32 years ago and I still remember exactly what I did that day. It was a Thursday. There was a Lion Cup rugby final between Northern Transvaal and Natal at Loftus coming in and I attended a meeting about it. (Ntvl won) Nic wanted to go to gym after work so I half-heartedly joined up. (I've never been a gym bunny). We got back to our house and the answering machine was blinking constantly. I held my breath.
Answering machines used to blink for the amount of calls that were recorded and then paused, only to blink again. As my mind went into slow motion mode seeing the red lights blink so often, I knew this wasn't a cheerful blink. My focus immediately went to mum who had been recuperating at home after a heart attack scare. As my shaking hand reached out to listen to the first message, I heard my brother in law's voice, who never called, so I knew something was really amiss.
'Call home' was the instruction. Funny that mum's house was still called home, even though all us children had our own homes. I pressed the buttons on the big phone by memory (different times) and my eldest sister answered. My logic brain immediately thought that is was strange for her to be there at this supper time of day. My reasoning brain trying to keep everything as it should be in an attempt to keep me safe.
She breathed heavily and said tearfully
'Mum died this morning...'
The phone receiver slid from my grip as a strange noise escaped from my mouth, my legs buckled and Nic somehow managed to catch both me and the dangling telephone mouthpiece. I shuffled to the couch, while I heard him speak quickly with my sister.
'We'll be there now...'
My big dog, Sammy, came over to me rather confused. She rested her head in my lap as if she knew I needed comfort. I took it, yet my brain raced trying to decipher what this meant. How could it be? I just talked to her last night. Why did I not find out earlier, why didn't they call me at work? As if knowing earlier would have prevented something. Why did I go to gym? What does this mean? She can't be gone? I should have known. In nursing, I told that after a mild heart attack, there's always danger of a second lethal one, I should have said something to the doctors. I should have warned them. Crazy, impossible thoughts trying to decipher and change this awful news.
I sat frozen on the couch, while Nic rallied round. Feeding the dogs, packing a bag, making some calls. I replayed the last week and the events of my somewhat ordinary day over and over in my head. Trying to find a loophole, trying impossibly to change the outcome.
It was winter and my mum lived an hour's drive away. I sat in the car looking out at the rapidly fading sunlight, willing it to stop moving, to slow down. In fact I wanted to rewind the day altogether and fix it. Salty tears blurred the bleak yellow veld and dirty smoky sky. Nic tried to console, by this time I was on the grief autopilot. My first ever encounter with the beast. I thought about my brother and sister, who had to sit through a long distance flight on the plane and felt for them.
Everyone was at mum's house. At this stage it was still mum's house. The clumsiness of forced name changes hadn't yet kicked in as we talked of her in present tense. Dad was a wreck, the rubble of which he took years to recover from. Everyone fluttered about trying to find a space both literally and figuratively in the small house. The winter chill clung harder to us all, now shivering with shock too. Food arrived from neighbours, who I'd never spoken to. None of us felt like eating, but the warm comfort of soup helped take off the edge plus it gave us something to do.
Christmas beds on the floor had us all squeeze together, useful in the cold, but irritating in reason. We all avoided the big empty bed that mum had died in. Nic realised that we needed to neutralise the room, so he volunteered to sleep in it. I think were all relieved that it became useful, instead of the gaping hole of a shrine. Very little sleep happened as if somehow sleep would cement the truth of the situation. I wanted to remain in the day that mum still lived. She'd seen the sunrise and I wasn't ready to leave her behind.
I lay and thought about everything and I realised that I was fortunate in a way. I had mum alive for longer in my energy than all the others. I found out last. I had an extra 8 hours of her being alive. The gift of this was only truly appreciated now, 32 years later. At the time I was angry that I hadn't found out, or been called at work. Now I'm grateful for the extension and the exclusion provided by cable telephones.
Sometimes the smart phone is too immediate. The pause between knowledge can be a gift. The heavy clock of grief ticks over without pause, and now it's 32 years.
A lifetime.
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