Mum passed peacefully in the early hours of March 10, three days after her 86th birthday.
Emma, Jason and Telishea arrived late on the evening of the 8th. Mum squeezed Emma’s hand as she came to her bedside but did not wake. It was her parting gesture.
Mum was born at the height of the Great Depression in the seaside town of Sorrento, about an hour’s drive from Melbourne. She was the second of four sisters but had an older brother who died tragically, in a motor cycle accident, shortly before his 21st birthday.
She kept a photo of him close at hand throughout her life.
At age eight, she contracted polio and wore calipers until she was 13.
At age 18, and armed with a strong artistic talent, mum moved to Melbourne where she worked as a commercial signwriter, before meeting and marrying my father in 1958.
Together they raised four children and in the early years mum hand-knittted all our jumpers and hand-made nearly all of our clothes.
She struggled for many years to find a sense of place and meaning following the breakdown of her first marriage, before she met and married her second husband, Keith, in 1980.
When youngest sibling Emma had grown and moved to Adelaide, mum was once again free to indulge her creative side.
For the next 20 years she painted and sewed, ran patchwork and quilt making classes and was a gifted maker of bears and porcelain dolls.
She ran a craft shop in Nagambie for many years and while she never made alot of money from her art, you can be sure every piece she made was made with love.
Death is a tragedy when a person is taken before their time, when a young person’s life is cut short by illness or injury. But when you have lived a full life, when you have struggled through adversity and celebrated life’s sweetest moments, I can see no cause for grieving.
My parents taught me lessons of resolve and compassion. They showed me that though life is a struggle, we are defined by our actions, that our character is defined, for better or worse, by the choices we make.
Jason and Telishea are devestated that they have lost their gran and I tell them to try and remember her smile, to remember all the the things she did that made them happy and to always remember the lessons she taught them about being a good person and doing good things in your life.
I think the message sticks.
I will miss you mum, but I have no regrets. I take only good memories of the love you gave and the impact you had on all those around you.
May you forever rest in peace.
Over the course of the next week we make preparations for mum’s funeral. Graeme and I each write eulogies, Emma chooses and rehearses a poem she will read, we select the songs to be played and the six of us pore through boxes and boxes of photos, many of us in our early years, many from the time of mum’s youth and many which I haven’t seen before from an even earlier time, of my great aunts and uncles and great grandparents.
It is a cathartic yet memorable time for all of us.
Jason and Telishea, especially, enjoy being part of the preparations and spending time with their extended family.
Emma was adopted by my parents and joined our family at the age of seven months. This is an especially difficult time for her as she has now lost her final connection to the two people who have supported her most throughout her life.
I’m able to make a appointment to see the sinus specialist in the days leading up to the funeral. His practice is in the nearby township of Kilmore.
Not much has changed in this town of my youth. There has been some development at the outer fringes but the main street is still home to the historic old building’s established in the early days of the Victorian gold rush.
The specialist is a gruff old bugger who I like immediately. After some preliminary medical discussion he asks what I do for a living. When I tell him I own a pub in Melbourne and a guesthouse in Lombok, Indonesia he snorts and says, “Sounds horrible!”
He tells me I have three problems. A deviated septum, a sinus infection and a polyp which has formed on the left side of the septum. The only way to address these issues is by surgery.
I am confident there will be no messing around when this guy takes to the scalpel.
He says he can fit me in next month but then realises he won’t be working over Easter, so it will have to be May.
I have no intention of being in Australia that long and tell him if that is the case, it will have to wait until my next trip to Australia. He tells me my condition isn’t going to get any worse and it’s up to me whether it gets treated now or later.
Mum’s funeral is attended by about 60 people and is live streamed for those who are unable to attend. It is a fitting tribute to a woman who lived a full life and was loved for her honesty, her humility and her compassion.
After the funeral, Emma and the kids prepare to return to Adelaide and I am preparing to give Graeme and Kiyoe some space.
Tom has invited me to stay with him for as long as I need. He and Shannon are still talking through their separation and still living apart. He has a spare bedroom in the unit he is renting and he is more than happy to have some company.
I realise it has been over five years since we have spent any amount of extended time together and that my youngest son is now every bit a grown man.
We spend the best part of the next month filling each other in on our life stories, where we’re at and where we’re hoping to get to and the challenges we are facing trying to get there.
Tom’s most pressing concern, apart from his relationship worries, is a pain in his chest, which he’s had for a couple of days and which seems to be getting worse. He thinks it is muscular and has booked an appointment with his GP to get some advice and some painkillers.
Having already met my sinus specialist, I now need to organise a colonoscopy and an appointment with the heart specialist.
I’m able to make a time for my colonoscopy next week and will see the heart surgeon the week after.
I will need to fast ahead of the colonoscopy and have enlisted Tom as my support person to get me to my appointment and to pick me up after the procedure.
The time between appointments also means I will have some time to catch up with Josh, Deidre, and a couple of old friends, as well as spend a bit of time catching up with people at my pub.
I will actually be going there for lunch tomorrow to catch up with Penny and our landlords.
Dewi has called with some exciting news. The two properties next to the guesthouse have come up for sale. One is a large house in very good condition on about 500 square metres of land. The other is a boarding house on a similar sized block. It is a bit rundown, as was our guesthouse when we first spotted it but it has alot of potential and would offer us the potential of another 11 rooms to let out.
Dewi thinks we could live in the house and split our current house into a series of poolside villas. The boarding house, once updated, would effectively double the number of rooms we have for rent.
The three properties could also be linked via a pathway so that guests in the new property could access the guesthouse pool and cafe.
Its a big plan but one that would certainly work in our favour when international tourism resumes.
The problem of course is finance. We’d be looking for about US$200,000 for both properties but would struggle to find an Indonesian bank to help us as we have no borrowing history. Interest rates are also around 10%, very high by international standards.
I tell Dewi I will speak to my accountant and see if there is anything way I can organise some finance here.
I will also need to pitch the idea to Penny as any finance would need to use our house as collateral.
I speak to Penny at our pub the next day and she’s open to the idea. I know she will become more nervous as we move further through the process but for now I have a green light to talk to our accountant, Rajesh.
Penny and I are waiting for our landlords to arrive when I receive a phone call from Tom. He asks if I’m going to be much longer. I tell him we are waiting for our landlords and it will likely be a couple of hours before I return.
But I quickly realise he is distressed and in a world of pain with his chest. Penny and I call our landlords and cancel our meeting then race across town to meet him. We then drive him to the Royal Melbourne Hospital in the city where he can be seen by experts.
The Emergency Department is full, as always and we wait for around an hour before he can be seen. Penny accompanies him while I wait outside. He eventually returns with a diagnosis of pleurisy. His condition improves over the following days though the fact that he now knows what he is dealing with relieves alot of his immediate worry.
Rajesh appears a little sceptical about my finance request and wonders if it won’t leave me a little stretched. I tell him it is a great opportunity to build on our current business and I will kick myself in years to come if I don’t act on the opportunity now. He agrees to speak to our finance broker, ahead of getting our financial year accounts up to date.
I call Dewi and tell her I’m hopeful I will have an answer in a couple of weeks.