Thursday, May 27, 2010

Happy Birthday Mrs 59

Tomorrow is my mum’s birthday. It goes without saying that special occasions mark the passage of time, slice it up and help us flick back on the years in a unique way. Like holding a handful of old birthday cards in our hands, as we think back to what we were doing the year before, and the year before that, one day cut out from each year of our lives.

When you are two, like my daughter is, a birthday must be like a solar eclipse, the next one, a lifetime away, which leaves plenty of time to anticipate the blow out present you would like your father to buy, (‘A bike.’) and the particular type of chocolate cake you want, (‘Not a freezing one like last year.’). I made ‘L’ an ice cream cake for her second birthday. Probably a bit of a silly thing to do at the end of June. But her daddy ‘A’ piped the face of her most beloved toy in chocolate on the top, so at the time it was a hit.

As we get older birthdays come round a whole lot faster, and some before we are really ready for them. This will be mum’s first birthday since the death of her own mum and her first since her youngest son died. I’m sure tomorrow will throw up all kinds of memories, sweet and sorrowful, for her. But hopefully we can still have a cheerful celebration of her 59 years of life.

I am grateful for the not quite 30 years I have known my mum. I think mothers and daughters can have pretty fraught relationships so I’m glad that ours has survived the difficult times. Particularly the tantruming teenage years, and the tantruming early twenties too, (though I think my toddler years sound like they were probably the worst!). All the laundry and the cooking and the driving. I left home at 21 unable to do much more in the kitchen than open a packet of mint slices. Unable to think what to do with my dirty clothes I called my mum and she did my laundry for a year! And she still had a husband and two teenage sons to wash clothes for at home! She is a very kind lady. Now that I have learnt to cook, and to reach even heights of greatness in my own kitchen sometimes, many of my favourite recipes to cook are the ones my mum made for us at home and I have copied them out of various cookbooks of hers and pasted them into my special recipe scrapbook. Though my mother no longer does my laundry I still don’t know how to switch the iron on. I hope I never do.

Most of all, I’m glad that my mum, afraid of going to hell herself and thinking she was a lost cause, took the trouble to send all three of us along to a Christian youth group, so that we might be saved. This had the added bonus of bringing my mum back to God too through the Ladies Bible Study of the mother in the playground who told her about youth group. My mum loves Jesus a lot, and has read and then delivered in monologue form to me more Christian books than I care to recall. But what a great legacy she is having. Her three children are all Christian, one, sad as it is for us, already safely on the other side. Two are married to Christian spouses and she has a little Christian granddaughter and another to come very soon. And my dad, her husband, is a Christian too. Thank God for my mum.

This week mum pulled out a cute homemade card to show us that she had found sorting out junk. It read: “Happy Birthday Mrs 46!” and then on the inside, “Thanks for waking me up every morning!” And on the back, “47 next year!” A seven year old 'J' wrote that to his mum. And I as I wrote my own card tonight I said how sorry I was that 'J' was not here to celebrate it with her as I’m sure he would have had something funny to say. Happy Birthday Mrs 59!

Friday, May 21, 2010

Beautiful in Death – Part 2

Death is horrible. There is nothing attractive about death. It is agony to be cut off from someone you love. It must be terrifying to die.* It certainly is terrifying to watch.

The actual week of ‘J’’s death is horrendous to recall. I often flashback to it and wish I had said something more profound to him or gotten to hold him. I know he appreciated us all being there and hearing our voices and ‘D’ even got him to play a geography game with a map on the wall where he would glance or grunt to indicate a place where mum and dad had been on their world travels. A game we were all expert at, as we had heard the stories many times. ‘J’ throughout his suffering with cancer, was never sorry for himself or complaining, but always kind, patient, often hilarious and prayerfully battling to stay alive. That in itself is an incredible testament to his beautiful and gentle character.

I went to a Christian Womens’ Conference recently (EQUIP) where they showed footage of a little girl being airlifted out of Haiti, several days after the official search for survivors had ended. One rescue team that was still carrying on the now deemed ‘hopeless search’ discovered her still alive. I found it almost unbearable to watch. Her glazed expression, so close to dieing, the mask, the tubes, the emaciated body. I just saw ‘J’. The camera zoomed in and you could see the sad, sad no longer much alert eyes, the young girl resigned to her fate. She knew she was going to die. But yet, she lived.

Though I saw all those physical aspects of death encroaching on ‘J’, as he lay in St Vincent’s in his last week of life, I did not see that defeat in his eyes. His eyes were burning with determination to live. Even after a stroke. Even when pathology called the hospital on the last day to find out where the blood they had collected from ‘J’ at 11am that morning had come from?
‘That blood does not support human life,’ they told the doctors.
‘Where did you get it from?’
There were no white blood cells, no red blood cells, no platelets, nothing useful.
‘J’ lived by the grace of God for 14 hours on that blood.

‘L’ and I have a running date at the moment with mum and dad once a week where we usually visit ‘J’’s grave, go for a swim, or now that the weather is cooling, have lunch at a local fish restaurant afterward. I have mostly found it painfully sad to visit my little brother’s grave, and many has been the occasion when I have tilted my hat down over my eyes so ‘L’ and mum and dad do not see my tears. But every time is different. And I go to support mum and dad and because that seems like the right thing to do.

Last week, for a change, I felt good. And I felt like we were celebrating ‘J’ by visiting him, rather than only mourning his loss. ‘L’ collected frangipanis with my Dad, as is the family custom. Only the soft white ones with a yellow centre, no brown bits. Sometimes Dad has other bunches of flowers he takes too. On this particular occasion ‘L’ collected some sharp sticks and leaves that she thought Uncle ‘J’ would particularly like. She held her grandmother’s hand and sang Colin Buchanan’s, ‘Super Saviour’** very loudly along the way:
‘Look! Look! Here comes Jesus! Up! Up! Out of the grave!’

When we got there we placed our flowers where we liked. ‘L’ made a ‘stick garden’ and then proceeded to sit in a corner of ‘J’’s grave, scattering sand and mixing furiously. (Apparently she was making a chocolate sand pie. ‘But don’t worry,’ she said, ‘there’s lots of chocolate in it, so it’s going to be very tasty!’)

I know that ‘J’ would not be offended that she is using his grave as a bit of a sandpit in spots. He loved little ‘L’ and would probably find it funny. We do restrain her and try to confine her to the edges, but I personally think there is something quite healthy and helpful in not being too solemn at his gravesite.

I really do believe that Jesus is going to raise ‘J’ out of this grave! I think it’s fantastic that 'L' has connected (of her own accord) Colin’s song with visiting her uncle’s grave.

In this lightness of mood, Mum has a chuckle about the messiness of the grave, strewn with a motley collection of different flowers, and looking a bit ramshackle. The last time they visited someone had written “ ‘J’ rules forever” in the sand. (A school friend. ‘D’ rubbed that out.) At Christmas time there was tinsel draped round the cross.
“There’s a certain family quality to it,” mum mused.
“Unpretentious?” I offered.
“What are you talking about?” said Dad. Completely oblivious to how much the grave really does say about our family style which is: Recycled, rough-hewn but definitely full of love.

There is a homemade white stake that Dad has painted with ‘J’’s name and DOB and DOD in blue. It is temporary of course. We are waiting for the ground to settle before erecting something more permanent, but for now it happens to be a very authentic memorial to a much loved, much missed member of our family.

People might think it is quite strange or morbid to visit his grave so often. But is it? How do you celebrate a life? At a 21st? At a wedding? At a 40th birthday party? ‘J’ didn’t make it to any of these. He had a funeral. At nineteen. And as much as it makes my heart ache to see a wedding car - whizz by with all the fun and excitement of that special moment in someone’s life bubbling out the windows, effervescent with hope and happiness - and think instead of 'J'’s hearse car - that was the big celebration of his life. That was what we got to do for him. And we don’t make him sound better than he was. He really was beautiful in life. And so he is beautiful in death. As we go and remember him, tell funny stories about him, have gallows humour and hope 'L' doesn’t tread on too many flowers or make too many deep holes in the grave.

* I know my brother told my mum he was not afraid of dieing, because he knew he was going to be with Jesus, but he was really sad to be leaving us.
** ‘L’ is currently having a love affair with the Colin Buchanan “The Good News Parcel Company” DVD given away at lots of churches for free during the Sydney Anglican CONNECT09 initiative.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Beautiful in Death – Part 1

My brother ‘J’ was a beautiful person. Beautiful in life. And beautiful in death.

I’ve been thinking about how my family is still celebrating ‘J’’s life by making his death beautiful: Finding a way to honour him - even when it is beyond us to make sense of the tragedy of his passing. I think our family has done a pretty good job of giving everyone permission to grieve: feel sad, cry, talk. (And that is a beautiful, precious and important thing to do. Especially when a lot of the time it seems like we’re supposed to ‘suck it up’, ‘move on’ and ‘get on with life’ no matter what the tragedy, at a rapid rate.) They’ve also been good at regularly taking the time to go to his gravesite and place flowers, do some gardening and think about him.

In talking about him and especially in visiting his grave, we are rubbing up against the realness of his death in a very solid way: there is a coffin down there containing his body, and sandy soil on top and a mess of flowers strewn over that, and above, a stone cross. The physical reality of his no longer being here is so strong at the gravesite. And it hurts. But it’s also helpful. It’s helpful in learning to live with his absence. Going to the grave helps us face up to our loss: He is gone. And that is horribly sad. We can’t have any more conversations with him. (That is something I will always miss.) Now we can only have conversations about him. But we need each other to do that.

Even though these conversations can be sad and painful, I am so glad we are not avoiding having them. Contrary to the way western culture in general tries to minimize death and suffering by largely ignoring it, I don’t think it would spare us any pain to try and ‘move on’ quickly from the tragedy of ‘J’’s passing. I think this could lock you out of healing, leaving you isolated in your own private grief. (Not that I have entirely escaped that feeling either. Though I am connected in a corporate experience of losing ‘J’ - as part of a family - there are definitely times when it has been just me and God. Or me holding onto my warm sleeping toddler in her narrow single bed, crying quietly into all that soft wavy hair, and hoping not to wake her. And I guess that’s a personality thing, of wanting to grieve privately, and I’m sure I’m far from alone in needing to feel pain privately at times. But I wouldn’t want that to be the only experience of grief. As well as my family, everyone who knew ‘J’ and friends who know me are all people I can have helpful conversations with.)

More than that though, to avoid the conversations about ‘J’ now that he’s gone, in order to minimise pain, is to waste the short but spectacular life he had, and rob it of its power to point to Jesus. I can say with more confidence than any other family member who has gone before me that ‘J’ is with Christ now. I can say this because he was my own brother and I knew him especially well. As my other brother ‘D’ said in the hospital corridors in those tense last few days of ‘J’’s life,
‘This must be a very special time for him.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said,
‘He could be about to go to heaven.’
And later, ‘This is the first one through to the keeper.’
And I’m sure he was right.

I am grateful to both my parents for being so open in their feelings, even if at times I have felt helpless, stranded between hanging on to my own emotions and not being overwhelmed by theirs. A lot of the time I have simply stood there, longing to be able to be a better comforter, listening to them or giving them a hug and feeling so sorry that the very thing that needed doing I could not do. I could not, can not, bring him back.

Though we grieve imperfectly, it feels much better to share it (at least some of the time) and to try and help each other through it. Together we are learning how to live with ‘J’’s absence, until we meet him again in heaven and will get to serve Jesus together, all our family I pray, perfectly this time. Something to look forward to!

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

A Wedding Car and a Funeral

Coming back from church on a sunny Sunday recently I saw three ribboned wedding cars drive up the main drag of Sydney’s most Italian suburb, bouquets dangling out the windows and a blaze of horn tooting being reciprocated by all the passing cars. I felt instantly happy and remembered my own wedding day sitting in a beautiful vintage car, the same shiny coffee colour as my wedding dress, and Dad asking the driver to take a longer route to the church down via our home beach so we could look at the waves before the ceremony. And then I cried remembering my Dad give the same instruction to the driver of the funeral car carrying my brother’s coffin on the day of his funeral. Oh ‘J’, we miss you! It is amazing how many every day moments blindside you back to your grief. A constant reminder that he is gone, and we're still here.

Monday, May 17, 2010

The Terror of Comfy Clothes

A couple of weeks ago Maggie Alderson (who writes a regular column in the Good Weekend supplement of the SMH) wrote a piece about the ‘unbearableness’ of wearing clothes. Though I don’t read her column every week, I believe she had a pretty long period of illness and was finding it hard to get back into civilian clothes. She wrote, “When you stop pushing yourself into them daily, clothes become unbearable.” And later, “Now I understand why toddlers take everything off at the first possible opportunity. Clothes are terrible.” (GW, April 24, 2010)

I quite agree! As a byproduct from being extremely scrupulous about hygiene during ‘J’’s long illness, I have a ritual of washing hands (and feet, if we’ve been wearing sandals or thongs) with my 2 ½ year old daughter whenever we come home from being out. We also change our clothes. Especially if we are home after a morning out and it is the middle of the day. This is my favourite clothes change. Oh the pleasure of taking off our ‘out and about clothes’ and slipping into comfy PJs! (Today it’s cotton flannel for ‘L’, stretchy viscose for ever expanding and pregnant me.) This is something that my husband ‘A’ cannot understand and as a consequence remains in what I would call ‘good clothes’ all day long. I do feel sorry for him not being able to experience the pleasure of this ritual but he prefers to be able to leave the house at a moment’s notice and not discover he’s wearing pyjamas when he does. I frankly bask in the glory of this ritual. And now that ‘L’ doesn’t have a daytime sleep, just putting on this comfy ‘at home’ outfit is enough of a luxury to induce a state of relaxation for me.

Whilst ‘L’s PJs mostly match and have a good number of buttons on them, my own outfits are strictly for family eyes only. I have, however, recently been caught out in my own private relaxing outfit by my sister in law ‘F’ who arrived at our house for dinner ten minutes early. I made a joke about being seconds away from slipping into something a lot cooler (or just normal would have been fine). I did have a black leopard print singlet and plain black pants in my hand as I answered the front door! And even though I waved them in front of her, nothing could distract her from the glaring garish colour swirl of my amazingly comfy outfit. I tried making a joke of it by reminding her that a love of ‘dag fashion’ is something of a family tradition. My brother ‘D’ looked up and smiled, which was kind of him, considering he was wearing a very nice creamy Tommy Hilfiger cable knit at the time, and looked a lot closer to being in Chuck Bass’* family at that moment than mine. Poor stylish ‘F’ couldn’t help it and exclaimed, “That outfit is truly terrible!”

She was so right. I was wearing a very old and very comfortable thai dye t-shirt, (you know the fabulous softness that only comes from a t-shirt that has survived a thousand washes in the machine? Such a stayer!) with ¾ length pink and white gingham pants. The obvious clash of styles here aside, the t-shirt is probably the main problem with this outfit: Yellow, crimson, green and grey all congealing together. I know from the ladies at my mum’s church that I am a ‘winter’** (black, pink etc) so not a good look for me, or to be fair, anyone not holidaying in Bali in the 70s. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and what must have looked like a rainbow had vomited on me to ‘F’, is like a technicolour explosion of blissed out relaxation to my eyes.

“This is my most relaxing outfit!” I wanted to shout proudly. But instead quickly slipped into my bedroom and changed.

I rescued this offending item from the throw out pile of my mother in law’s partner ‘R’ (a man who loves t-shirts so much he has different categories for them depending on how many times they have been washed and the staying power of the cotton.)*** I can tell you he was on to a winner here. I have loved it ever since and find its gross unfashionableness inversely proportional to its comfort.

I guess I too have categories for t-shirts. There’s extremely private, and extremely relaxing thai dye. This is not a t-shirt I would consider taking the bin out in anymore. Though an old Linkin Park t-shirt, (rescued from ‘A’’s throw outs) would be fine. It is black after all. Then there’s all the other ones that I can wear just about anywhere I like but would certainly not be a contender for my favourite part of the day: relaxing hour.

This whole experience has been such an eye opener. ‘F’ is so much more stylish than I could ever hope to be. I thought this recently as I marveled at her relaxed elegance wearing a black floaty kaftan down to the beach. At the same time I wondered fleetingly if I would still be able to fit into my XL pink Mambo ‘Skate or Die!’ t-shirt for the final month of my pregnancy? Lucy’s response to this t-shirt is: “Oh wow mummy, you look beautiful!’ Which, though I’m sure I am to her, is probably pretty far off the mark from what everyone else is thinking. But it doesn’t matter. Clothes are terrible. And I love some awful ones. But clothes set an important tone. I would feel more stylish in ‘F’’s kaftan but it wouldn’t be right on me. I’d feel frankly uncomfortable and overdressed for my home beach, where like the privacy of my own house during toddler rest time, I want to feel comfortable and myself. Nothing does that for me quite like: Skate or Die! Or thai die and gingham! When I’m slobbing it, I would warn you that some outfits may be disturbing, but are oh so comfortable for me, should I be brave enough to answer the door in them.

* One of the many well-dressed young men in the teen TV series, Gossip Girl.
** This is a method of dressing where your colouring (hair, eyes, skin, etc) are matched to a season, and then you try and stick to the palette of the season that suits you.
*** Incidentally my daughter ‘L’ categorises her t-shirts as well. The most comfy are ‘my good-sleeved shirts’, which are $5 Aldi t-shirts with ‘eco chick’ written on them. And I must say, are made from some pretty good quality cotton. A daughter after my own heart.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Five Months Ago

Five months ago my baby brother, ‘J’, was taken from us. He was 19 years old. When he was 17 and at the start of his HSC year he was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). At the end of a harrowing nine months of aggressive chemotherapy he was in remission. White haired, puffy and looking like a ghost, he made it to my other baby brother, ‘D’ ’s, wedding to stand up the front with him, two beautiful men in suits, and watch ‘D’ ’s beautiful bride, ‘F’, walk down the aisle. I've never cried seeing a groomsman walk down the aisle, but I'm sure I was not alone in crying that day and praying that we would all get to go to ‘J’ ’s wedding one day soon too. It was not to be.

‘J’ relapsed just before Christmas 2008. My brother ‘D’ took a video file of ‘J’ on that Christmas day. (We’re glad he did as there aren’t many video files of ‘J’.) ‘D’ has managed to capture a quiet and sweet and profoundly sad moment. In the background you can hear a clarinet being played by a young cousin. My then 1 ½ year old daughter, ‘L’ is walking the way only toddlers who’ve just found their legs do, precariously, and from side to side. Fat and happy and dribbly, she’s busy pulling round baubles off the Christmas tree to give to her uncle ‘J’ who smiles at her with big wide-eyes when she places the treasure in his hands. Then she swivels round and goes back for more. It’s sweet to watch and makes your heart ache. As the little girl walks back to the tree, the camera stays on ‘J’ ’s face. (I wonder if he knew the camera was on him in that moment?) Then his face falls, you notice the dark circles under his eyes. As my Dad put it when we sat in ‘J’ ’s bedroom watching the video on his laptop, crying: “He looks like he’s in the spotlight of a night-shooter.” How terrifying it must have been to have already tasted the awful battle that was ahead of him. He looks about as far as you can get from a carefree Christmas day. But when his niece returns with another bauble, he smiles again at her and accepts her gift.

It is a very difficult video to watch. He looks so very sad. And he tried so very hard, but he did not win this time. After a bone marrow transplant in May 2009 with a Matched Unrelated Donor (MUD) he suffered terribly with Graft Versus Host Disease (GVHD). After going on a trial to try and cure the GVHD later that year, ‘J’ ’s graft from the bone marrow transplant was grown over, lost, and the cancer resurged with a vengeance. On the 30th November 2009 he died. But he died in Christ and he has not been abandoned to the grave. (1 Thess 4:13-18, Psalm 16) Though we miss him horribly now, we will see him again. And thinking of him reminds me to do everything I can to not miss out on that heavenly inheritance. I want to see my brother again!

It has taken me a long time to know what to do with the stories and thoughts and feelings I have had in the time since I lost my darling brother. For the moment, I have decided to write some of them down and to share them with other people. This blog will not only be about ‘J’ though. I couldn’t help but include the silly and the trivial too: playing as they do, a rather starring role in my full-time-mum life*. I promise every post won't be harrowing. But I wanted a place where I could write about ‘J’ too and remember him.

*I once read the term ‘work-at-home-mum’ in an article in Sunday Life, and though I don’t feel brave enough to use it, it has stuck with me. It seems far more accurate than describing oneself as a 'full-time-mum' or worse, ‘stay-at-home-mum’– the latter phrase in particular conjuring up images of sitting on the couch all day watching Oprah and eating Tim Tams. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that! It just sadly doesn’t reflect my life.)

If our family is well I am not a stay-at-home-mum. I take my daughter, ‘L’ out every day. We go to the park, the shops, to bible study, to playgroup. We swim at the beach, we visit Grandparents and friends. When we are at home we vacuum, hang out laundry and occasionally wash the windows! (Much to the annoyance of ‘L’. But being 36 weeks pregnant a clean house is the luxury I crave right now. Not Oprah or Tim Tams. It’s a personal choice.) We also read stories, have chats, and cuddles, and pray together. We play playdough, duplo, dollies, doctors and patients. Draw with crayons, paint (only sometimes, it’s very messy!) make scones, and pack everything away again at the end of the day. So you see I really am a ‘work-at-home-mum’! It is great work, and a great privilege to have this time with my small but incredibly noisy daughter, and on the good and even the bad days I wouldn’t swap it for anything else!