It shapeshifts, the pain and sadness, taking different disguises, making itself a flat black shadow that can slide under doors and into empty rooms, a blanket that wraps around me in the cold, a companion sitting beside me as the plane lands, the tears when I hear a song that takes me back.
I am busy but trying not to be so busy that I avoid processing and feeling it all, trying not to hide in books and work and love and kids. I want to be available to the memories and emotions that come up.
My early years as a lawyer in Sydney, I had moved home for a couple of years and then out, so I couldn’t conduct my miserable life more flagrantly. They were really unhappy days. I would go home on the weekends to pick lavender in the afternoon sun with you, bunch after bunch. Sometimes you had already picked it and my job was to collect and tie in bunches. They were such sad days for me on the inside, seeing my life and purpose deteriorate, and I took such solace being able to come home. Another couple of admissions, periods of peace followed by worse periods and I was heading further down hill. Towards the last days I started morning drinking at Balmain Shores and would head over in tears, listening to music to match: but always it was a place of peace and love and calm, and always you were there for me with unconditional love despite what you were seeing. Id like to think that I was a loving daughter, when I passed adolescence especially and we became best friends. I wasnt very useful when I was sick, was more of a liability than anything else, but I did get well and step up and try to be the daughter you needed.
I think about when I realised how frail you were in April this year and I had returned from Sydney after maternity leave and stood crying in the kitchen for 30 mins. How happy I was to hear the joy and light in your voice after you’d been to the gym or out with AJ.
I think about those admissions to RPA and how scared you must have been. The worst once, where you were in ICU, where at least I could fly out and be there without kids, and could be present, albeit taking work calls in the hallway of level 10 outside your room. How scared and lonely you must have felt. And I was a day late, after the operation, because we had a big party scheduled for Matilda's birthday and I thought I had to stay for it. I will always feel really bad about that. I am really sorry. "Im so glad you came" you said.
I think about my 21st at Margaret’s and Patrick’s wedding and our first communion parties and how great you were at stuff like that. I think about which years exactly must have been the hardest years for you, and think I have it locked down to 1991-1996. I’d like to think that it got better after that, or maybe towards the end with the Swedish family staying and you in your helping element, with Hannah to stay up all night with. And then we started moving out of home, you took some cool trips, things were looking good.
I think about how you taught me to give of myself and give my time and home and love and the shirt off my back and my last loaf of bread if someone needs it, and how that’s more important than just giving money which you can spare. I hope I can teach Matilda and Parker this lesson also - will it bring them happiness or do they need to learn it just because we are Christians and this is what is important to a Christian? I don’t know. But I think it important to live in service to Others and as part of a community. I want my girls to be happy functioning stable members of society, maybe all you ever wanted for me. In those last few years, the last 2 specifically, did you know that’s what I had become? I had mum. You don’t have to worry about me anymore. Everything will be ok, and it was a privilege and a pleasure being able to step up and to be a helpful and useful adult in the years when you needed me. I just wish I could have been there longer and more and closer. I will always be sorry about that.
