Eight: The Shift

Nicole, 59

My dad was born on an island just off Java and that’s where he grew up. He was Dutch-Indonesian. In those days there was a lot of outer marriage with – they called them then – the natives. So there is a little bit of intermingling there. So I could claim that I’m 1/8th Indonesian because of that.

It definitely had a big impact on the life of my father and life in The Netherlands because of how they grew up.

Indonesia was a Dutch Colony. I never lived there but my brother and sister did. My sister is 13 years older, my brother is 11 years older and they were born in Holland. After the war they all had to go to Holland and then they went back again on a boat. I think they lived there for about 2 years and then they definitely had to leave because everything was getting a bit out of hand.

Independence was in 1956 I think.

He was a very gentle person, very caring. He was probably more of a carer than my mum. He loved reading. Because he was 52-years old when I was born, I always thought he was a little bit boring because he wasn’t doing the things that I wanted a father to do with me. Particularly with him because he was never really an active kind of guy to take you out and do exciting stuff.

Luckily I had a brother who did all that with me.

He came from a big family. There were six in the family and then two extras because his mother remarried. Because his father passed away quite early, he was always a bit of a caretaker for the rest of his family. He was the oldest male.

Because of his background of living in Indonesia, a lot of people ended up in The Hague in Holland. The Hague became this big Mecca for Dutch-Indonesian families. They had a bit of a sub-culture there where they had their own shops with Dutch-Indonesian food. They had writers – like those Colonial writers – who would keep the stories going. They call it tempo dulu (Tempo Doeloe) which means the good old times that they had to leave behind but all the memories were still there. My dad was definitely hanging on to all that and was very much involved with organisations.

He used to write a bit but nothing published. I’m not quite sure what he was writing for but for little newsletters for different organisations.

My mom was the complete opposite of my dad.

My dad in Indonesia was a Principal of a school and my mum was a teacher there. That was in the early 1940s.

Unfortunately the war got so bad that they were sent to … I’m not sure exactly what happened … they were all put in this prison camp [like an Internment Camp] so he ended up working on the Burma Railway. So they had to quickly get married.

It was a strange time for my mum. She was left behind but … this is a bit of a strange family dark bit … no one really knows what exactly happened. My mum and her parents and her sisters stayed back in Batavia in Jakarta. Because one of her sisters was working in a bank and the bank got taken over by the Japanese but they offered her the job. In a way, she was working for the Japanese. For some reason they ended up staying in a house and they were not interned in a camp like all the other women were. My mum never really wanted to talk about it too much because everyone was like “why weren’t you [in the camp]?” They never really chose to be on that side, it just happened to be like that.

[Working on the Burma Railway] very much traumatised my father. He had a friend in Holland that was in the same camp. They talked only when they were together. My dad never really spoke about it much with us or other people, only with people that had been in the camp as well.

He managed to get through it. He managed to get out but you could see that there were scars on his body from the hitting. He was very skinny. He lost all his hair because of poisoning, malnourishment and all that.

Because he was already a very kind sort of person he would never be bitter about the Japanese. He was very forgiving.

I do believe that his stress has been passed on in the Genes to us. You hear that quite lot that the post war generation of especially Colonial people have definitely some sort of stuff going on [laughs].

We had a caring relationship. I have more fond memories of him as a parent. With my mum it was always a bit difficult. My mom and my brother were getting on a lot differently.

I sort of rebelled a lot in my adolescence and I felt that I sort of lost him or he lost me. I really rebelled in a dramatic way [laughs].

When I was 12, my brother emigrated to Australia and that was also a part of me going a little bit downhill as I lost a big influence in my life.

For some reason, 10 years after my brother emigrated, my mum decided she wanted to go live in Australia. [They packed] everything up. Got rid of a lot, including photos, including beautiful memories. Just completely, radically left everything behind. Took just the minimal and of course my dad had to come along with her.

He was never very happy [in Australia] and he hated every moment of it. But he was so committed to staying with my mum that he did it just to make her happy basically.

That was a lot in his life, that he had to make people happy [to his own detriment].

While they were living here, his brother in Holland got very ill. His half brother. He decided to go back to Holland to look after him because he was going downhill so quickly and ended up renting a room in a house.

Then his brother passed away.

That’s when we started having very intimate conversations because he got so confused whether he needed to go back to Australia or stay in Holland because his heart was just in Holland.

He just couldn’t face the trip. He couldn’t face living here. He couldn’t face being with my mother because she was a difficult woman to live with.

One day I was going to have dinner with him and I went to his house to pick him up and he wasn’t opening the door. So I looked through the window and I saw him half out of bed and then he struggled – because I couldn’t get in – to get out of bed and open the door and then he just collapsed. He had very bad Pneumonia so we rang the Ambulance and took him to the Hospital. Two days later that was it.

To me, that was a very sad, lonely way. He died alone. We weren’t there. We came too late. He wanted to do it all on his own.

Very different with my mother. It was a very different sort of death.

I found it very difficult. I was 26-years old when it happened. He was 78. It took quite a few years to process that.

It’s probably more the circumstances of how he died that I thought were more sad. I probably would have spent more time with him, get to know him more and share more stories.

The day after [the fall] was probably the last moment we had some sort of conversation. I said to him, “Tell the nurse if it goes downhill and let us know”. But… he had made up his mind.

He was just in a delirious state, probably the fever and the exhaustion.

I probably have the softer side of him and also the search of something that is more than this earthly life.

From very young, we did go to Church – not necessarily Christian or so – but my parents used to go to this Church that was more open-minded. You went to the Church of Rosicrucians that was more like a spiritual kind of Church, that was more encompassing of everything that is beyond the dogma of a religion.

I would say my father was a spiritual person. I think he had enormous faith that there was something bigger that kept him going through the camp years and going through the difficult times that they faced when they were dumped in Holland and had to start a whole new life again. Then they had to go to Australia and live with my mother in a strange world.

His funeral was held in Holland. That was actually quite bizarre because I was the one who had to organise the funeral and I was in such an emotional state. I remember going through the yellow pages and ringing all these funeral places. There was one guy who said, “Ok, I know what you need. I know what you are going through”. It was all easy, easy, easy so I let him do the whole thing.

My sisters were there and his brother was still there.

I do remember on the funeral day being completely not there. I wasn’t there.

I didn’t speak at the funeral but my older sister did. I do remember after the funeral we were sort of standing in a line and all these people come and shake your hands and they tell you how sorry they are and blah, blah, blah. All of a sudden there was these two ladies and they said, “Do you know that we were actually the girlfriends of your father back in Indonesia?”

It was such a weird contrast of emotions like I didn’t quite know how to take that but they were lovely women. I think we ended up having a chat with them.

In those days, it was for me very vague and I do remember my other sister being very, very emotional and not handling it very well.

He got cremated and we scattered him in the North Sea in Holland. We didn’t want a grave. My mum decided not to come either. My mother and brother decided to stay in Australia.

We could understand it at the time but mum later on actually regretted it that she wasn’t there to have a more formal goodbye.

[I have been reading about this idea that we need to see a body to actually get past someone’s death. A lot of people have real problems when they can’t see the body as they can’t mentally reconcile the experience.]

I found that with my mother’s passing that we were actually there when it happened. When she had her last breath. If you talk about the Rattle, that was definitely there and it was actually very beautiful.

When that happened, it was just a body. Mum was gone but still I was very happy that I actually was there. My brother just made it from the eastern states. It was amazing.

I think I was just in daze really [at my dad’s] funeral, trying to comprehend what actually happened because it happened so quickly. In two days it was just bang and gone.

I took a long time off work to get over it. We don’t know how to grieve. There is no ritual.

The Māori do it very well. You get the chance to sit with the body and orate what needs to be said and give that person the honour still. It think it is beautiful. And then the wailing of the women.

We had the body of my sister-in-law, my brother’s wife in the house for a few days. She passed away from Breast Cancer and we had her in the house. In a way, it was almost comical. We were sitting at the dining table and she was just around the corner in the living room, lying there. We were just eating a takeaway pizza and all of a sudden [laughs] we were sniffing… “I think it’s time”.

We made the call, “You can come and pick her up.”

Just to have her there as life was going on. Even for the children that were only 12 and 10, to have that experience of having the body of their mum still there was quite beautiful.

[I was thinking the other day that it’s quite difficult to have private moments when viewing a body in a funeral home. Regardless of any lack of time constraints, it still feels like this is your ‘allocated time’. It’s often difficult to have your own moments.]

I think I was having difficulties with [the reception]. I was so absorbed in my own emotions then these two women that came to tell me their happy-go-lucky story about my father. I thought, “How dare you come and tell me that in my face like this?!” I remember being angry about that.

It was just a vague day.

We really don’t know how to deal with it and [things] like funerals and weddings brings out the worst and the best out of people. I remember going to my Uncle’s funeral (my father’s brother) where I was sitting in one of those follow cars and they were going on and on about his girlfriends who were claiming all the money and all the inherited money went to her rather than to the people that they said it should go to. I thought, “Get me out of this car!”

I think my mother pushed [my father’s passing] away a lot because she wasn’t there. In those days you didn’t have Skype so you wouldn’t want to have to pick the phone up and have these sorts of conversations. That was something that really didn’t happen. I think we [talked about his death] with my sisters a lot but on the other hand not really. You still sort of processing your own stuff because my older sister was working and had children and her life went on. Quite insular in a way.

My other sister had very major problems [with his death]. Definitely more than me.

There was a bit of a sense of relief because [my father never really approved of the] partner I was with at the time. He didn’t come to the funeral either. In a way, I felt a bit sad that he didn’t come because I felt that I needed that support from him but then after that I thought, “Oh well, at least now I can still be with him without feeling guilty.” [laughs]

I felt so immature in a way with a lot of feelings that were coming up.

It was quite a dramatic sort of relationship and that’s why I ended up going to Australia because I had to get away from him. [laughs]

Maybe the [funeral] was the catalyst that made me go, “I’ve got to go otherwise I’ll never get out of this.”

I definite felt [after my father’s death] that I had to become a bit more mature and I felt definitely that there was a lot of support gone. [He was] somebody that I really loved and wanted to get to know better and didn’t really get the chance to get close to him and talk about the things that I wanted to talk that I couldn’t talk with him about before.

I left home when I was 17. We had regular contact until they, in 1981, left to Australia [and] that contact sort of disappeared. That was quite a shock.

I kept my father’s watch. When he passed away I really wanted to wear it because it was still working. When the watch stopped, it was like, “This is it. He’s not there to wind it up for me.”

I had [his] raincoat that I loved to wear [laughs]. It was his favourite coat and the smell that was still there. I remember seeing An Angel at My Table and there is this scene where she ended up coming home for her father’s dying and his shoes were there. Then she started to go and act like her father because he was quite a domineering person and it was so moving. She stepped into his shoes and started to become her dad…. It was beautiful.

I kept [his watch] for a long time and then, a few years ago, I gave it to my brother. I realised that my brother never had anything from my father.

I think we still want that connection I guess.

[The funeral of my mother] was a very different sort of experience. She died two years ago and it really showed me how I looked at that notion of losing another parent but not be so self-absorbed any more. I think also because my mother was in a home for the last two years she wasn’t really ‘there’ anymore, there was no connection.

I don’t want to say it was Alzheimers or Dementia, I think my mum just switched off from the world. I think we kind of had two years to grieve.

I recorded that whole process of coming to her death bed. My brother was in Victoria then and I took my niece with me to sit with her and hold her and not let her be alone. Because I could feel that it would have been so lonely like with my dad and I didn’t want that experience for my mother. So I took photos and video of the sound of her and it was pretty powerful.

I haven’t shown it to many people because [I think] it’s too confronting for other people.

 

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