I walked into the house to find Mum standing alone in the kitchen crying. She’d received the call earlier that day that her mother had died. Twelve years had passed since they’d last seen each other, exchanging emotional goodbyes before she and Dad boarded the ship leaving Greece, dreaming of a more prosperous life in Melbourne. The house in which she now stood, in Lower Templestowe, was the brick-veneer embodiment of that dream.
We had moved there two years earlier from North Fitzroy. Our new home was a new build and Dad would catch the bus every few days to check in on the construction. Over the years that followed, my father would regularly be reminded what the old house in now-gentrified North Fitzroy would be worth – “Shame you didn’t hang onto it, Tom” – but he had no regrets because he loved living in leafy Lower Templestowe.
Mum seemed to have had little agency in her life. She was an eager student but didn’t go to secondary school because her parents weren’t comfortable with her travelling on the bus for four kilometres from the village to the town. At 21, she had a son who died aged eight months, apparently from the “evil eye”. She wasn’t allowed to know where the child was buried and was discouraged from talking about him. Somehow, she was expected to get over the sadness and to think of the future.
Two years later, she was pregnant with me when they boarded the ship Patris in Piraeus, arriving in Melbourne in November 1963. Two more children followed in the next five years. I knew as a family we weren’t well-off, but it didn’t matter because I felt loved and secure.
The modern comfort of our new home felt less like the realisation of a dream and more a symbol of alienation that day I saw Mum crying in the kitchen. Three decades later, the sense of what she had missed out on hit hard when I visited her village with my own family.
It was late April and a massive St George’s Day celebration was in full swing a few doors down from where we were staying. A pig, which my young children had fed a few days earlier, was rotating on the spit. And there was plate smashing – yes, it does actually happen! Seated at the centre of one of the long tables was the proud matriarch of the family, watching her children, grandchildren and other relations party. She told me she had been at primary school with my mother and asked how she was. I couldn’t help but wonder how much Mum would have loved to be in her position.
Approaching her 80s, Mum had lots of medical problems that Dad dutifully attended to. He had his health issues too, but was physically more robust than she. His sudden death irrevocably altered her life as well as my own.
Without Dad’s 24-hour care, it was impossible for my mother to stay in her home. She didn’t want to go into a nursing home – I don’t imagine many people do – but there was no choice. Making a difficult situation even harder was the fact that, as with most elderly Greeks, she expected to end her days living with one of her children, and wasn’t happy with her new living arrangements.
It was a shock but not a surprise when, a year after entering aged-care, a nurse at the home matter-of-factly referred to “your mother’s dementia”. There’s no doubt it had been there a while but had been masked by Dad’s diligence in looking after her.
I’ve always felt guilt about my mother’s life, not out of a sense of personal responsibility for the hardships she’d endured, but because there was never a chance that her potential could flourish. After Dad died she would often talk about her son in Greece 60 years earlier, proof – not that it’s needed – that trauma, unacknowledged and untreated, doesn’t simply vanish over time.
When she stopped eating last month, it didn’t register that Mum might be entering her final days. There’d been a few times in the past couple of years when her health took a sudden dive to the extent I was warned this could be the end, but she’d always bounce back. Things were different this time. I was told there was no way back and that I should start making “preparations”.
The thought that, after all she had endured, my mother could simply slip away alone in a room a long way from home was unbearable, and I felt an overwhelming sense of duty to be with her until the end. For two days she lay there, eyes shut and breathing steadily. Staff would come in every couple of hours to shift the position of her body and administer a morphine shot.
Late on the third morning, Mum suddenly made a sound and drew in a large breath. Her eyes opened, she looked straight at me, and then she died. The fog of a lifetime’s worth of sadness lifted. I couldn’t have been more grateful for this one precious gift of a moment, for I knew that she knew I was there, and that she didn’t die alone.
Jim Pavlidis is an artist and former Age visual journalist.
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