Tag: grief and loss

The pram in the hallway

The pram in the hallway, the baby seats in the car, speak to the presence of little ones. JG Ballard considered it an advantage to his writing, after his wife had died and he was left to care for their three small children. He refused to pass them onto relatives and chose instead to raise them as best he could, single parent by day, writer by night with much drinking and cigarette smoking to shore up his energy until he too was dead.

Others see the pram in the hallway as a deterrent to the lives of writers. Either to the person who does not take up writing till after the children are grown and gone, or the children themselves who suffer neglect.

I never used a pram with my babies, nor a highchair. When they were tiny I ferried them places by car, in a capsule for the later babies, a bassinette on the back seat for my first born. 

By the time my children could sit, I invested in a lightweight Maclaren pusher to wheel them around. A pram seemed an unnecessary luxury, until my youngest came along and I borrowed the pram of another to experience the joy of walking along a street pushing my little one as she slept.

My mother had a pram in Holland. She used it to walk the thirty long miles from her home in Haarlem to the countryside where one of her cousins lived. This cousin was married to a man who ran a farm with crops and cows enough to feed the sickly baby watered down milk so that she might regain her strength during the Honger winter of 1945. 

The pram was in wicker with high wheels and sturdy frame, and it held the baby snug over the rickety cobblestones of Haarlem streets, over the kinderhoofjes, babies heads, so named because of the round bluestones that covered the ground, and then onto the gravel laneways of the countryside. 

By the time they reached Heilo, the baby sickened. She lasted only one night and died in the morning. In May towards the end of that cruel winter when ice was beginning to thaw, an icicle entered my mother’s heart. It stayed there as she pushed her pram, now empty. They buried the baby in Heilo, far from her home. Dead at five months of age but forever in my mother’s heart.

I asked her to tell me this story again and again when I was a child. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to understand how my mother could go on living in a world in which her baby no longer lived. 

I could not understand the way she held back tears. Her ability to tell this story with seeming detachment. 

In one of my earliest writing classes I befriended a woman who described the death of two babies, boys. They each died in turn of a genetic abnormality before they were the age of one. My friend told the story with more grief than my mother showed for her lost baby. 

‘I could not bear to go through what you went through,’ I said to her in a break during our class. ‘To lose two babies.’

‘I could not bear to live with an incestuous father,’ she said and turned to face me, her eyes grim. ‘I can’t think of anything worse.’

And so it was we shared our grief. Compared notes, pondered on the unimaginable, each a different story. We survived the unthinkable, each in our own ways. My friend wrote fiction, insisting her story was too raw, too close to home, but her fiction spoke of a young woman who had lost a baby and could not believe the baby was gone, while I stuck to memoir even as at the time I wrote my story as fiction. Always in the third person a thin disguise.

Even as I write now in the first person, a thin disguise, an effort to process something I could not make sense of when I was young. The unimaginable, the stuff that makes no sense, life lived under cover of darkness.

At the age of 34, JG Ballard drove his family from his home in England to Spain for a holiday and there his wife contracted pneumonia and died. He drove back home, the front seat empty, his three children in his care alone. 

My mother pushed her empty pram across the fields of Holland, an empty space in her heart.

The pram in the hallway suggests the presence of a small life in your care, the empty pram its absence.

In 1964 when JG Ballard was 34 years old and drove his car with his wife and three children on a holiday to Spain, he did not know that his wife’s lungs would become so congested with pneumonia she could no longer breathe. Nor that he would later drive home alone with his three children to a life so different from the one he had imagined. 

Ballard had also been interned by the Japanese during the Second World War and although he was only a child, looking back on it, he did not imagine internment was so bad for him. A child who simply played with other children, the way children do. 

He saw cruel things beatings and torture, but it was only later through his writing he came to recognise the extent of the trauma. His family had been prosperous and successful in Shanghai. Then one day out of nowhere it was all taken. They were dropped into a bucket of despair. 

This is the stuff that, like the pram in the hallway, offers a writerly dimension, the stuff we must explore. For how can our expectations be so turned on their heads, the way it is in war times, when we are helpless to forces beyond our control, when we might lose all we once had or find ourselves as hungry as our dog this morning who vomited because he had been fed too early the day before and his hunger, his empty stomach turned into an acid bath so great he had to expel it. 

‘A hungry vomit,’ my daughter called it. This breed of dogs have bodies not designed to be so empty; they shrivel. Our minds too need nourishment. A pram needs a baby, and a life needs to be populated by live company to keep it going. 

My mother/myself.

We are in a strange place of endings. My mother may be dying. She is not dead yet, not totally on her last legs, but the doctors cannot stop her heart from racing. Now they imagine she might have a clot in her lungs or some such difficult-to-discern reason for why her heart rate will not slow down.

‘It’s my age’, my mother says, finally acknowledging that she is old.

I wonder that we all go on as though we are looking for a cure. To my mind, it would be good to find a way of settling my mother’s heart a while longer so that she can go back to her beloved room in her retirement village and spend the rest of her days, as she herself tells us, in the joy of looking out onto her little bit of garden surrounded by her books, her memorabilia, her piano.

But this may not happen.

If my mother cannot get back to resume the life she once lived she might prefer to die. I know she does not want to go into a nursing home.

It’s not just the finality of the nursing home, it is the disruption. Hospital for my mother is okay because hopitals are busy and noisy places full of life and attention.

Before she goes I start to write my mother’s obituary. I start it now while she is still with us because we are in that in between place where life and death touch one another ever so closely, and it is as if we can see in both directions, if only for a moment.

Once my mother is gone, all we will have left of her are our memories. For now she is alive. For now I can still hear her voice, her crowded Dutch accent filled with dislocated verbs, and disordered sentences.

Am I a fraud? To rush onto the scene now, now in these last few months when it has become more clear that our mother is soon to say goodbye forever.

‘Sometimes we can’t separate relief from sorrow, resentment and love,’ David Denby writes, reflecting on the death of his parent.

This may be my struggle, our struggle, all my sisters and brothers, as we try to grapple with our mixed feelings, now as our mother is about to leave us for good.

Some part of me wants her to go, now at last, while another part wants her to stay, for many years yet.

When I was a little girl I remember so clearly a constant fear: what would I do if my mother died? How could I ever cope without her? When I entered adolescence and early adulthood the feelings shifted. I began to feel that my mother needed me instead.

I wanted then to make up to her for all the privations she had suffered married to my father, married to a man who for all the good that might have been there hidden within, bullied my mother and caused her immense pain, the pain of sexually abusing his oldest daughter among other things.

I have often wondered how it is that my mother has coped with the fact of my sister’s abuse, my father blinded by his past, and his pain.

I have often wondered how my mother has lived with this knowledge.

She carries the burden with her. I see it in her eyes. I hear it in her voice, the way she does not chastise any one of us for abandoning her as we have all chosen to do, in one way or another, over the years.

Our rage with our mother has gone unsurpassed, though I must not speak for all. I must only speak for myself. Only I can know my mind, and what others have told me, but we do not often confide in one another about these things, sometimes, but not often.

These things are too raw, too painful, too much a scooping out of your sense of yourself, from memories of a lost childhood to bear talking about out loud, at least not with one another because somehow when I am with my sisters and brothers, I carry a strange sense of guilt for all the things I too have ever done wrong in relation to them and for my anger towards them for the things they have done wrong in relation to me.

The day my older brother kicked me in the pubic bone, the day my older sister tried to nick ice cream out of my bowl once too often, the day my younger sister threw my school hat over a fence in a neighbouring street on our way to school, the day I told my little brother that I thought he was too dependent on me.

I was twenty-two years old in a new job, my brother only sixteen. He had come to stay with me for a few days in Canberra. I felt ashamed of having a little brother then with me at work and of not knowing what to do with him.

I left him in the hospital grounds. I told him he must fend for himself. I told him he was a burden on me and he cried. I cried afterward for this rejection of my baby brother who had stirred up feelings in me that I had not wanted to know about at the time.

My mother’s lips are still red, but not so purplish in tone now that she can have oxygen whenever her breathlessness appears.

I visited her this morning.
‘My head feels hollow’ she said. And with the echoing of her hearing aid it was not easy to have a conversation.

The woman in the bed opposite asked my name. She admired the fact that my mother and I have the same name and scolded me for shortening it. And I think then of my four daughters all with my name in second place, a link that goes back through the generations to the other Elisabeth’s that have preceded us.

The passage of time. There was a tine when my memories seemed as fresh as yesterday, but these days they fade. They fade every time I write about them, as if in the process of retelling them on the page they lose some of the energy they once held for me when I mulled over them from time to time.

The geraniums in the front yard pf my childhood home have faded along with the blue hydrangeas in the back. The garden has diminished in size. It was once enormous, the size of a paddock. Now it seems the size of a car park.

My mother does not share her memories any more, but she tells me that when her youngest son walked in to the hospital to see her yesterday she found herself crying.

The sight of him, and he looks so young yet, she said, as if she had expected him to look older.

She does not see my youngest brother much these days. Like most of her other sons, this brother has been angry with her. They are all angry, all my siblings but some manage to bypass the anger into a respectable closeness, others will tolerate her, others still might even feel a deep fondness.

I remember my mother as a movie star beauty with dark hair, olive skin and bright eyes. I remember my mother with lips reddened with lip stick and the faint flush of pale compact on her otherwise pink cheeks.

I remember the feel of my mother’s body, tight under her corsets, the rounded shape of her hips and belly where all the babies once lived.

I remember my mother for the softness of her skin and the melting moments in her eyes. But those same eyes could glaze over and this same mother could become distant and aloof.

She rarely spoke a cross word to me, but when anger took over and this I remember particularly from my adolescence onwards, my mother became ice cold, the steely glow of her otherwise shut off eyes, a sliver through my heart.

I have not been a faithful daughter. From the time I entered into analysis in my early thirties I began what I consider to be a delayed adolescence and I came to hate my mother.

I blamed her for everything. Where once I had blamed my father for all our difficulties, I now held my mother responsible and not so much in a simple it’s-all-her-fault kind of way but more in the way of feeling she had denied too much and I resented all those denials.

Yet I now know my mother was a creature of her times.

My mother was a woman of a her generation who married and stayed marred, who obeyed even when her instincts told her not to, who maintained her marriage at all costs, not simply out of a loyalty to the commandment of marriage, but more so because she had no choice, no money, no career, no other way of looking after nine children without the infrastructure of husband and breadwinner to support, however negligent that breadwinner might prove himself to be.

I cannot stop writing here. It holds me to the page. The clicker clacker of the keyboard protects me from this unraveling feeling that creeps up on me all the time now.

My mother is dying. She will leave soon. For all that she does not want to go, she will leave us and the little girl inside me who wept so hard for my mother when her second husband died several years ago, will weep again for her and this time for me, too, to be left, to be next in line and to be faced with the struggle that my ongoing life in this world entails.