Scene from a Hospital Room

I wasn't sure what this piece was “about” until it was finished. This scene, partly drawn from life, attempts to tackle the disconnect about what we expect from death and the reality of how we experience it.

I wanted to get to the hospital before the others. I had nothing much to say to my mother, I had thought about playing her George Jones or reading a passage from her St James bible but when I came in, she was asleep.

I said, Hi Mum, it’s David. Then I took my seat beside her. I apologised for being such a pain in the arse. And said that maybe it was better this way – her being asleep, so that I could tell her that.

The body of our mother was almost unrecognisable. A large woman throughout life, she was now gaunt. The gauntness of her face unearthing plains I had never seen. Bones beneath skin, she was like a carving that had been worn down into something else; something brittle and calcified. Beautiful in its own way, but a reminder nonetheless:

A reminder of that point in life when you can no longer look after yourself. When you are at the mercy of the seeds you’ve sown; the community you live in; the healthcare it provides; the bonds you have built with those who come after you.

Her weight loss had shocked me; it still gave me pause. I’d recognised her increased frailty in the ever-increasing flatness of her behind when I would wash her. It was there in the deepening of her collarbones, in the increased time it took to find a pinch of fat each morning, when I gave her injections. Each time, this reduction, felt like a reveal. The end of a game of pass the parcel, skin shedding.

Though I don't go in for religious beliefs like the afterlife, fate, or coincidence, it strikes me that I was there for her passing, the moment she left. She was not alone. Somewhere between me sitting there and my brother entering with his family, she took her last breath.

The word mum is the existential cry of abandonment; it reduces us to children. And when my brother cried out, with a mixture of frustration and fear, I felt for a moment, as though all the adults had left us.

His first reaction was anger, then regret. There was a lot of talk then too, about the exact moment she died, as suddenly the exact moment was very important. If I’d known the last time we came down, if only I’d known… but he had called, he had visited often. He had done his part; it was just something to say, I thought and wondered how much of it was grief, or the ritual performance of it. Not because it felt insincere, but because I felt none of these things. I was glad that I arrived when I did. Glad that I’d witnessed, without knowing it, my mother’s last breaths. I believe, despite my lack of faith, that she was waiting for me - in some abstract way, to come to the hospital, before she left.

I don’t know if my mother liked me, but I know she loved me. I was hardened against her pain, though sympathetic to her situation. My mother didn’t want to die. She would have lived much longer if her body had allowed. But she had readily accepted her smoking habit. She lived for people; that was her saving grace.

Her tongue was startling, pink.

My nephew jumped up to hug my brother. Then his wife joined them. And then she hugged me for a long time and said sorry. They are a tactile family, not like ours. I found it strange, how some people know what to do in these situations.

I went to get some air. Standing in the carpark, my shoes muddy, I looked down at the bypass and watched the evening traffic, red tail lights fading west. I thought about what I was going to do with my life and I thanked my mother.

When I came back the rest of the family were there. I thought my sister would cry but she had shed her tears. She was her typical self and the event took on the odd atmosphere of most family gatherings. A birthday, Christmas. Anticlimactic, familiar. It happened; it was done. Everyone stuck to their roles. My brother told a story we had heard a thousand times; my sister allegorized. I think that’s when we first knew that mum was serious, she said. Yeh, my brother agreed in the same tone of summation, yeh she always did what she said she would.

Then my dad chimed in with a story of me. Me at 9 years old, changing all the clocks in the house so that my mum would miss “her programs.” I couldn’t remember this - any of it, and was hit by the plain fact that my dad loves me.

As my brother was telling his story, sat on the hospital bed beside my mother’s body, I’d thought about how when we go, we are just the stories we leave; our fading impressions.

“The word ‘mum’ is the existential cry of abandonment; it reduces us to children. And when my brother cried out, with a mixture of frustration and fear, I felt for a moment, as though all the adults had left us.”

The story he told was this:

When they were younger, my mother would get him and my sister ready for school. My sister was older, self-sufficient, but my brother would often forget to clean his teeth. My mother warned him that the next time he left without brushing his teeth, she would come down to the school and “do it for him.” My brother promised, but my mother, unsatisfied, devised a scheme. That night she went downstairs and found his toothbrush. Then squeezing a thick swipe of toothpaste onto it, she left it on the bathroom sink, waiting. The next day she waved him off to school and returned to the bathroom. The toothbrush was exactly as she’d left it; unused, untouched - its bristles still coated by the same thick swipe of toothpaste.

True to her word, she drove down to the school.

Marching into my brother’s classroom, she declared: “Excuse me, my son hasn’t brushed his teeth this morning. And I’m here to make sure he does it.” As the class burst into laughter, she dragged my older brother from his seat and clipped him around the ear for good measure before taking him down to the school toilets, where she produced from her handbag the offending toothbrush, a tube of Colgate and watched, arms folded, as he cleaned his teeth.

At this point in the story, my brother recalls, something about the way he was crying, the force of his tears, slowly shifted my mother’s demeanour. He was in fact telling the truth; he had brushed his teeth that morning. But in his own words, the damage was done.

At this point, my sister’s shoulders trembled with held back laughter as she waited for the punchline. I hadn’t noticed how quietly she had been sitting there on the hospital room floor, hiding her face in her arms as my brother spoke. It was her – up until then the silent participant in the story, who’d overheard my mother’s stern warnings. It was her, who had gone back that morning, to squeeze toothpaste back onto his toothbrush, long after he had gone to school.  

Yes, I had heard the story a hundred times. But still, I had to laugh.