About my mother – Carolyn Alexander

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER  

My mother must have been 24 when she married. I know this because the date is inscribed in her wedding ring, which later became mine. She was barely 30 when her husband, her four-year-old son, her baby daughter, father and brother were killed in a head-on accident near Barham, on a straight stretch of road on a fine afternoon. My mother was holding the baby girl. It was the 1950s in the days of bench seats in cars and no seatbelts. They were returning from an Anzac Day picnic. Her father was driving when they hit a drunk driver coming the other way. My mother woke up in hospital and asked where her family were. The nurse said they were all dead.

I think of that scene sometimes. The nervous nurse. My sedated mother. Coming out of her shock and with barely a scratch. Her mother had also been in the accident and was in another part of the country hospital, quietly fighting for life with half the top of her head missing.

Months later, my mother and grandmother finally out of hospital, they holed up at home. Friends and neighbours delivered food. They couldn’t face seeing anyone else. Eventually the town GP came to visit and insisted that my grandmother go back to playing golf, and that my mother go back to work. She’d given up working in the bank when she got married. My mother said she never forgot the first time they walked down the street. Everyone that saw them stopped to stare.

Years went by and my mother eventually met my father. He was a farmer, a kind and empathetic man who said he didn’t mind when my mother said she couldn’t face having children again. He understood. He was happy to have her. But a few years later my sister came along, and then me. Every Anzac Day, on the anniversary, my mother would take to her bed and wouldn’t come out. My father shooed us away and said she had a migraine, but my sister and I knew it was the day of mourning and didn’t complain. We had known the story of the accident for as long as we could remember. A framed portrait of the curly haired boy, a cherub named Andrew, hung on my parent’s bedroom wall. There were no photos to frame of the baby girl, Merrilee. I tried not to think of my mother’s sadness. Without the death of these children, my sister and I would not have lived.

Years later my mother died from cancer, after a life long with laughter and friendship and sadness and regret, a divorce from my father, hard years on the farm and then illness that scared her and made her weak and thin. I was in her country town, visiting the graves of the people I’d never known but felt like I had, going through council records and microfiche at the library, reading about the accident, trying to bring closure. I was taking a while on the microfiche, and could see an old man waiting to use it. I apologised and said I wouldn’t be long. He asked what I was doing and I told him a little. He probed further and then revealed that he had been best friends with my mother’s brother, the nine-year-old who had died in the accident. He had been in scouts with John.

This man had been at the funeral, a service for all five, held in a local church. He was with all the other scouts, dressed in uniform. It was the biggest funeral the town had ever seen. Over 1000 attended, spilling outside the church. There were 350 floral tributes. More than 200 cars followed the five coffins to the cemetery. John’s teachers and headmaster carried his coffin. The old man remembered the day of the accident, when every ambulance in town had gone screaming down the main street and he knew something terrible had happened. He said John was very smart and an excellent swimmer. I realised it was the first I knew anything about him. He still had a bracelet that John won in a swimming competition. He said he would post it to me. Six weeks later the package arrived. There was the bracelet worn by my uncle, my mother’s brother. I held onto it like a sacred item.

It’s been almost 12 years since my mother died and I think about her every day. I always remember her smiling. Despite everything that happened in her life, she always smiled. I remember that about her most of all.

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