Really?You want more?

I didn’t see Mum’s body after she stopped living in it. In hindsight, I regret this a little but she’d died very early in the morning and I was in shock. ”That’s when most people do it,” a former nurse had warned me, and the shock largely came from Mum deciding now was the time to finally follow the crowd. 

 

I couldn’t see her later that day as, naturally, she already had better places to be. She’d donated her body to science which meant Mum had finally gotten into Melbourne Uni. It had always been such a funny premise, Mum donating her body to science. My standard line was, “It’s great because we have a LOT of questions,” but after she died someone told me the remains are often cut up and moved to different areas of the medical department for years on end – and it got a lot less funny. Now when I pass the university on a tram I imagine doing a scavenger hunt to put her back together. 

 

Scavenging is certainly a word I associate with the grief I’ve felt in the seven or so months since Mum ‘got into higher learning’. In the wild, scavengers are grifters who consume dead creatures already killed by other predators. But there was no predator that took Mum out, she proudly did the bulk of the work herself, a reckless (brave?) gazelle giddily throwing itself into the lion’s mouth and laughing all the way, a lit cigarette in its jaws. And while I’ve been scavenging ever since, I’m not a natural at it. I keep searching for her and coming up empty. 

 

“You’ll find yourself talking to her,” a good friend told me. Her mother has been dead as long as I’ve known her, over thirteen years, and they seem closer than ever. She says she even hears her mum laughing whenever life proves all the annoying things she said were actually right. My friend doesn’t always take the laughter well. In fact, they still fight.

 

Mum and I don’t do that. To be honest, in the last few years we were speaking less and less in general, so why would I take her calls now? That said, only a few weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and finally embrace the tired trope of calling her voicemail to hear her voice. But instead of the chillingly hilarious sound of my mother trying to appear easy going and friendly - “Hi, you’ve reached Heather Flanders…” - there was an automated voice telling me the person I was trying to call was unavailable. 

 

“No shit,” I thought.

 

I’m glad I have a half hour interview with her on file – a strange bit of admin I felt compelled to do in her final weeks, selfishly wringing out every last drop of the good material she always gave. And she delivered, as always. I’d asked her to confirm her favourite things and, while I was right about a lot of them, she stumped me with her favourite film. Hopefully the University can explain the exact type of brain deformity that makes ‘Once Were Warriors’ a film you could just watch over and over again.

 

I haven’t been able to listen to it yet.

 

For now there’s just silence – a silence that began in those final days when she was unconscious, blissed out on morphine as we all sat around her, applying hand creams and making terrible smalltalk. It was terrible not just for existential reasons, but for very practical ones – we were using muscles we’d never had to flex before. If Mum was in the room you were lucky to get a word in. You were her audience and your job was solely to laugh, be appalled, take the bait or, ultimately, to agree with whatever contrarian view she’d decided to take for that second and that second only. Those days were the first time in my life I’d been in a room with my mother and not heard her voice. 

 

Not that she couldn’t handle silence. In fact, there was nothing she loved more than quietly reading in bed for hours on end. A close friend visited Mum in hospital and later remarked how normal it felt because whenever she pictured Mum she imagined her alone in bed. As a child I had a friend visit and Mum refused to get out of bed to meet their mother. Instead, she insisted the woman, who she’d never met before, join her in the bed and watch TV together. They were still laughing two hours later. We had to make them cups of tea.

 

These are the stories I find myself scavenging for. Evidence of who this person really was. I’m afraid I’ll forget all her contradictions and she’ll blur into some stock character. I’m scavenging for reminders, I guess, which is a ridiculous thing to be doing because I couldn’t forget her anymore than I could forget to breathe. But that urge to piece her together, psychologically as well as literally at the University, is ever present. 

 

“Who’d want to be remembered?” she said in her last few days when we were asking why she didn’t want a funeral. It was the type of performative and perverse take one can only have when they’re secure in their icon status. One time I did an interview for a show –  all about my fears of Mum dying, nothing has been at all like I imagined – and the interviewer revealed she’d met Mum in hospital when she was about to give birth, to me of all people. She’d never forgotten her. In fact, they even had a joke in their family that the babies had been switched seeing as her son went into finance and I’m an artist like both his parents. Only Mum could be a running joke in a household she’d never been in. I asked if they saw each other again and the interviewer said they tried but it didn’t work out. I imagine the problem was Mum had now moved on to her latest and most loyal audience, me, and no longer needed anyone else.

 

Because as much as I think I’m the scavenger, in reality she’s the one who’s consumed me my whole life. What no one seems to talk about with this whole ‘dead mum’ caper is how much your brain has to change. I didn’t realise every train of thought passed through Mum Station. But it makes sense that the person who teaches you the iron is hot, what a joke is, how you can love someone but not like them right now, has built the lens by which you see the world. And while that lens is clearly warped - “big men can have little ducks but little men are all dick” is, objectively, an odd thing to tell a seven year-old - it’s all you have. It takes an unimaginable amount of time to slowly craft your own way of seeing the world, to reroute every single train.

 

The grief business is never ending. It’s tiresome and singular all at the same time. Tiresome because it’s so deeply cliched and singular because that’s what relationships are. I wish I was one of those people that still heard her voice, one of those people that forgot any cross word we ever had, but I am not. I’m still angry at her for some things – maybe I should break into the University and shake a bunch of jars – but mostly I’m angry that she’s not here to be angry with. I love her but I don’t like her right now. 

 

The fact that the story has an ending is the simplest and most earth-shattering thing I’ve ever known.

 

I’d asked her before she died what animal she’d come back as – what the ‘sign’ would be. You know, people have certain totems, usually butterflies or birds, something that flies and inspires wonder.

 

 “I don’t know… a bitch,” she said, between drags.

 

“So, just any female dog?”

 

“No, a wild female dog… stealing a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. That’ll be me.”

 

Wild dogs, unlike me, are fantastic scavengers. They can hunt down anything. But even I don’t know how likely this will be. It’s very Mum to set up an impossible expectation, one last way to keep me wanting more. But that irrepressible addict didn’t raise a quitter. It’s picnic season and I can make this happen. It’ll take a lot of planning – is it still ‘Mum’ if I rub the bottle with dog food first? – but it’s the least I can do. 

 

I’d rather think of her as a disturbed, alcoholic hellhound than some flotsam and jetsam on a shelf. At the very least, it keeps the story alive.