I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with mum, even more in these last months. I was with mum when she died. I really hope that my time with mum, especially as she died, was a comfort.
I've never thought too much about death. When I was young the very idea spun me out. "How can you think about un-thinking?" was a death-thought pattern that I reasoned towards. If there's nothing after death then that's fine, but I can't imagine not being able to imagine. It probably speaks about who I am that this is the 'problem' I have with death. But that inability to wrap my head around not having a head to wrap around things scared me when I was young and ever since it has been easier to not think about death.
Mum also didn't talk about death, didn't talk about what she wanted at her end of life. And then her health meant she couldn't. So when faced with this inevitability the family, not mum, had to try and create and support an environment for her to die well in. I knew we couldn't possibly figure that out perfectly as mum might have imagined, so for me that just meant settling on the one simple thing I could do; spending time and being with her.
My idea was that even asleep or knocked out with the palliative drugs on board, mum's brain was still thinking, still processing all the stimulus people in her room provide. She could hear us, she could smell us she could see us (when she occasionally opened an eye) and she could 'feel' us.
Rationally though I reckon the time I spent with mum was selfish. I was seeing her, I was hearing her and I was feeling her. And I was shaping the way I think it would be to die well.
Because of the experience I had with mum, I have set ideas about how I'd like it to go for me and I will be using a living will and set in place EPOAs to direct my loved ones towards these things. It shouldn't be bad or taboo or even uncomfortable to discuss this stuff. Like it or not, death is a real process we will all go through and I'd like it to be OK for me when it is my time. More importantly I want it to be OK for those that come along for the ride with me. And having a run sheet for that seems like a good way to help with that.
Anyway, we said goodbye to mum last week with a private cremation and then an emotional but lovely service at the golf club. My sisters and I all spoke. The community that came to share it was overwhelming at times. It was a good send off.
I copy the words I read for mum at the service under a photo of mum's hand, flowers and ashes waiting at the apartment with Dad for the family to fully gather and scatter Liz in December.
I’d like to start this by thanking everyone that Liz touched on her health journey over the last two years. As a firmly independent and thoroughly giving woman, I don’t think my mum was ever built to actually receive help. Mum wouldn’t have had the quality and dignity she enjoyed, especially in these last months, without the professional, empathetic and loving care she’s had all the way from the ambulance and hospital staff through to the wrap-around care the staff and health teams at Shona McFarlane and Bob Scott Retirement homes gave her.
Mischievous and Magical
For those that know Liz it’s hard to look past the no nonsense, tireless doer that mum was. She worked for us and provided real, tangible results every single time. From her kids perspective this is particularly true, she gave us everything, literally by birthing us which is no small measure especially if you look at me! But also with the other tangibles she gave us, the education, the drive and the skills we have are in all us kids because that’s what she committed her life to.
When I was wondering about what to say about mum today I knew I could focus and thank mum for everything, but I trust that the people she made us become will honor that in due course. Instead I’d like to focus on two things that you might not think mum was but that really made Liz Liz for me.
Mum was mischievous. There are a number of examples but I'll mention just two. Mum didn’t have much to say about school. I suspect she was too smart for it and she had a healthy attitude, some would call it disrespect, for institutional authority. So the only mum school story that really struck a cord with me, was often told with mum’s twinkling bright eyes highlighting the pleasure she always took when her teacher said “Watch the board while I run through it!”
It’s no wonder that mum, smart as she was, thinking anti-school thoughts and hearing statements like this, became a great crossworder and enjoyed all forms of wordplay. I can still imagine her bright eyes mischievously speaking up in class to that teacher “Do it already!”
The other clear sign of mum’s mischievousness is the hand. As you’ve heard, mum didn’t want a funeral and didn’t want speeches. We’ve failed her on that, but we did meet her only demand for her funeral. Only Liz, and her bright eyes, would have communicated this single desire for her funeral. As silly as the hand is, it's also a brilliant mum moment, an undeniably and everlastingly Liz thing we will take away from today and remember her by.
We’ve heard a little about the Morris 1000 already but my remembering about it is proof of another of mum’s qualities. The ability to drive that car and remove the key and it still keep going was proof, I say proof because mum completely sold this to us, sold us proof that the car was magic. The hole in the floor pan of the car, allowing us to watch the road pass underneath our feet while the car did its magic thing, was a further reinforcement of this magic.
How you can have such a matter of fact woman, a woman who was prepared to spend the time and energy to answer “where does the water come from” questions with a level of truth and accuracy that puts my parenting of Liz’s Nelson grandchildren Arthur and Dixie to shame, all that and the bloody woman hoodwinked me into thinking she had a magic car!
One thing that strangely ended up not being a hoodwink, a practice you’d have thought that was contrary to mums normal character, was her near-religious zeal putting a piece of grass in a glass of water on the kitchen windowsill whenever something in the family needed what she called “luck”. Again it sounds too silly to work, but I’ll tell you what, and it's another proof of Liz’s less tangible qualities; ask any of her children about the grass and we will swear it bloody works!
It’s taken me a very long time to figure this out but you know what, that Morris 1000 wasn’t magic and the grass on the windowsill wasn’t lucky. Mum was.
Before I hand back to our celebrant Mary Death, I say her full name again only for mum’s benefit here, and before we are free to go shake mum’s hand, the last and most personally beautiful thing I took from Liz, a thing that really only came down to me in its pure form, and which ensures I alone will be her mummy’s boy, is because mum showed me that human feet are meant to be free. Free from the constraint of covered shoes and free from the constraint of socks! I couldn’t agree more, Mum. Love you.
