jmgoyder

Lately, Anthony has been asking me more and more frequently where his mother is, and sometimes he asks me to ring her. Mostly I evade the question or just say that she is busy cooking, but the other day I ventured, “She’s gone, remember?” This truth made him sad and quiet for some time and then he was a bit embarrassed for having forgotten.

One of the best things about this nursing home is its meals. Lunch is often a roast served up in much the same way as many of the elderly residents remember their mother’s offerings. The photo below shows Anthony’s meal the other day before he demolished it – roast beef, potatoes and pumpkin, with cauliflower gratin, peas and gravy.

Last week, my mother, brother, niece, Ming and I attended the funeral of one of our oldest and most special friends, V, a woman who first taught me to drink from a straw when I was little, and for whom Anthony had a lovely affinity. My funniest memory is of V staying here on the farm one night and 4-year-old Ming (who used to sleepwalk) clambering into bed with her in the early hours and cuddling her nose into the wall. I remember getting up and not being able to find him until I discovered him fast asleep with his little body curved around V who looked a little alarmed! To V’s sons, siblings and family, your mother was a legend.

Yesterday, I attended the annual memorial service at Anthony’s nursing home. I dumped my bag in Anthony’s room, gave him a quick kiss and explained that I was going into the next section to pay my respects and volunteer as helper in the serving of tea and coffee, cleaning up etc. He wanted to come with me until I told him it would be like a church service! Once I was seated and reading through the list of people who had died, I was shocked to find that there were 18 because I only knew of two, J and A. J was in the room next door to Anthony’s for over a year, and A was a beautiful, tiny woman who used to get great pleasure from holding the dolls that look like real babies. The fact that 16 other people had died in different sections of the nursing home during the past year jolted me and, looking around the room, I spotted J’s wife and her tear-filled eyes blinked at mine, anticipating the hug that we would share later.

After the service (in volunteer mode), I helped Ev (my volunteer ‘boss’), to rearrange the room into a cafe whilst, out on the lawn, the people who had lost someone released balloons filled with wattle seeds and helium. On the small crowd’s return, on walkers, in wheelchairs, on foot, I served tea and coffee, made friends with a few residents and volunteers I’d never met before, gave hugs where it seemed acceptable, and pinpointed T, J’s widow, to give her my sympathy. After all, she and I had been visiting our husbands at around the same time every day for a year. But her red-rimmed eyes eventually dismissed me and I moved away to help Ev with the clearing up of cups and saucers, tables and chairs. Once all of that was done, Ev thanked me and said I could go back to Anthony, so I did.

But, just seconds later, I was told by the nurse-in-charge that M, a 91-year-old man two rooms down from Anthony’s, had died in the night. Two days previous, I had hugged R, M’s wife, when she told me that M had pneumonia and I had just begun to, shyly, befriend the many members of this family and learn all of their names. Now that M is gone, I may never see R and the family again and yesterday afternoon, when they all came to clear out M’s room, I was very careful to keep a distance, to just speak to one of M’s daughters before withdrawing into Anthony’s room, closing the door and crying in his bathroom.

A bit later, Anthony hugged my grief away enough for me to be normal, even jovial, but the experience of losing this many people I cared about in such a relatively short space of time is difficult.

I remember so well the day that Anthony’s mother, ‘Gar’, died because I was with her, in the hospital, 33 years ago. She and my father died within less than a year of each other and, at the time, my teenage heart didn’t cope very well with losing two such enormously important mentors and the grief was unbearable.

But now, with the benefit of an additional 30ish years of hindsight, insight and love, I think that next time Anthony asks where his mother is I will say, “Just around the corner, Ants.”