Love, loss and remembrance

 

Mum, radiant at 21 years old

Fifteen years ago today my mother was released from the pain and suffering of her mortal life, following a six-year battle with ovarian cancer.

In some ways I can't fathom that she's been absent from my life for that length of time, and in others I very keenly feel the vast passage of time between our final embrace and now. 

Mum and I had a challenging relationship that oscillated between an intense, loving closeness with a marriage of minds, to a violent resentment that sometimes neither of us could overcome. There were several periods during my twenties and thirties when the hurt and anger meant we didn't communicate for many months at a time.

However, as the multitudes before me have noted, there is nobody like your Mum. And when you lose that person who carried you in her body for nine months and then expelled you, squalling and wriggling into the world, you are plunged into an all-encompassing, insurmountable, black grief which in my case lost none of its intensity for a full year and still plagues me periodically, a decade-and-a-half later.

The final photo of me with Mum in 2005 - about 9 months prior to her death

 

Mum is responsible for many of my characteristics - either as shared qualities (attention to detail, kindness to animals, love of music / literature / Hollywood golden era films / travel / a penchant for 'nice things') or as a negative response to her own flaws (her chronic lateness - I am ALWAYS early; her inability to throw anything away - I am very streamlined, possessions-wise). 

Despite the groans and protestations of her children, Mum never gave up teaching us as we grew - correcting our grammar, reminding us to tilt the soup bowl and spoon away from us when delicately scooping up the final dregs, encouraging us not to point at people (gesture using an upturned open palm instead), refusing to give us the answer when we didn't know how to spell something ('Look it up in the dictionary'). 

Some of this probably seems fussy and silly in this modern age, but when I became a young adult and was thrust into a world of international executives in my early working life, I had never been so glad that I knew how to behave when taken out to exclusive restaurants and when attending corporate events. I was an ordinary young woman from Sydney's south-western suburbs but I knew which fork to use, the correct way to sit and how to engage perfect strangers in small-talk across the imported champagne. 

Mum's little gold watch - I believe it was a 21st birthday gift, and she wore it
every day until she was into her forties when the chain broke and the mechanism
ceased to function

After she retired in her early fifties Mum was always taking classes, making the most of the leisure time she finally had after decades of combining salaried work and pretty much singlehandedly raising a family. She learned to paint in the folk art style, she joined the local chapter of Probus and even completed a catering course. As a family we'd been taught to value home-made gifts and encouraged to give them, though of course as children and teenagers we often preferred store-bought presents. Over the years Mum would give family and friends things like kitchen towels to which she had added a crocheted loop, meaning you could attach the towel to the oven handle. She rescued discarded household items and adorned them with folk-art.

After my siblings and I cleared our parents' home of more than 40 years in preparation for sale of the property, we each kept certain items that had special significance, and divided up the contents of cupboards. These were full of beautiful things such brand new, incredibly expensive bed linen which Mum had bought in a sale as an amazing bargain. It had lain there for decades, unused in its box and with the tags still on, while she had less expensive sheets on her own bed, repairing the tears and frays and continuing to use them until they fell apart in the washing machine, at which time they would be cut up and used as household cleaning rags. Mum was the original environmentalist - everything was re-used and recycled.

Although these items are just 'things' they carry with them a wealth of memories. Every single time I use the last two of my now well-worn kitchen towels, there is a brief moment where I remember Mum sitting in her armchair crocheting. The crochet part of one of the towels started to disintegrate a few years ago, so I stitched it together with needle and thread but I'm afraid its life is coming to an end. It's so threadbare that one day soon it will disintegrate into pieces, and I will reluctantly have to let it go.

Once a richly coloured, thick piece of towel, after 17 years of constant use
you can see daylight through this example of Mum's handiwork

How adorable are these illustrations? Cheeseboard hand-painted by Mum, a birthday gift to me in my thirties

Fruit & veg trug, decorated by Mum

I'm not one for keeping nice things 'for good.' If clearing the family home at Panania taught me anything, it's that life is short and you should take joy in beautiful objects. Use the good crystal glasses. Luxuriate in the high thread count imported bed linen. Wear the clothes that you stressed over for months, having paid more for them than you would have imagined yourself being willing to do. 

Nonetheless, I do confess to taking particular care with some of the more fragile items I inherited, and have been known to bark a warning reminder at Kevin - 'Be careful with those glasses - they were Mum's!'

Using things given to me by my mother, or inherited from her, provides perhaps a disproportionate amount of pleasure. But I like to think that Mum would have been happy to see those items being employed and enjoyed, rather than locked away in a cupboard, despite that having been her own practice.

A set of silver plated fruit spoons - one of my favourite inherited items

Just a few months before Mum slipped away, Kevin and I had to make the decision to have our beloved cat, Sasja, humanely put to sleep at the age of 16. So in the course of four months I lost both my 'baby' and my mother. I think back to those harrowing, dark days of 2006 and marvel that I ever emerged from that black hole of grief.

Mum wouldn't be upset at me including Sasja in the same category of bereavement as herself. From a very early age I demonstrated my love for non-human creatures, to the extent that whenever I found the dead body of one of the little black beetles that populated our garden in Sydney, I would give it a funeral - complete with matchbox coffin and grave-marker cross made out of two Paddle-Pop sticks. The loss I feel for Sasja remains second only to that of Mum; I still cry for both of them.

Sasja, immortalised on canvas by my talented niece, Eliza Persen

To this day, when I visit somewhere beautiful I am thinking how Mum would have appreciated it. I lament the fact that she is not here to share in the life I now have in glorious Surrey - how she would have loved this place.

And so, on the fifteenth anniversary of my mother's death, here's the advice to fortunate friends and family who still have their parents: Make the most of every day. You're a long time missing them, when they're gone.

In memory of Margaret Anne Persen (neé Stanton)

04.09.1933 - 25.05.2006

My parents on their wedding day in 1955 - what a fabulously glam couple!

Until next time,

- Maree  xo