It has come to pass-my mother has died in a palliative care ward at the age of 90. She was from a family rent by sectarian divisions . Baptised a Catholic as a baby , after her mother, she was then baptised a Presbyterian by the other side. Her parents divorced. In my ignorance of this double dip and brand , I told a nun who came to my mother's bedside that she was Church of England. A priest who had called on her previously asked if she would like a blessing, to which she replied, tongue in cheek and a roll of eyes , that she would need a multitude.
In preparation for Mum's death , my half brother and I went through her private papers and made several discoveries . Folded into well worn squares was a letter of reconcilation from her husband, father of my half sister and half brother , unsuccessfully beseeching mum to allow him to return to the bosom of the family, he missing her and the kids. As a young man he had been a" biscuit bomber" , pushing supplies out of planes skimming across the jungle ridges in New Guinea, and had suffered from his wartime experiences . They divorced in 1973, religion again rearing its blind, punitive,legalistic head . Mum had written on the back of the letter that it was for the children to show how much their father had loved them.
There were references from the time she worked as a nurse at a Methodist geriatric home in Sydney where she often had the task of laying out the dead. A handyman there , Jack, hit the bottle , made a pass at a prim nursing sister, and outrageously declared that a lot of silvertails tried to "square their nob" with God by making donations or confessing their sins before they died.
As a schoolgirl, my mother, something of a tomboy, went to a concert attired as a paperboy , shouting her wares . When I became a reporter and decided to go to Darwin in 1958, she strongly advised me to always wear a hat to protect myself from the sun. A typical son, I took no notice of that advice and it is now my excuse for being troppo and weather beaten.
When a nun raised the subject of God,Mum replied:" We have one God. Don't know who he is or where he is. But we are all the same." Drifting in and out of consciousness ,she was capable of both lucid and irrational statements . Several times she told me to get and read the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper of June 12,1920 -the day she was born-which was in the bottom of a chest of drawers at the retirement village where she had been living. It had been given to her by my half brother as a birthday present.
Our sister ,who had looked after mum for many years , often with little thanks , deserves a Croix de Guerre for soldiering on in difficult circumstances. My brother and I selected a site for a memorial rock in a cemetery on which there would be a plaque with space for seven lines of text, not much for a life which could easily fill an entire edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, she being present in the early days of the Australian crawl technique of swimming, engaging in roller skating and ice skating at the Glaciarium, dashing home during the Japanese submarine attack on Sydney Harbour, working in a wartime factory making parts for a bomber,going bush and working on a sheep station and in a guest house, scrimping, saving, battling for her family, whipping up sponges galore, buying me an Army BSA motorbike ( which she feared) and throwing a plate of spaghetti in my face when she was under great domestic stress and I was being a thoughtless smartarse.
On a piece of paper torn from a small notebook was a quote my mother had read in a book : So many Gods, so many creeds/So many paths,that wind and wind/When just the art of being kind/Is all the sad world needs.
