Dying Read online

  Back in the car, she stuffed a tissue into the neck of the bottle to stop the dirt escaping. ‘A piece of home,’ she said.

  Mum kept her bottle of Beaconsfield dust for many years and through many moves, until it was finally tossed out or lost, then forgotten along with everything else she had ever held dear. I don’t know if she had any concept of home by the time she died. She talked obsessively about going there, begging me to take her home every time I saw her. But I wasn’t sure where she meant. She had made so many homes by then, more than twenty. Some she had loved and some she hadn’t. She certainly didn’t mean the nursing home where she lived out her days.

  ‘This is your home now,’ I’d tell her, trying to pacify her.

  ‘Liar.’

  I wasn’t with Mum when she died. Shin and I were living in Japan temporarily, trying to figure out a way for him to establish a base back in his home country. Before I left Brisbane, Sarah and I met up with a funeral director. We planned to arrange for Mum’s funeral in advance, given that she was so frail. We felt a simple cremation was best, with a memorial service to be held later, at a time that suited the whole family. We didn’t want anything religious because Mum had long ago given up on the church. Sarah suggested a party; Mum had always so loved a party.

  ‘If we do it this way,’ my sister said, ‘you won’t have to rush home if she dies. What would be the point? You’ve been grieving for her all these years anyway.’

  I was grateful to her for saying it, and for her sisterly concern.

  What we didn’t do was discuss our thoughts with Eliot. I can’t say exactly why communications with our brother were so poor. The simplest answer is that we all lived separate lives in different cities—me in Brisbane, Sarah in Newcastle, and Eliot in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. The more complex explanation is that the fractured way we grew up had left us leery of each other. This was especially true after our parents’ marriage started to fray. My sister and I could at least have a conversation, swap news on the phone about our kids, comfort each other about our mother’s devastating decline, but my brother was much harder to talk to. I called him perhaps twice a year to update him on Mum’s health. Apart from that, we never spoke.

  According to Sarah, as Mum was dying, Eliot was the one she wanted to see, only Eliot. He came to sit with her, keeping a vigil at her bedside, holding her hand.

  ‘He was very good,’ my sister said, ‘and very helpful when we had to clean up her room, get rid of all her stuff. But then he blew up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he thought it was selfish not to have a proper funeral. He thought we were just thinking about ourselves.’

  ‘Maybe he’s right. Maybe we were.’

  For whatever reason, Eliot went ahead and arranged a funeral service in the chapel of the Catholic nursing home where Mum had spent the last miserable years of her life. Sarah didn’t go.

  ‘I never wanted to set foot in that place again,’ she said.

  Given our lack of practice, it isn’t surprising that my brother and sister and I failed so miserably to bury our mother’s ashes properly. Up to this point I, for one, had never experienced the death of someone close to me. And we were, all three of us, without any religious belief, all of us clueless about standard rituals and rites. With no guidelines, Sarah and I were happy to improvise, but this did not suit Eliot, and he decided to act without us. Even to this day I wish he could have waited. At the same time, I understand why he didn’t. If Sarah and I were acting selfishly, then so was he. We all were. We didn’t know what else to do.

  And so that’s where things stood for a while. Eliot kept our mother’s ashes with him in the Blue Mountains. The idea of a party-like memorial service faded away. I spent time in Japan thinking about other things. It wasn’t until I returned to Brisbane a few months later that the question came up of where her ashes were to be permanently placed. I knew the answer. She wanted her remains to join those of her parents and grandparents in Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery. She wanted her name added to the others on the big pink granite plinth dedicated to the Murrays. She had taken me there some years beforehand to show me. We had packed a picnic and had sat on a nearby bench enjoying the spectacular view over the city.

  ‘Bury me here,’ she said.

  ‘Happily,’ I said.

  At that stage I was still brushing off any premature death talk. Mum wasn’t sick then, or not that I could tell. It’s only now, looking back, that I think she suspected something was wrong, or else why start choosing burial sites?

  About a year later, I rang my sister to suggest a plan.

  ‘I was thinking we could all meet up in Sydney next weekend,’ I said, ‘have lunch together, drink a toast to Mum, then Eliot could hand over her ashes and I could bring them back here to do the deed.’

  ‘Where do you want to meet?’

  ‘Chinatown. BBQ King. We could get one of the rooms upstairs. Mum loved that place.’

  ‘Who’s going to call Eliot?’ she said.

  ‘I was hoping you might.’

  The fact is I was scared of my brother. He was too like my father for me to feel comfortable with him. I had been frightened of him ever since we were children together.

  Sarah, being the oldest, was less easily awed.

  ‘Chicken,’ she said.

  Eliot arrived at the BBQ King a little later than the rest of us. Everyone was there: his son Ben, then in his mid-twenties, who had been a favourite of my mother’s, Shin and me and our two boys, Sarah, her daughter and two grandsons. Unfortunately Sarah’s son wasn’t with us because he wasn’t speaking to his mother at the time.

  ‘Mum adored him,’ I told my sister. ‘He should have been here.’

  ‘I tried,’ she said.

  She stood up when Eliot came into the room and went around to kiss him. I preferred to remain seated. In his hand he had a large paper carry bag with Bulgari emblazoned on the side, which he placed on an empty seat.

  ‘Is that her?’ said Ben, peering inside. ‘What an ugly box.’

  He removed the box from the bag and placed it on the table. It was beige plastic, the size of a small shoebox, with Mum’s name written on the front in marker pen.

  ‘Put it back,’ said Eliot.

  Ben did as he was told, carefully settling the bag back on the seat so it wouldn’t fall.

  ‘It’s so small,’ said Sarah.

  The talk went badly after that. There was a long argument about what we were going to order. It was the grandchildren who saved us from ourselves. Ben and the others regularly steered the conversation back to Mum, making sure the occasion was about her, and what she had meant to them growing up, and how they still missed her. And the great-grandchildren provided a useful distraction. There was always the topic of how they were doing in school, and what their favourite subjects were, and what they thought they might like to do when they grew up.

  ‘Gamer,’ said the older one.

  ‘Oh God,’ said his mother, her head in her hands.

  After an hour or so there was nothing left to say. Everyone had trains to catch, or planes, in the case of Shin and me, and Eliot said he had another appointment somewhere else. In our rush to get away we almost forgot the ashes, sitting in the beige plastic box inside the Bulgari bag, until Ben remembered and went back for them. He handed them to my brother, who passed them to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing to thank me for,’ he said.

  ‘It’s what she wanted,’ I said.

  ‘If you say so. I thought I might have taken them up to Beaconsfield and scattered them there.’

  ‘I thought of that too,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think she belongs there.’

  ‘How would you know where she belongs?’

  I couldn’t think of a reply before my brother was out the door and down the stairs, leaving the question hanging in the air, unresolved. That was how it was with him and me. Every conversation was an argument, every encounter another chan
ce to raise some point of disagreement, then leave before it could be settled. We were combatants before we were brother and sister. I was ashamed for us. A different family might have managed to put all of this history behind them and say goodbye to their mother in style. As for us, all we could manage was an hour of faked good fellowship followed by a hasty retreat. I was glad Mum wasn’t there to see it. She would have been inconsolable.

  Jenny was with me on the day, in 2010, when I interred Mum’s ashes. She drove to Brisbane from the Gold Coast, where she and Ranald had retired to their holiday house. Ranald was too sick to go anywhere by then; he spent his days in an armchair in front of the television with the volume turned up so loud Jenny had to leave the house to get any respite.

  ‘It sends me batty,’ she said. ‘He won’t use earphones.’

  She was driving me up through Toowong cemetery towards the Murray plinth. I had the beige box on my lap and Jenny had brought a bunch of white lilies and a vase.

  ‘Your mother always said, out of us three girls, she was the lucky one,’ said Jenny. ‘We’d married men who were tolerable, but she’d married one who was intolerable, which gave her a reason to leave. I still think she was very brave though.’

  ‘I don’t think she felt brave,’ I said, remembering how long it had taken Mum to end her marriage. Years and years of conciliation and backtracking before she finally made the decision.

  ‘Does your father know she’s dead?’ said Jenny.

  ‘Apparently he didn’t quite take it in,’ I said, repeating what Ben had told me. By that time, I had become completely estranged from Dad. It was a consequence of so many things: the divorce, my father’s mental instability since then, my desire to shield Shin and the boys from his worst excesses, and my illness. But Ben would sometimes go with Eliot to visit my father in his Sydney nursing home, and would subsequently relay news of Dad’s condition to me. ‘He’s very far gone.’

  ‘She told me she wanted to outlive him,’ said Jenny. ‘Even by a day.’

  ‘There’s no God,’ I said.

  I’ve never been to a Japanese funeral, but friends tell me there is a traditional ceremony after the body is cremated where the mourners pick through the ashes of the deceased with a special set of metal chopsticks. Bits of bone are lifted out for closer examination, signs are read, whether of fate or character I couldn’t say, but apparently the ceremony can be funny—some of the comments about the dead raise a laugh, whether intentional or not. In any case, I imagine the ritual is helpful. I imagine the mourners derive comfort from this last act of intimacy with the person they have lost. I’m only sorry that I didn’t think to do something similar before burying Mum’s ashes, something to make the occasion more fitting.

  As it was, Jenny and I stood by and watched while two young council workers dug a hole at the corner of the pink granite slab at the base of the Murray plinth. The soil was rock-hard after weeks and weeks of dry weather, but the workers chipped away until they had gone about two feet down and about a foot across, just wide enough to fit the beige box. I handed it to one of the workers, he placed it in the hole, his colleague covered it with dirt and tamped down the loose soil with the back of his shovel. We thanked them and they left. And that was all. Jenny and I said nothing, no prayer, nothing formal, only pausing to arrange the lilies in their vase, before saying goodbye to Mum as if we were just leaving her for a moment, to go down the road for a coffee. We didn’t know what else to do. When I think of it now, I wish I’d at least thought to pour Mum’s ashes into the hole so that they could mingle with the dust, instead of leaving them in the box. But I didn’t, and I’m sorry.

  I’ve only been back to visit the grave once since then, after the stonemason finished carving Mum’s inscription. Her name was there: Everil Mary Taylor (nee Murray), and her dates 1921–2008, but I didn’t sense that she was there, and I wasn’t tempted to talk to her or catch her up with all my news. Actually, I had a powerful feeling that she had long ago fled the scene and that the question of where she belonged in death was still wide open. And I realised that this was probably nothing more than the price she’d had to pay for wandering so far from the place where she was born, that at some stage there was a point beyond which belonging was no longer an option. Her little medicine bottle full of dust was only an approximation of home, not the real thing, just like my burying her ashes was only a gesture at belonging, one that was bound to fail.

  My father’s name was Leslie Gordon Taylor, but everyone knew him as Gordon or L.G., and we children sometimes called him Captain Taylor. I never knew where he came from because he kept it a secret. Even Mum didn’t know with any certainty. According to her, Dad’s account of his past varied so often she could never be sure if, or when, he was telling the truth. It was known that he grew up somewhere in Sydney, but we were never taken to see his childhood house, or to meet his family, and his parents came to visit only rarely when I was growing up, certainly not often enough to leave any lasting impression. I cannot even recall now what they looked like.

  If he talked about his boyhood at all it was to say how unhappy he’d been, cooped up in a little suburban box with a mother and father who didn’t understand him, and no brothers and sisters to share his ordeal. He declared his father a bully and his mother a doormat, and told us he’d stormed out on them at the age of fifteen, never to return. He was vague about what happened next. There was a job as a jackaroo for some wealthy Victorian squatter, which ignited his love affair with horses, and where he might have picked up his patrician affectations—the cigar-smoking and the penchant for tailored clothes—although these could equally well have been acquired later, in the air force, where his character was truly forged, and where he grew his trademark handlebar moustache.

  He was as hazy about his war as he was about his childhood. The air force to start with: it was obviously where his passion for flying began, and where his problem with authority emerged full-scale. He never said why he was thrown out, only that it probably saved his life, since so many of the other trainees had gone on to be blown to bits in the bombing raids over Germany. After that he simply got lucky, he said: one day he bumped into a recruiting officer for the British Army in India, who immediately convinced him to sign up for officer school. He duly shipped out to India for training. Six months later, his training complete, he expected to cross into Burma to fight the Japanese, but they surrendered before he could pack his jungle kit. I was never sure if he was pleased about this, or resentful, because it had deprived him of the chance to prove himself in combat. In any case, the end of the war saw him transported back to Australia anxious to launch his career in civil aviation as soon as possible, since flying was his true vocation.

  Not that it was an easy calling. In the early days, when Dad was starting out, it was full of risks, all of which he seemed to relish. Along with travel. He couldn’t stay in one place for longer than a year or two, or in the same job. He appeared to be in a perennial state of high dudgeon about the incompetent way airlines were run, about the primacy of commercial pressures over everything else. He fought with almost everyone he ever worked for. As a result, we lived like gypsies, forever packing up and moving on, which suited Dad perfectly. He was at his best when he was leaving. It didn’t worry him if we had to change schools yet again, abandon friends and neighbours, repeatedly adapt to new surroundings. Anything, apparently, was better than settling down in some barren suburb like the one he’d escaped from as a teenager. That was Dad’s nightmare, the thing he feared the most. I think he would have preferred to die than end up back in the same place he had started out.

  He was in his seventies before he started to examine his beginnings with anything like equanimity. Growing up, he had always had a suspicion that, given how unsatisfactory they were, his mother and father were not his true parents. He remembered another couple, periodic visitors to the house, who came from Glasgow and bore an air of old-world refinement, people to whom his mother and father had deferred. In the hop
e, no doubt, of confirming his theory, he chose them as the first quarry in his genealogical hunt.

  ‘They were called Auchincloss,’ my father told me. ‘There are five of them in the Glasgow phonebook. We’ve got to be related.’

  He travelled to Glasgow, where he discovered the truth. It was not what he had hoped. The couple were not his parents, but his father’s relatives by marriage. And his father was not who he had said he was. Originally from Ireland, my grandfather had run away from a violent household at the age of fourteen or so, and ended up in Glasgow, where he changed his name from O’Neill to Taylor. An aunt took him in, and not long after that he joined the merchant navy and started travelling the world, eventually jumping ship in Sydney.

  ‘I never knew any of it,’ my father said. ‘I might have had more respect for him if I had.’

  He showed me a tiny grey photograph of my grandfather scrubbing the deck of a ship.

  ‘He was just a kid,’ he said, the first kind word I’d ever heard him say about his father.

  My father spent a week in Glasgow meeting relations he never knew he had. He came back changed. It would be too much to say that he was at peace—he was never at peace—but there was some sense that he had laid a few ghosts to rest and decided not to run so hard. There was also some recognition of the price we had all paid for his insistence on always moving.

  ‘It was tough on your mother,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame her for quitting when she did.’

  He wrote to her asking for her forgiveness, but she didn’t reply. By then, I am sure, all her reserves of compassion for Dad were exhausted.

  My father’s spiral into severe dementia probably started around the same time as my mother’s. I should have recognised the signs, but I saw so little of him that it was hard to keep track. By then he was living in Canberra, where he had seen out his working life as a mail sorter for Australia Post, and now lived on a modest pension at a hostel for public servants. I went to see him there a couple of times, and Shin and I once visited with the boys on our way to the snow for a holiday. Now and again, he would turn up in Brisbane and knock on our door.