Why May Is Difficult

(Please note: This is a very long post. It didn't start out that way :)

I've been contemplating the onset of May for a good couple of months now. May will be filled with a hefty chunk of difficult moments.

This is a picture of my mother, who died in May last year after suffering a heart attack. She's holding Master J, who was about six weeks old, at Christmas 1998.

On the 13th is Mother's Day. I last spoke to her the day before Mother's Day last year.

On the 17th, she would have turned just 56.

The 30th marks the one year anniversary of her death.

My mother wasn't the healthiest of souls - she was overweight and she smoked. Heart problems were always going to be number 2 on a list of possible serious health implications as a reasult of her lifestyle. But 55 is young.

We'd lived through the Early Morning Phone Call before. Six years ago (and two weeks before our wedding), my father suffered two successive heart attacks on the same day. My father lives half an hour from town, alone (he and Mum had separated a year or two prior), and 'town' is a 'one horse wonder'. The silly bugger walked to the main road after his first attack to flag down the ambulance. True to his nature, his determination is what counted in the end - the ambos weren't entirely sure where his property was and may have missed the turn off. On route to the hospital he had to be revived twice.

All h*ll broke loose. I mean, I was two weeks off getting married, an event which normally necessitates a large dose of fatherly input. My mother was a cook on a cattle station waaaaaay up north of the country at the time and dropped everything to come 'home'. Though they'd separated when she left, she moved right back in to help care for Dad. Thankfully we didn't need to alter our wedding plans (we would have postponed had Dad not been well enough to attend), but in terms of living life on a razor's edge, we'd been there, done that.

Despite giving things a red-hot go, Mum and Dad separated for a second time a couple of years later. Mum moved in with my sister, who lived across country, and slowly made a life for herself independent of a partner for the first time since she was 18. I didn't often get to see her due to the distance involved and the cost of airfares, but we did manage to have a family reunion of sorts in the early part of 2005. It was the last time we saw her. And the last time she saw my kids.

The phone rang in the wee hours on May 30 last year, and hubby grumbled and groped for it. I was instantly awake. There's something so absolute about an early morning phone call. Nobody calls at 7am unless someone has died. I thought it was Dad. But my sister told me Mum had risen early for work (she was a cook at a mining site in Queensland by that stage, staying for a week on-site and going home to my sister's house on weekends) and was in the kitchen preparing a cooked breakfast for the miners when she collapsed. She was sped off to hospital after being treated by mine personnel.

My sister spoke to her via phone while she was in bed in hospital. She was groggy, but she understood what had happened. It was after this that Sis had called the family, waking everyone up. It was a school morning anyway, so I got up and went through the motions of preparing the kids. Then there was a second phone call.

Mum, ironically, had virtually mirrored Dad's experience. Both had had two heart attacks about an hour and a half apart, both of a similar type. Dad's heart had just been that little bit stronger.

I had last spoken to her a full two weeks before she died. I rang her for Mother's Day, but knowing that Sundays meant a long drive back out to the mining site for her, I got in early on Saturday (it was difficult to catch her during the week while she was working, so we reserved phone calls to the weekends). We nattered on about not much in particular. I hadn't bought her a Mother's Day/Birthday gift yet but I was going to go shopping that week and post it up to my sister's house. I forgot.

I intended ringing again the first day I knew she would be home after her next on-site stint at the mine. Only she worked through that weekend. It didn't seem important at the time. It seems odd to describe it now, not speaking to your mother for two or three weeks at a time, but it was normal for us, and neither of us was peturbed by it at all. Life happens.

The next thing I knew, she was dead.

The funeral was intense. Hubby and I packed the kids off to their other Nana and Poppa for the week. It was just so expensive to fly up at the drop of a hat that we just couldn't justify bringing the kids. Our whole family converged on my sister's tiny little house at the foot of a volcano. Where she lives is right in the midst of a tropical rainforest type environment. She literally walks out into her front yard and has to crane her neck to look up the mountain. A skip across the way and you'd find the Whitsunday Islands.

So we were all there, trying to organise a funeral. I put up with a horrible aunt (whom I've always had issues with, *smile*) asking incredibly impolite questions about how big our house was, how much we paid for it, and so on. We chose music. A Rod Stewart song for the seating and Fly by Celine Dion for the service. I, naturally, wrote the eulogy. Can you imagine it? Having to condense your own mother's life into two type-written pages? People tapping you on the shoulder asking if you remembered to include Great Aunty Gertrude's anecdote or the name of Mum's first pet?

The night before the funeral itself, there was a viewing. I let myself get swept along with everyone else and went into the little room. I made it three steps inside the door and howled. Later that night, I tried hard as I could to drink myself into a good mood (which, for me, isn't all that difficult - two drinks is all it takes *smile*). In retrospect, I would not view a body again. It was not real.

At the funeral, I read the eulogy I'd written. (Later, the same nasty aunt had the audacity to pick it to pieces for not specifically naming Mum's siblings. I was going for something different - not a biographical account but more that it was my own feelings and thoughts).

It wasn't a totally bad week. I got to see my sister, her husband and their two kids for the first time in two or three years (they have always been northerners, and we've always been southerners :) A group of us were all staying at the same holiday park and gathered in the cabin every night to play cards for money, which was a lot of fun :) And on the day we flew out, the day after the funeral, we even managed to swing by a bowling alley for an impromptu (but very fitting) game or two. My mother was an Australasian Champion and competed professionally in her early twenties :)

Mum was cremated and each of us four kids took some of her ashes home in a little urn. I kept wondering what would happen if security at the airport took issue with this little bottle, not believing it actually was her ashes. I walked through security probably looking completely guilty :)

Mum has been in a safe place here at home for the past year. I'm not one for displaying ashes and the urn is really quite itty bitty anyway. In a way, its quite fitting - Mum made it to virtually every corner of the country because of how far flung her kids ended up :) But I think its time to scatter the ashes. Probably this month - it does seem appropriate.

P.S. Thanks for indulging my little pity party here, LOL. Happy happy joy joy tomorrow, promise :)

Cheers,
Lizzie