Passing Through

THE SON

Mum, mum.

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

What love? Are you alright?

THE SON

Yes, sorry I was just…

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

Just what love.

THE SON

Nothing I……………

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

I am so tired babe.

THE SON

I know you get some rest.

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes.

THE SON

Yes you do that! I am here, I am here.

How the roles reverse, I am now the protector, the safe haven, the one cleaning her and making her comfortable.

Its soul destroying watching someone you love,

Someone you adore, just drain away in front of your very eyes.

Technicolor fading to grey.

THE SON

The sense of humour is still there, it’s just not as sharp as it used to be. Like the time she decided it would be funny to put a statue, the Madonna,  that had been passed down through the generations and gave me the willies, in my bed when I was staying over. So late at night when I pulled back the sheets, it was there to freak me out.

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

You always said you wanted to go to bed with Madonna.

THE SON

That cocky sense of humour developed from a pre-internet age, before TV, when people had to talk to one another instead of BBM, tweeting and texting.

The docks of Liverpool were her playground.

She’d venture to the American Ships that had just come in and say,

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

Got any gum chum?

THE SON

Have you got any sisters?

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

Yes, our Joan!

THE SON

I thought she’d gone on Easter Sunday. The medication had changed and it sent her into another place, hallucinating, all kinds.

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

Look at all the ants on these sheets, see?

THE SON

They are clean on sweetheart.

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

Ha look at all those!

THE SON

All what love?

THE ELDERLY WOMAN 

Mushrooms flying.

THE SON

There’s nothing there love.

THE ELDERLY WOMAN 

There bleeding well is!.... and the rice.

THE SON

It was a trippy day; she kept making the blanket into a bundle and rocking, singing a lullaby. She claimed that the dead dog was on the bed too, oh and my Grandmothers Parrot with Tourette’s, Captain. I said, it’s a bleeding good job we got the hospital bed in the living room when we did, otherwise there’d be no room at the inn.

The next day the liquid anti biotic started to kick in and she spoke about that day, fleetingly but certain.

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

I was walking in a field and my dad was holding my hand, a beautiful green field, filled with sunflowers and it was so, so hot, the sun shone. I was walking and I felt so tired, my dad stopped looked me directly in the eye and said, don’t sit down Princess, because if you sit down, you won’t be able to get back up.

THE SON

Easter Sunday! Wasn’t that when Jesus was re-surrected?

Sitting here watching her sleep, deadly hours, I find myself drifting through the past, it’s like a roulette wheel, the table stops spinning and I am immediately in the moment. The reality! I remember I started to keep a little notebook of malapropisms that she’d come out with. Before she was ill, she was renowned for her comic mix ups.

I always wondered whether she knew what she was doing.  Clever witch!

I am not religious, but I often thought what would happen if in years people found it and would give it some spiritual significance,

like The Book of Genesis,

THE BOOK OF NAN,

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

That Princess Diana would have been alright you know?  if that Pavarotti had not chased her through the tunnel.

THE SON

I mean if a fat Italian Opera singer was to chase my car, I think I’d crash too.

Then there was that advertising campaign for chewing gum, she asked me to pick her some gum up,

You know the one she said, from the telly, Mastication for the Nation, was the strapline, only she got her words mixed up.

Then there was my friend, who every time he came over for tea she’d say,

I bought you some of those cakes you like, you know them Vietnamese whirls.

She also had some madcap philosophy, the one that echoes in my mind still.

THE ELDERLY WOMAN

What you lose on the swings, you make up for on the roundabout.

THE SON

That’s what she’d say, that’s what she’d say.

I never had a bloody clue what it meant.

Blue bird tin,

filled with black and white pictures, distant faces from the past, family traits, random compositions, lost identities, distilled into the fabric of time. Party’s celebrations, funeral invoices, extreme milestones.

All this packing up of the house in stages,

 like a correspondence course in bereavement.

Week two – take the deceased’s clothing to a charity shop.

But it’s hard to part with because her smell is still on some of the clothing, you know, it’s just her, her perfume, her scent.

And this home that has been marinated with generations of family memories is suddenly being deconstructed. Becoming less and less a home, just bricks and mortar, just a house.

Her bedroom looks lonely, the only sign that sturdy pine furniture had ever been there, is the rigid marks ground into the carpet.

The morning before the funeral, relations like emotional tearful dominoes, if one starts the other does.

Another process, another system, waiting outside the crematorium.

 CASHIER NUMBER 2 PLEASE.

The service over ran, so we had to stand outside bearing the coffin, the music playing on an antiquated tape reading device, it was modern once.

Roses being placed on the coffin, before it went to be cremated ashes into the universe.

At one point I wondered who are these strangers, who happen to have acquired a rose to show their respects?

Did they visit her? Did they spend time with her?

Comfort her when she needed care?

I wondered how people can show such a depth of sheer hypocrisy. How can you justify this sacred act of symbolism? But people have the capacity to be able to run with the drama, jump on the emotional band wagon, that takes them back to the after show party, the buffet, and the free bar. Even alcohol cannot serve to act as medication.

It doesn’t even touch the sides.

Its a few days later that it really strikes and nothing can take away the pain.

Random objects have filtered into the inventory of my house.

Songs that remind me of her appear frequently on the radio, as if in direct frequency to my feelings.

The bench I bought her before I went away on a Nile cruise at the top of my drive, out of place, at first, but comforting.

I guess we just pass through don’t we,

pass through.

Like I said,

I guess we just pass through.