis and got to know another player, Margaret Maidley. Jean described Margaret as very funny, very droll. She and Margaret remained close for the rest of their lives.

Jean won admission to Battersea Domestic Science College in London. At a social night there in 1954 she met a group of men from the neighboring Battersea College. That group included Murray McGrath, who she found delightful, and Robin Chalmers, who she thought was a very pushy Australian. Of Robin, Jean said, “We could talk. With a lot of the people I’d tried to go out with, I had nothing to talk about. Robin chattered away. He was interesting.” Jean loved Robin’s intelligence and how practical he was, how good with his hands.

Jean and Robin were married in Whitchurch in 1961. Jean wore a dress from Brown’s of Cheshire, long-sleeved and short-skirted with a fitted bodice, a Parisian design. Margaret and Ruth were bridesmaids and the best man was Ivor Wong, a friend of Robin’s from college who also remains close to the couple. Jean and Robin honeymooned in the Lake District, visiting the Beatrix Potter museum and Derwent Water.

After the wedding, Jean and Robin lived in a flat on Narbonne Avenue near Clapham Common in London. Robin worked as an electrical engineer and Jean as a comptometer operator. They loved going to jazz clubs to hear Humphrey Littleton, Chris Barber, Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine.

When Jean became pregnant, she and Robin moved to a semi-detached house in Shirley. Jean remembered hedgehogs in the garden. Sarah was born in 1965 and Iain followed in 1967. Jean was always very touched at what a doting father Robin was. When they were bringing Sarah home from the hospital, he pulled the car over before they got home. “I have to hold her,” he said. “The nurses wouldn’t let me hold her.” Iain was a home birth, and his dad caught him.

The family sailed to Australia in 1968 on the Fairsky. They saw albatross, dolphins and flying fish. Jean found Cape Town beautiful but was shocked by signs saying For Whites Only and For Blacks Only.

In Sydney, Robin found a job with AWA Two more children followed: Alain in 1969 and Rachel in 1971. With the birth of Rachel the family outgrew their house in West Pymble and moved to the house in Frenchs Forest that would be their home for the next thirty years.

Jean found work at Avon, where she met Hazel Young, the second of her two great friends.

Jean herself was very funny, very droll. She was a working mother – like her Nana, ahead of her time – but she was dedicated to her children and always took their side. When Sarah was diagnosed with epilepsy and when Alain had a badly broken leg, she became their tireless advocate and fought the medical establishment on their behalf.

For a shy, quiet English rose, she had an unexpected spirit of adventure. In 1983 she announced that the entire family would be going away on a hot-air ballooning weekend. It was the first of many such adventures, and quite unforgettable. But daily life in her home was also full of pleasures, like roast Sunday lunches and uproarious games of mah jongg.

In 1990 Sarah married Ian Marrett, whose grandmother lived two doors down from the Frenchs Forest house. Their daughter Kelly was born in 1995 and Ross followed in 1997. In 2000 Rachel married Jeremy Fitzhardinge. They had Claire in 2002 and Julia in 2005. Jean attended the births of all four grandchildren, intrepidly flying solo to San Francisco to help out with Claire and Julia.

After retirement Jean and Robin sold the Frenchs Forest house and bought the Motley, a Winnebago. For seven years they explored Australia, seeing Uluru in the rain, watching whales off the coast of Western Australia. They also flew to Trinidad and Tobago for the wedding of Ivor Wong’s son. They picked up the friendship as if it had never been interrupted. It was the trip of a lifetime.

In 2007 Jean and Robin settled in Barraba, which Robin believes is the most beautiful small town in Australia. Jean quickly became involved with the Clay Pan. Her grandchildren were always plentifully supplied with beautifully knitted cardigans and hats. Jean also made many exquisite pieces of needlework.

Investigation into trouble swallowing in August 2013 showed Jean had aggressive oesophageal cancer. A period in Sydney having radiotherapy treated that cancer, although on January 7 2014 scans showed secondaries.

Jean spent the last four weeks of her life being nursed at Barraba Hospital. The dedicated care and excellent facilities there gave Jean precious time with her husband, sons and daughters and friends. Her great friend Hazel joined with Jean’s daughters in caring for her in Barraba Hospital.

Jean’s sense of humour remained glorious: laughing off concerns about her visitors’ germs, she said: “That won’t kill me!”

Jean is survived by her husband Robin, eldest daughter Sarah, her husband Ian and children Kelly and Ross, eldest son Iain and his partner Rachel, younger son Alain and younger daughter Rachel and her husband Jeremy and daughters Claire and Julia.

A great lady, my mother.

Their names are inscribed on little brass plaques on all the family-supporting pieces of kit in the palliative care room.

Kate Spencer gave us the Rupert Richardson watercolour of Mulwarree. Tony Brown gave us the TV and Clarrie Sugden the DVD. The boombox is from Woody Woodgate. Col Howarth gave us the chair and tables on the patio, and I sleep on Peter Milson’s fold-out bed.

—–

What piece of kit will have my mother’s name on it?

—–

Sometimes the ghosts open the door and let themselves in.

—–

Last night Mum dreamt she rode Alfie. This morning she started up, saying: “Bebe? Bebe?” She could hear my cat meowing.

—–

I don’t believe in ghosts. I do believe in love. I believe in kindness. I believe in bearing witness. I believe that this matters, and that it’s worth it.

• Sarah: “Sorry, we’re fussing over you again, aren’t we?” Mum: “I like to be fussed over.”
• Have I mentioned how compassionate the nurses are? Humbling.
• Giving Mum water. Hazel: “Don’t know how much you want.” Mum: “A whole jug full.” Me: “I can put gin in if you want.” Mum: “Gin and tonic.”
• Mum: “This is so lovely.” Me: “Having everyone here?” Mum: “Yes.” Me: “We should have done it years ago.” Mum: “Yes.”
• “Look who it is, Mum! It’s your number one son.” “NUMBER ONE SON!”

Mum slept all day Wednesday. I called my brother, Mum’s best friend and my aunt and uncle to let them know how things stood. My brother and Mum’s best friend decided not to come, under the circumstances.

My Auntie Barb and my Uncle Ron, both in their eighties, already busy supporting their youngest daughter Lynne whose husband is also dying of cancer, dropped everything and drove for nine hours to see Mum.

We expected them at 10.30pm. I called the innkeeper every hour until 1am. I slept fitfully from 3am till 5am. No news. I imagined my aunt and uncle dead in a ditch. I called Jeremy and cried.

They were already safe in bed at Andy’s Guest House, of course. Ron was scathing of my concern.

Ron: “Why on earth would I be dead in a ditch?”

When they came in to see Mum, she woke up and wept for joy at the sight of them.

Mum: “I can’t believe you came all this way to see me. It’s so kind of you. I’m speechless.”

Ron: “Obviously not actually speechless.”

We had good hours after that, until Mum realized that her best friend had cancelled her flight. She cried out in pain.

Oh reader, I hope you never have to feel what I felt then.

I called Hazel, who instantly rebooked her flight. She should be here within the hour.

Auntie Barb, saying goodbye to Mum: “Thank you for taking such good care of my little brother. It’s been a wonderful life, hasn’t it?”

After a string of terrible nights, Mum slept peacefully until 9.30am.

“You’ve been asleep twelve hours,” I told her.

“Twelve hours! What time is it? Sarah will be cross.”

“You needed it. You were very tired.”

“I was.”

I helped her into the bathroom. She was very staggery.

“Your hair looks beautiful,” I told her as she washed her face. Jenny came and gave her a haircut yesterday.

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“You look beautiful,” I said, and she smiled at me so that her face lit up. “Do you want to go back to bed or sit on the sofa?” I asked.

“Not the bed. But I don’t want to knock you flat.”

“You won’t. I play with horses, remember? And I probably outweigh you now.”

“You probably do!”

“I don’t have to catch you. I just have to push you back over your center of gravity.”

“You’re right, that’s true.”

She made it to the sofa, holding on to her bed and her trolley. I told her what I’d been chatting to Jeremy about. She felt a little ill and asked me to pat her back.

“She only keeps me around because I beat her,” I explained to the orderlies who’d come to clean.

“You can get me back for all the times I beat you,” she said.

“Revenge at last!”

The orderly was anxious to make sure she didn’t walk around in her bedsocks on the wet floor.

“But they have these spots on the soles, so I don’t slip,” said Mum, showing her. “They’re really good.”

The orderlies left and Mum dozed off in my arms. I shifted to hold her better.

“Am I too heavy?” she asked drowsily.

“No,” I said. “I like cuddling you.”

She hasn’t woken up yet, not even when the nurses moved her back to bed in a mechanical sling.

Nurse Karen: It’s great that you two have such a good relationship with your mother. I envy you. I don’t have that.

Sarah: She is the best mum in the world.

Mum: I don’t know what I did.

Me: You always took our side, even when we were in the wrong.

Sarah: You loved us unconditionally.

Me: You took out a second mortgage so I could go to college overseas.

Mum: Did you know, I’d forgotten about that!

Me: AND THEN YOU FORGOT ABOUT IT.

Nurse Dale said: “Every day is precious now.”

She said, “What people want most now is your time.”

Mum’s sleeping more and eating less. She’s sleeping now. When she’s awake, she’s – I have run out of words to describe her valor and derring-do. As she gets thinner she is more and more like a bolt of silver fire. Like Galadriel, only funnier.

My brother Iain and his partner Rachel drove up from Sydney last night. Mum’s overjoyed to have them here. We played some good mah jongg this morning. Mum won a game.

Rachel’s car was fine all the way to my sister’s house, then broke its fanbelt on the way to Pam’s. Luckily Adam is in Tamworth today, meeting his parents and picking up his puppy. He’s getting a new fanbelt for Iain and a new pair of tongs for Dad, who broke his old tongs collecting fallen needles from around the base of the Bunya pine.

I drove down to the markets to spend a bit of time with Dad. We had coffee together in the Playhouse.

But I can’t stay away from my mother for very long.

I love her.

You are my beastie and I will love you for the rest of my life.

First a clarification on behalf of Dad, who I am pleased to discover still reads my blog with close attention. Dad’s view on his own condition is that he has a little problem with his language, not with his memory.

—–

Dad and I went for a lovely drive the other day. We went out to Mulwarree, the homestead that is the original of the Rupert Richardson watercolour in Mum’s hospital room. It’s only 7km out of town, but the Hereford cattle, the dry golden paddocks and the gnarled gum trees are pure outback.

The lightning storm on Monday night had sparked a bushfire on Mount Hobden, and we could see the smoke streaming off the mountain and the haze falling from it like white rain. We stopped behind the saleyards so that I could speak words of love to four Thoroughbred broodmares, their bellies heavy with foal.

—–

Mum is …stable. She eats little or nothing and keeps little enough of it down, but she can cope with Sustagen, and usually has a glass of it on the go. Sylvia the syringe driver keeps her pain at zero, mostly.

The improvement this has made to her quality of life is hard to adequately convey. After Christmas (when Mum was still treating her end-stage cancer pain with the equivalent of Tylenol) it was hard for her to sit up long enough to play a game of mah jongg. She was folded in on herself. She looked grey.

Now she is comfortable, and the glow has returned to her skin. We play for hours. We watch The Last of the Summer Wine. We finish crosswords. She is teaching Sarah to do crosswords. She tells jokes. She is full of good cheer.

Morphine is mercy.

—–

She is a remarkable listener. Her friends come by and tell her extraordinary, deeply personal stories. Mum is a quiet and accepting presence. It’s a privilege to witness.

—–

I’m settling in for my fourth night on the pull-out sofa. I take my meds, I brush my teeth, I eat healthy food, I swim my laps.

I take each thing as it comes. I look for things that need doing. I do a little bit of work while Mum is asleep.

I’m very lucky to be here.

I’ve slept on Mum’s pull-out sofa bed the last couple of nights. I am expert in the use of Mum’s TV, DVD and breathing bed. I have the freedom of the hospital kitchen.

I leave for an hour or two at a time, to spend time with Dad (whose dementia doesn’t comprehend the severity of Mum’s illness, a perverse blessing), to hang with my therapy wolf (who put a vast paw through my rose gold necklace, but I found the charms in the grass, so it’s okay), to swim endless slow laps at the pool.

Mum’s still funny and brave. From my Twitterstream:

• Nurse: “I thought, when I looked in the other day, you look like a family on summer holiday in a motel. I thought, I wanna sit with them!”
• Somewhat difficult night but “I’m all right really, you know,” says Mum.
• Sarah: “I’m going to make zucchini slice. I feel like a zucchini slice.” Mum: “You look like a zucchini slice and all.”
• “Sarah’s coming over in five minutes.” “Is she bringing the Bailey’s?” It’s 8am.
• “Mum, you’re amazing. You are so strong.” “People keep saying that. How else would I be?”

David Foster Wallace may not have been the best choice. Palliative care is not unlike a cruise ship; comfortable and existentially horrifying.

The syringe driver’s name is Sylvia and it’s our new best friend.