A month or two before Mum passed away, she had a final, useless bout of cobalt treatment to try to zap her cancer. James, Alison and I piled into her hospital room and found her sitting up in her bed looking for all the world like a plucked chicken. She was still beautiful to me. By then we were used to her shorn, battered, emaciated appearance and soon we were rubbing her head and making chicken noises at her, and she laughed and laughed.
My father, who was absent through most of my mother’s illness, was not used to seeing her like this and one day when he turned up at the hospital out of the blue it was too much for him. He buried his head in the bedclothes and wept. ‘I can’t stand seeing you like this,’ he wailed. My heart went out to him. James’s did not. He turned on Dad in a rage. ‘Look at you, you weak bastard! You’re responsible for Mum being sick in the first place. Now piss off out of here before I kick you out!’
The last time I saw Mum was a Tuesday afternoon after school in early February, 1982. James didn’t allow me to see her in her last days. One of my aunts – not the one who broke the news of my mother’s illness to me when I was eleven and told me that she was going to die – said that whenever she visited Mum in hospital, she’d be lying asleep with a smile on her face. I think she was saying that for my benefit, because apart from the plucked chicken day, Mum didn’t do much smiling. She died a horrible, painful death.
Over the years that she was on the downhill slide, I tried to put her plight out of my mind – refused to accept that she was dying – and was more concerned with living day to day, running riot in Woolloomooloo, rather than being with Mum in the time she had left.
My mother had hung on for so long, much longer than her doctor’s prognosis when she was diagnosed. Then, I think, after fighting cancer for over five years and realising she just didn’t have the strength to fight any longer, she said to herself, ‘You know what, I can’t do this anymore. I’ve reached full circle. It’s time for me to go,’ and she simply gave up and slipped away.
Of course I’d known that Mum was crook. For many years she’d been a tiny wraith of a woman, always sick, always tired. When I was a kid I had trouble remembering how she’d been before that. Fortunately today, when I think of Mum I don’t conjure up an image of a dying woman. I remember the happy, beautiful, sunny-faced Mum who hugged me and took me on outings and read me stories and kept a stiff upper lip even when she was copping hell from my father. The Mum who sang ‘Red Roses For A Blue Lady’.
The day she died, 12 February, was a blazing hot school day. When we were let out in the afternoon, a group of us ’Loo boys were hanging out and we decided to go into George Street in the city where there were video game arcades and multiplex cinemas, and with them the chance to meet girls or get into a rumble. I was running up William Street to catch the bus into town when I tripped and fell and twisted my ankle. I hobbled to one of my aunts’ homes, she lived nearby, and she sat me on her lounge and put ice on my ankle. While I was sitting there the phone rang and a chill ran through my body.
I knew this was bad news about Mum. Then my aunt confirmed it. My mother had passed away. I cried my heart out and fell asleep on the lounge.
Next morning I didn’t go to school. I went to Bondi Beach and lay on the sand and felt Mum’s presence flowing all around me, as warm and comforting as the summer sun.
That period between my mother’s death and her funeral and cremation was hard to bear. I could not help but picture her lying cold and alone and still on a morgue slab.
Mum’s funeral was on 16 February, my birthday, and I’ve not had a happy birthday since.
Sacred Heart was packed. There was Mum’s immediate family and her extended family, a weird and disparate assortment of people, many of whom I’d never laid eyes on. Many seemed to be limping, on crutches or otherwise incapacitated. Mum’s friends from Camperdown and Woolloomooloo and her many workplaces turned up to pay their respects. Dad sat alone at the very rear of the church, sobbing uncontrollably. About what? Mum? His shame? The happy life he had thrown away? He didn’t approach James, Alison or me, nor did we approach him. My whole school came to the funeral, and I felt embarrassed and a little self-conscious that they had. Next day at school, no one referred to it. I acted tough. In the ’Loo you play your cards close to your heart.
As if the day was not tragic and traumatic enough, when my godmother was dressing to come to Sacred Heart, her six-month-old son fell into the gap between his bed and the wall and suffocated.
After Mum’s funeral and cremation, I felt relief, for her and for me and James and Alison, that her long battle with cancer was finally over. Just knowing she was out of pain made her death easier to bear. I remember thinking, That’s a terrible stage of my life that’s over. Now it’s time to take on the game of life. I was ready for the jungle. I threw myself into my sport and my study. I partied like there was no tomorrow and was pretty much out of control. I often slept at mates’ homes or in the park. I was not going to die wondering what life was about.
I felt it was a sign that he believed I was growing up when James confided in me that we might be out on the street very soon. The Housing Commission was saying they would not let us stay in the house if we couldn’t pay the rent that Mum’s pension had covered. They wanted to evict us, have Alison and me put in some kind of official care, and let the house to someone else. To this day I despise government departments for their callous attitude to us after Mum died.
Florence Dack’s life didn’t amount to anything in terms of financial or social status, but she was one helluva mum.
My sole consolation when Mum died was that she knew how much I loved her, and how much James and Alison loved her. And we knew she loved us. My mother has been dead now for twenty-seven years and there is not a day when she has not inspired me and been as close as my heart.
The way I treat my loved ones today and will treat them as long as I live is the way she treated me. She taught me how to love. My memories of Mum are inviolable and give me what strength I have. I could not have succeeded in rugby league and boxing, in the law, in life itself, without her example and without her love. She still warms me like the summer sun.