I visited Mum several times in the days leading up to her funeral. I accompanied my nephews and my father to the viewing room to make sure everything had been done right; that the wedding ring had been placed on the third finger of her left hand and the handwritten notes and her glasses and lipstick were in her handbag which nestled beside her in the coffin.
As I checked the grandchildren’s notes I slipped my fingers into the silken pocket inside her handbag and found, sunk and hidden at the bottom, a thick gold chain and engraved locket that once belonged to my great-grandmother. I drew it out. My mother did not like sharing. Even though she found jewellery cumbersome and irritating she didn’t want anyone else to have it. Maybe it was growing up as the oldest of eight siblings during the Second World War. When she died she would have taken everything with her if she could. I held the chain up and the locket swung and spun and I felt a fleeting, incongruous moment of triumph. ‘You nearly got away with that one,’ I said and I fastened the chain around my neck.
Later, as I went through her jewellery box, I again felt that reversal of power; I was here and she was not. Her things had been out of bounds when she was alive but now they were not. As children we had longed to sit at her dressing table and try on her beads and gold chains and rub scent on our wrists.
Now all these treasures were ours. There was no one’s permission to ask.
I examined her dressing table, half-expecting to hear: ‘Stop rooting! I’ve got eyes in the back of my head, you know!’ I discovered the perfume was congealed and most of the jewellery was broken. I got her pearls restrung but I never wore them. I saw on the television that you can tell real pearls by rubbing them against your teeth. If you feel tiny bumps they are real, if not they are fake. I went to the jewellery box and took out the pearls and tested them. My mother’s pearls were fake.
I was reminded of when we were children and the biggest bedroom was out of bounds because the roof leaked. It was full of stacks of material, wool and haberdashery, with the odd bucket to catch the drips. When Mum went shopping we sneaked into this room to root among the treasures. We discovered a doll still in her packaging behind moulded plastic; staring eyes, solid hair, her own little kitchen sink behind the plastic too. How we longed to play with this doll but we could not mention it without admitting we’d been where we shouldn’t. Over the years as we visited the doll the plastic packaging got grubbier and more opaque as her staring eyes disappeared behind the dirt. Then one day Mum brought the doll out but by this time we were too old for it. When we took it from its plastic we discovered the doll was so cheap she didn’t even bend at the hips. We threw both her and her kitchen sink in the bin.
My mother had particular hands – hands I would recognize anywhere, with flat almond-shaped nails always cut short. Several days after her death her fingers had gone a creamy pale blue but they were still recognizably, uniquely hers. I touched them and they were deathly cold. It took me a visit or two to realize that the chill was caused by her body being refrigerated in between because, in fact, death is room temperature.
I photographed her hands.
Weeks later I was flicking through the photographs on my camera and unwittingly came face to face with the close-up of my mother’s mottled hands. I was shaken and a bit embarrassed. What would people say if they knew I was keeping a picture of my mother’s dead hands?
I studied the photo and noticed the exact shape of her fingernails, the way her wedding ring had worn a smooth groove in the flesh of her finger before she’d cut the ring off, and I noticed the knobs of arthritis in her thumb joints as her hands rested against the blue silk pattern on her dress.
Then I deleted the photograph.
Death is a thousand tiny losses and each loss is a thousand tiny details.
Why was it important to get everything right for my mother as she lay in her coffin? It was guilt, I think – guilt that I couldn’t do anything else for her, guilt that I couldn’t bring her back, guilt that I had not been able to stop her dying in the first place. My mother had an enormous ability to make me feel guilty even when I had no idea what I should feel guilty about.
Years later I discovered that items placed in a coffin have a name: grave goods. Apparently people tuck all sorts around the dead: jewellery, photographs, sealed letters, rosary beads, spectacles, hats, mints, walking sticks, cigarettes, football strips, teddy bears, comfortable shoes and money.
For whose benefit are grave goods? Maybe mourners believe the item will help the dead on the journey to the afterlife – the walking stick, money, glasses and shoes. Or perhaps some items are considered part of the deceased’s identity, things that they should never be parted from – in particular the glasses. Or do grave goods in the coffin give the living a sense of comfort?
I think so.
In fitting my mother up with a bag and glasses and notes and her fanciest dress I took comfort from having done the best I could.
We arranged to bury Mum in the local village churchyard, a row further on from her own mother and father. We explained this to the undertaker at a meeting in Dad’s kitchen. The undertaker took notes on a clipboard and my father said, ‘Dig it deep and leave enough room for me,’ and Tricia, speaking up for the first time since the meeting began, said, ‘Dig it even deeper and leave enough room for me too.’
Every wall, every gateway and every tree on the lane leading to the farmhouse held a memory of Tricia. On my right was the wooden fence we leaned on to watch the mating ducks when she was five or six. ‘What they doing?’ she asked. ‘Makin’ friends,’ I said. On my left was the verge where our neighbour parked his flatbed truck – our stage for the plays I wrote, heavily influenced by Enid Blyton, in which I cast Tricia and Janet-from-next-door, mainly as dolls or fairies. (Play: A Lot of Rice for Tea; Characters: Rag Doll, Dancer Doll, Fairy Doll, Dolly Doll and six ‘Chinease’ Dolls.)
Me and Tricia in front of the wall we used as a stage and a catwalk
Past the verge was the head-high yard wall we balanced along for ‘playin’ bally’, never having had a ballet lesson. We took turns wearing a dog-eared 1950s evening dress donated to the dressing-up box by Great-Aunty Margaret and we ‘did twizzers’– arms outstretched and on tiptoes – until we legged ourselves up. At right angles was the stone garden wall we used as a stage to play ‘Miss World’, during which we draped ourselves in stuff from Mum’s ragbag. Elizabeth was compère and held a spoon or a drumstick for a microphone – ‘And in national dress, please welcome Miss Guam’ – as I set off down the wall wearing a 1940s tea-dress tied round with a tablecloth. ‘Next up, in her evening frock, it’s Miss Ceylon,’ and Tricia tottered down the wall wearing her vest, with a 1920s shawl around her waist and bits of broken chain-belt in her hair. On one occasion we used the wall as a catwalk for a fashion show with dresses we made from old cow-feed sacks, with holes cut for heads and arms and tied up with bale twine. The sacks made a ‘mini’ for Elizabeth, a ‘midi’ for me and a ‘maxi’ for Tricia, and left us covered in hundreds of tiny insect bites. We sampled the cow food-pellets – finding them salty and gloopy when chewed – but tried to forget about that fifteen years later when mad cow disease was all over the papers.
The day after Tricia died I was drawn back down the lane from Dad’s to the farmhouse, by a sense of disbelief, I think – a sense heightened by the many surrounding memories. The mortuary was closed for the weekend so I had not yet visited her body and I needed evidence it had happened; to see Tricia’s world without her in it, to check she was really gone.
Tricia beside the knicker bush, dressed as ‘Miss Ceylon’
Inside, the house smelled of stale tobacco – a smell that hit me then like a