Eight: The Shift

Helen, 81

My experience of my parents’ deaths was a bit of a shock because they died within two weeks of each other.

My mother was perfectly fit, she didn’t have any problems at all.

My father died in hospital of heart failure I think and he knew that he was going to die on that day. Everybody came to see him. It was really weird. Lots of friends. Lots of family.

We all want that don’t we? We don’t want to be the one that’s left.

We’d left the hospital that afternoon and then they called us back but he’d already gone.

She stood there and said to him, “You’ve let me down. You promised you wouldn’t go.” It was horrible.

I went back with her and slept in their bed with my mother that night because Barry was down here, weren’t you? He was building this house.

My mother was fine. She said, “You don’t mind sleeping in your father’s sheets?” and I said, “Of course not! He’s my family. Why would I worry about something like that!”

She was a bit of a fusspot with cleanliness.

She was fine and then we were going to join Barry down here and show her where she could come and live with us if she wanted to. We were quite happy for both of them to come and live with us.

We got this set up so they could have this area. Behind there is a bedroom and a bathroom and then the rest they would share with us. It wasn’t yet built. It was a shell.

We sat outside and laughed and talked and went and saw other people who were also building.

She joined into the community as though she was quite happy to come and live here.

We were sleeping in the garage and she woke up in the middle of the night, unable to breath.

Barry woke up and she said, “I can’t breath!” We said, “I think we should take you to the hospital” and she died almost where the little cemetery is… in my arms, in the back of the Volvo.

The nearest hospital was an hours drive. There is a hospital closer but we didn’t know where it was because we hadn’t expected this at all. We had checked that she was ok. We’d been to the doctors.

She had had to wait for the doctor because there was an emergency. In his surgery, where she was lying on this examination table, there was a Monet print Breakfast in the Garden on the wall. I said to her, “I could do a painting of the back of our garden in Karrinyup. It was a bit like this. There was a table laid for breakfast. I could put dad and you in the background.”

I never finished it. I’ve still got it somewhere. I’ve got the table but I haven’t got a teapot like this Monet. She said, “You can have this old silver teapot. Take it with you now.”

We’ve got it still here.

She seemed ok with his death but inside perhaps she wasn’t. She wasn’t the type of person who shared too much emotional stuff.

My father was much, much more of an emotional person. He would cry when he heard beautiful music.

They’d known each other since they were 18. They were 87 when they passed away.

My mother was the backstop. She was the sensible one. My father was full of joy and he would make fun out of anything. He was really, really soft hearted. He would bring home lonely people for dinner and I remember there was one fellow who said, “Got any sauce?” We didn’t have that in our house! We said, “You’re not going to bring ‘got any sauce?’ home are you?! We didn’t like him. He was a bit rough.

He would bring home stray dogs. We’d always have some poor old dog kicking about.

He was a lot of fun and everybody loved him.

My mother was much quieter. We were very close and we used to go on holiday together. She used to say to Barry, “Don’t let those two” – my father and I – “go off on their own! They’ll come back and they’ll have spent all the money!”

They were both avid readers. All of us would be sitting there reading at home when we were all there. I have a brother and two sisters so there were four of us. We had a very happy childhood.

I had a closer relationship with my father and I worked with him as well.

He worked for the Air Ministry during the war. After the war, he worked for Hawker Aircraft and I worked there with him.

He believed in a higher power but he didn’t push any of us into religion. In actual fact, my brother and I and my younger sister weren’t christened. My older sister was but that was probably because my mother’s sisters pushed her into it. They thought we should choose our own way which I think is right too.

My father always encouraged us to strive. His famous little saying was, “You can do anything if you really want to. You can achieve anything.” We were all quite successful in our own lives.

They were very loving. Not so much my mother. She wasn’t so demonstrative as him. She didn’t easily hug people. She would hug Barry. She loved Barry!

This is her [handling a locket] and I take her with me when I go somewhere interesting.

She was very glamorous. She always had painted fingernails and she was always elegant.

They enjoyed life.

Because we are at the age we are, lots of our friends have died. They need to talk and keep on talking about their family.

[Being isolated can also be difficult. It’s not easy when someone is ill or dying and you can’t just pop back and forth.]

That applied to Barry’s parents when they died. We didn’t go to their funeral in England.

We had been to visit them not too long before Barry’s father died. Before Barry’s mother died, we’d stayed with her for a week. Because she was in a wheelchair, we’d hired an Ambulance and we took her all over the place. We had lots of fun.

My mother died in my arms. I was holding her. It felt weird. Here I am, in the back of a car with my dead mother … it was weird … but I wasn’t sure whether she was dead or not until we got to the Police.

Things were distributed amongst the family and my niece, my younger sister’s daughter, was just setting up home so it was just sensible for her to have the furniture.

My mother, before my father died, thought that members of the family should have this or that because it was appropriate for them to have that as there was a connection.

My parents had some nice artwork. There was a beautiful old map of Cambridge because my parents had had country pub in the back lots of Cambridgeshire.

They arrived on holiday six weeks after we had arrived so it was much easier for us to leave England knowing that we were going to see them in three months or something like that. They fell in love with it so they just said, “Our life over here will be much better for our health.”

They had two children in Europe and two over here. My brother was also here.

We had two separate funerals as we weren’t expecting that to happen. We had them both at Karrakatta.

Because they were both cremations and everybody had something to say about them. We all wrote little Eulogies and one of us read it out. My niece read it out for my mother and Jack did it for my father. I’m too emotional and so is Jack. He was dreadful. He struggled but he did do it. It was private and a family thing. We didn’t have lots of people there. People turn up because they want to support you.

My younger sister didn’t come to the funeral as she had small children. My elder sister visited just before so she wasn’t actually at the funeral either. My brother and I did it all.

I didn’t like seeing the coffin go through the curtains. I thought it was horrible. We’ve discussed this at length. We don’t like these impersonal funeral directors. What else can they be but mournful but it’s fake. I don’t like that.

I don’t think you actually notice it so much when you are very close to the person but I did with friends who have died. You see these people all dressed in sombre clothes and saying things. Somehow that seems fake.

A young local man died and the funeral directors were handing out all these things and they wanted us to put our names down. It was like touting for business! I’m sure it wasn’t that reason but it felt like that. I don’t like all that.

Bung a body in a box, take it somewhere in a van and that’s it. Don’t have that. Have a celebration of the life of the person afterwards which is what we did with both of my parents. They said, “We want you to have a jolly time and remember us. Forget all the miserable stuff.”

When my sister-in-law died, there was the coffin with flowers and everybody said their things and then the curtains just pulled across. That’s much better. Not sliding through a little coffin-shaped hole! That’s nasty!

There is a lot of theatre in it. They had TVs now with photographs of their life and the widow in lots of these funerals is distraught.

It’s a strange thing.

If you’ve got more than five acres you can be buried in your garden. You don’t have to get rid of the body straightaway.

My parents wanted to celebrate the good things of our lives together. Everybody came to our house and I did all the food. We played music. The sort of music that they liked. Cole Porter and all that 30s and 40s stuff which we all liked because my father used to play the piano and we used to sing. We knew all the words to all those songs.

In fact, I was singing them last night when I couldn’t go to sleep. A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square. I was trying to remember the words [laughs].

I think that helps. The good memories you share with your family and close friends is really good.

We did have a little ceremony where the coffin goes through the hole. I don’t like that. I don’t want that for Barry and I. No way.

Post hole digger! [laughs] Straight up, straight down.

My mother was very down-to-earth, practical person. My father was the dreamer and the arty one. He encouraged us, all of us.

I paint. My brother did. My sisters are also both very creative. They’ve both got beautiful homes. They’ve expressed themselves through that. They are both a bit like my mother, a bit glamourous. They look after themselves like she did.

She used to put Castor Oil on our eyelashes when we were babies so we would have long eyelashes [laughs].

She used to say, “You’ll want to put some Castor Oil on those eyelashes.”

Not my brother but the girls.

It was terrible losing them so suddenly. They’d been there for so long. It was good for my father to be out of the misery of being in hospital. It wasn’t a terribly painful death but it was getting to the stage where he wasn’t himself and he was a bit grumpy.

I remember a lot of birds. He was in Charlie Gardiner’s and there were a lot of birds that flocked there.

I took my Birds of Australia book in there so he could identify which bird was which. I thought, after he’d gone, “Where’s my book?”

It was a big, fat volume and it was an expensive book. I did want that back! I had to retrace my steps and go and get it. That was a bit horrible.

I know this sounds awfully morbid but when you drive down Monash Avenue you see this tower and sometimes smoke is coming out of it. Is that where they burn the bits that they chop off people? I’m always conscious of that tower and that smoke.

That area was very special to me because I went to UWA and I loved it as a mature age student. It’s a lovely place and we shared a lot, my parents and I, because of them coming from England to here.

My brother and I talked about the experience because he was here. The two sisters were not. One was in France and other one was in Suffolk. I felt a little bit cut off from my sisters.

It was difficult because my sisters weren’t here and my brother and I were too emotional. We would grizzle if we started talking about my parents but it goes. I think my brother suffered more than I did. I don’t know why. He got Alzheimers after that.

It was a shock with her. For example, we were in the hospital. We eventually got to it because we didn’t know where the hospital was. We went to where we thought the hospital was and it had closed down. It was a different Bunbury Hospital. The new one.

This was in the middle of the night. The police were involved because we went to the police station to find out where the hospital was and they said, “In case she is still alive, don’t worry about traffic lights, just go.” They came with us.

It was Easter time so we had to leave my mother in the morgue in Bunbury Hospital. Then the funeral people came and took the body from there.

When we came back home – this was extraordinary – it was dawn and three Robins came and circled around our heads. Never happened before or since. It was very emotional.

“What’s with these birds!”

We thought, wouldn’t it be lovely if that’s what happens. You turn into a bird. You die and off you go. You can fly. I’ve heard other stories about other people.

They are quite skittish and normally they just pose for Xmas cards!

Because I was suffering, Barry was a bit peculiar about it all. We had a big fight.

Death is inevitable. Why treat it as though it’s something terrible? It’s not.

I think sitting down as a group and talking about this is a good thing. Lots of women do need to do that.

[It can be a place for people to talk generally, not necessarily just about grief. A place to feel comfortable and to recognise that their experience is not necessarily unique, ‘bad’ or ‘weird’.]

It must be terrible if someone you love is murdered. Just think of that. That would be unbearable.

People shy away from looking at a dead body. We didn’t look. I did look at my father at the funeral but not my mother as I’d already experienced seeing her dead.

I told my brother from the hospital that she was dead and he said, “What do we do know?” Like a child. They’ve gone. Both of them.

Because they went so quick – she went so fast after him – that was a bit tough and hard to take.

They didn’t suffer so we felt blessed because of that. They both went without prolonged, painful illnesses.

We were happy about that and they didn’t have a miserable old time in some old folks’ home.

That’s the fear of all of us really. Being stuck. Having a brother who had Alzheimers and we used to go and visit him, take him out, it was awful at times.

It was funny as well because it was so obvious that there were these little old ladies who thought my brother was much more interesting than this horrible old husband who was telling them what to do all the time. [laughs]

They used to come wandering in and sit on his bed and my brother would say, “Oh… hello.”

Some people have a miserable, horrible time and they don’t go and see their old folks because they can’t cope with it.

I’ve got my mother’s wedding ring. This ring was given to her by our son. When we came on the boat to Australia we went through Egypt and we went to Cairo. It’s a Russian wedding ring that falls to bits. If you press in a certain place it will all fall to pieces but it never does. I don’t think it works properly. It’s too old.

I think that we were very lucky to have had a wonderful relationship with my parents and that they didn’t have a horrible, miserable death.

That had a good life and they didn’t suffer in anyway really. Even through the war. They went through the bombing and things like that.

They were freshly married and with small children. I was two. They didn’t have a normal life. They had special night clothes that they put on and we didn’t go upstairs to bed. We had a beam in our house in England and we used to all sleep on the floor under this beam because it was the safest place and it wasn’t near the windows. Houses just disappeared.

I was four when the war finished. Barry was seven and he remembers much more than I do. You don’t remember much when you are four. I can remember picking up bricks because they shouldn’t be there [laughs] they were in the wrong place. I was tidying up. I’m a bit of a tidy freak [laughs]

Because my father was in the Air Ministry, we didn’t stay in London. We went to the north of England. In a country town close to Preston, Lancashire. He used to cycle because there was no petrol. He used to cycle from Manchester if he was doing that factory because he had to clear aircraft for flights and things like that. He would cycle all the way home. Bloody hell … it was 50 miles! He’d cycle all night to get there. We’ve got no idea what it was like for families during the war. I don’t know how they didn’t go mad!

Because we had this wonderful father, there was a time when there was a huge snow fall and he spent all day making a sled. Then he took us out in the moonlight to go down this hill. I’ve never forgotten that. That was magical. All of our cousins came from London to stay with us. My mother had all the kids!

Lots of kids had to go and stay with strangers but my dad made sure that we all went as a family although he was miles away and wasn’t there during the week.

Some of the children [who migrated out to Australia] were told that their parents weren’t alive. Fairbridge was those kids. That’s where they were all housed. They were used like little slave labour.

 

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