The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide

Author:Debra Adelaide
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781741984262
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia

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There are times when, despite all the arguments and the swelling resentment, despite years of cold silences, you desperately want your mother. I had so wanted Jean when I was giving birth but I bit down on that desire and refused to let it burst through.

And when my son was dying I was also crying, from the loss of my mother after that final fight when she told me Van was worthless, that I was wasting my time going north for him, that I should have had that abortion, and that I would be ruining my life. I told her then how I hated her and her plans and her perfectly successful life, and slammed her front door so hard I heard the ornaments rattle behind me.

After I had sent the first peace offering of news about Sonny’s birth, we’d contacted each other irregularly, and I’d assumed Jean only remembered him at birthdays and Christmas out of obligation. But when I phoned from Sonny’s bedside to tell her about the accident, as the machines murmured and the nursing staff pattered in and out, the first sound of her voice scorched my throat, making me unable to say anything more than just, Oh Mum, Mum, and crying through the words, because I understood then just how much she loved me, how, no matter what, she could never stop loving me. How the pain of your child suffering felt like a rock had lodged in your chest. That was her, when I left. And it was me now, watching Sonny.

The next morning, Jean appeared like a magician’s dove at the hospital. And after we cried more and said sorry then told each other there was no need to say sorry, she began to do the things she was so good at. She took care of the practicalities, like my clothes, my hair and the coffin. His casket, which would be plain, functional and distressingly small, but necessary.

And so we were standing in the yard of Vittaro and Sons, which abutted the southernmost edge of the circus. Jean had taken me there knowing what I didn’t yet realise, that I would want to choose Sonny’s coffin myself. I was sedated by the diazepam a doctor pressed upon me, numbed by the shock and gagged by the magnitude of what I had just allowed to be done to my only child. I was a zombie, a non being. A liminal thing inhabiting a twilight zone between living and non-living. Jean’s remedy was action. Confrontation. Besides, a small coffin needed to be custom made with some urgency.

Vittaro’s place was fronted by a low cyclone wire fence and a sagging gate that looked permanently held open by clusters of weeds. The shed was low and shabby, but there was a cheerful garden of geraniums out the front and a line of banana palms down the side. Apart from the small sign, there wasn’t a hint that Vittaro and Sons were in the death industry. The noise of an electric drill drew us around the back.

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