I don't know why I think of this. There is really no similarity at all. It was summer in the hospice garden, a viridian lawn beyond the plump pink roses stretching down towards the blue of the bay and the shimmering sea. 'She should have come here before,' I remember saying. 'She would have felt better if she had come here.'
'You would have felt better. Your mother chose her own way.' The nurse's calmness was comforting. She looked very young to me, her uniform crisp and colourful like a child's play outfit. She waited patiently with me until I was able to go back inside.
The nurse wanted me to stay and sit with my mother as her frail crumpled body turned from parchment-pale to ash-grey and her ragged breathing lessened into stillness. I did not. I don't know why. I had some muddy, muddled, feelings about dignity - about wanting to remember her fierce fight for life and not her slow surrender into quietude. I had other trivial anxieties, logistical things I can't even grace with recollection now. When the nurse phoned next morning it was to tell me my mother had not died alone. Someone sat with her, she said; your mother was not all alone. Again like in the garden I had that bleak sense that there was no deliberate reproach or judgment. I had simply got it wrong.
So I mounted my own vigil. For a year in my mind's eye I watched my mother dying every day. Sometimes I recalled the solace of the hospice garden but mostly I went back inside the shady room to watch her as she lay like a fallen fledgling. I listened to her quiet dragging breath and I waited, over and over again, until she was dead. After a while the image came less constantly. I can go for hours now, sometimes days, without this dry-eyed watchfulness. The memories of her death which scratched at me like jagged fingernails for so long are easier now to touch.
Elaine and I often walk outside the town at the dusky end of long afternoons. Sometimes some natural glimpse will shock and delight us - ablaze of berries, sun streaming through misty woods - but mostly we walk only half aware of the passing landscape of the lanes, immersed in talk about our children; their lives and loves and our passionate love for them.
end
Crysse Morrison (c) 1999
Crysse's newest novel, FROZEN SUMMER, due out this summer.
Publisher by: Hodder & Stoughton 1999