It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow. Even though my Mum and I lived in different countries, I used to think about her a fair bit. A lot, actually. Now, if not exactly haunted by her, she pops up all the time–when I’m driving, turning the pages of a book, listening to music, stirring something on the stove. What surprises me, is how immensely vivid and alive she is since her death. Hers was a relatively quick demise. After some months of illness, given a first small dose of morphine, she died shortly afterwards in her sleep. I like to think that she enjoyed that first and ultimate fix. She was always partial to drugs. Not the injecting kind, but the more commonplace alcohol and pills. Through the menopause, she self-medicated with bottles of whisky kept under the bed and, as long as I can remember, swallowed painkillers by the handful. Now I wonder why I didn’t do more to help her stop.
Stop? She was 85 when she died, of heart failure. Heart failure is as it says. Failure of the heart, of the mechanical pump–not of the will, pleasure in life, desire to lie snug in bed of a cold winter’s morning, cat purring at your side. It seems strange, now, that my brother and I didn’t see what lay ahead, blamed her failing health instead on a reclusive nature- she’d always preferred cats to people; on her stubborness–for years she’d refused to eat properly, answer the door-bell, venture out except to see the doctor, a fellow cat-lover. Though she did still manage each day to get up on a chair and lean, half toppling, out of the kitchen window, to feed the neighbourhood strays through the burglar-bars.
I can’t actually ever remember celebrating Mother’s Day with my mother. She was fairly cynical about such things. I liked that about her. I liked the fact that, during the Iraq War, she railed against George W Bush; and prophesied that no good would ever come of an intervention in Afghanistan. When she was in her seventies, she began to read Patrick White; all of him, David Marr’s wonderful, voluminous biography and letters, included. She loved books, seemingly more so, with age. Perhaps she just had the time, the hours to fill. Her books reeked of cigarette smoke (she smoked and read in bed, late into the nights), and I often found neat cylindrical logs of ash wedged along the topmost edges of the books in her bookcase. I remember once staring at the kitchen wall of the house she’d bought after my father’s death (soon filled to overflowing with knick-knacks and stuffed animals) surprised at its odd colour only to discover, taking a cloth to it, a pale pink under the patina of brown nicotine.
When younger, she’d had what was then known as, ‘an artistic bent’, and attended evening painting and pottery classes at the local high school. I was deeply impressed by, and proud of, what she brought home each week. And slightly uneasy, too. As if I could sense another side to my mother in the gaudy sunflowers she laid down in thick oils, the fixed and ferocious stare of her prowling tigers. It seemed born out, many years later, when she began to confide in me stories of her sexual exploits as a young woman. Graphic accounts of infidelity and indiscretion that left me equally amused and shocked. And even, perhaps, a bit impressed.
After her death, I brought two of her paintings home to the Mountains. One, of the cranky calico cat, Ouma, that I’d rescued as a child from certain euthanasia; the other, the green bowl of orange flowers, a personal favourite. Wiping the nicotine from the frames, I felt for a moment as if I were wiping my mother away. And then the brown turned a satisfying creamy-white and it came to me how easily we tolerate and forgive the failings, be it large or small, of those we wholeheartedly love. Those who have so whole-heartedly loved us in their turn.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mum. I know you’re there. That death’s just a different country.