Goodbye Eileen
It was winter and the sea lay like a line of rope against the edge of the light sky, fat with fog and spitting icy mist. The six of us went towards the water, in dark coats with hoods up. We looked like monks. One brother cradled the urn that held our mother. On flat rocks carpeted with ochre lichen, he tried to undo the lid of the urn and struggled with the wire attachment. The rest of the family, some twenty or so of us, including six small children in gumboots and bright woollen hats, silently lined the rocky shore standing on knots of seaweed the colour of olives. The children looked like flowers. When the lid was released, ash lifted from the mouth of the urn in slow drifts, and our mother became a thin white flag moving in the faint wind. A child said, ‘goodbye.’
After the scattering, there was to be two minutes silence (which would be timed) and upon that announcement, two of the children sat down on the seaweed. In the salty silence, thoughts of Eileen returned to all, and tears were wiped away. I thought of her vivid presence. How, when she was young, she was far more beautiful than the queen. She could be kind too. I thought of her nut brown hair and dark eyes, the indigo of them that I see in my daughter, and I felt her nudge my heart.
I hadn’t spoken to my twin brother since Eileen had died. We’d disagreed about her care at the end. As it always was between us, discussion was intense whether edgy or compelling, we were usually honest. So, after 16 years from the death (with him holding onto the ashes), I had not recognised him on that Sunday afternoon. Seeing him as an old man revealed him as if the shell of him had opened. The old truth remained. I saw again, as I always had, that when feeling challenged, even if that was not the case, he held his mouth with a kind of squareness. This had long been there, the defiance that walks the edge of tears. The doubts were there but so was his wonderful brain. I recognised too the enthusiasm and the shimmering veil of anger. Ageing is disquieting, it takes away those we know intimately and transforms them into old people in flat caps. And old people are invisible.
One of my sisters had dreamed that our dead mother spoke, urging us to finally let her go. Dreams are just odd things that pass through us in the night, barely hiccoughs, but I’m the only one in the family of that opinion. Great importance has always been place on dreams as a way of reading events. Apparently, in the dream, mum wore her grey wig, and it was clear she had called upon all her dignity because she’d even bothered with lipstick. Eileen Patricia Mackenzie Nolan had decided to be released, my sister said.
As my brother and I walked toward the beach, he mentioned that the dead cannot rest until two days after their remains are released, so then I asked why he’d kept our mother on his shelf for 16 years. He didn’t answer directly. ‘It’s just the way of things. You get on with your life, don’t you? And you just park the thoughts that tell you what you should be doing.’
All of Eileen’s children had loved her with a serious reverence, and she held that as the gift it was.
Our father was from West Australia, but he had died a few years before Eileen. He drank so much, his brain was mashed to the point that he didn’t know his own name, let alone any of ours. The drink is bad in us. We can’t handle it and if we push it, we’ll end up alcoholics. And anyway, no one kept his ashes on the mantlepiece, which says it all. We kids were the intersection of them and intersections are where the crashes happen. Forever we had eyes on them, comparing, calculating, reckoning. Who was the best? Our parents loved like hovering falcons, watching, measuring, judging, and leaving.
The sacredness of death weighed on me while I nursed her. I had been looking after her as she walked through the great halls of cancer, the galleries she held within herself. She wouldn’t move out of her home; so I drove to her about an hour a day and cooked and cleaned and kept her company, but she wanted to be alone at night, so I drove back. She could not talk to me about dying though, that was private.
Once she ran away and I was panic struck. Then I recalled her independent mind. I got in the car and drove to the hospital where we’d all been born and there she was, small in her tennis shoes and slacks and found she’d hailed a woman in a passing car and asked her to take her there. Mum said ‘hi’ to me and nothing else but wouldn’t look into my eyes. I had thought she loved me, but that was becoming less clear now we were on different clocks.
She’d changed with the drugs they gave her and also probably with the illness. She resented us for living and would look at us hawk-eyed and envious, as if we were strangers. And soon enough I was a stranger. My brother took over and organised a roster so that we could all spend time looking after her.
After the scattering, I went out to shop and saw an old woman, her unwashed hair dyed flame red, the pale scalp beneath sharp as a scar. As I watched, she stole a tin of prunes. She wore sheepskin scuff slippers. She scanned the shop, but her eyes rested on no one. She walked out with the prunes. How had she been twenty years ago? Who loved her? And who would scatter her ashes?