Blossom in the Dust

By Anna Birch

"I vowed then that I would never let the bastards win."

The young girl could see no escape from the terror she experienced at the hands of those who she should have been most able to trust. But when opportunities to make changes presented themselves, she grabbed hold of them with both hands. Courage, perseverance and determinat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debborah Olsen
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780994255686

Book preview

2015: The End

Saturday

Go see Mum, go see Mum, go see Mum, my intuition had screamed since the bottom of the hill.

The traffic lights at the top of her street went red. I was slowing to a stop in the kerbside lane and it would be easy to turn left into her street, but I was running late for American Sniper. Anyone who knows me would not be surprised; lateness is my worst trait.

The lights changed. My foot came off the clutch, the other depressed the accelerator.

After one last nanosecond of argument with myself, I sailed through the intersection. Nah, she’ll be right. I’ll see her tomorrow.

Sunday

The house phone rang. I sat in my pyjamas in my cheery, buttercup-yellow study watching my dogs play in the back yard, wishing I was anywhere other than at the computer organising my tax. I tossed up whether to answer it, figuring it was a telemarketer pushing holidays or wanting money for some real or contrived charity.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Anna?’

‘Yeah. Hi Judy.’

‘Anna, I’m with your mother. The ambulance is here. We found her on the floor in the bathroom this morning.’

Without missing a beat, I asked, ‘Is she conscious?’

‘Well, her eyes are open and she made a gurgling noise when I spoke to her. She has blood coming out of her mouth.’

‘OK, can you ring me back when the ambos know which hospital, they’re taking her to?’

I expected it would be the John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle but thought perhaps it could be the local Maitland Hospital. That would mean it wasn’t as serious as, really, I knew it was.

As I waited for the phone to ring again, it struck me how unemotional I was. I wasn’t worried or scared or even sad. I felt nothing. All that was running through my head was that I needed to contact my brother and my sons to let them know what was happening.

The phone rang. Judy said that Mum was being taken to the John Hunter.

‘Judy, what happened?’

‘I spent Christmas and the new year with my son, and only came home last night. This morning Georgina came and said she hadn’t seen Dell for a couple of days …’

Mum lived in a small one-bedroom Housing Commission unit. Georgina and Judy were Mum’s neighbours and, as Judy was Mum’s carer, she had a key to her unit.

‘We found Dell on the floor. I don’t know how long she’s been here – maybe a couple of days. Anna, I need to tell you: the ambulance men have left an awful mess here.’

I showered and had something to eat. I know this sounds callous but I wanted to allow time for the ambulance to get to the hospital and for Mum to be reviewed by medical staff.

My Limp Bizkit ringtone broke into my thoughts …

‘Hello … it’s Nurse Baxter at the Emergency Department at the John Hunter Hospital. I’m not sure if you’re aware that your mother has been brought in to us this morning. She’s very unwell.’

‘Yes, I did know and I’m about to leave home to come down.’ I went to hang up the phone.

‘Hold on, the doctor wants to talk with you.’

‘Hello, Anna. I’m the doctor looking after your mother. When did you last see her?’

‘Oh, a couple of weeks ago.’

‘And she was OK then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Can I ask you about her medical history?’

‘She has high blood pressure, Paget’s disease, osteoarthritis, and she’s almost blind due to macular degeneration … and she’s had a couple of TIAs. That’s about it. Why?’

‘We’re having trouble stabilising her.’

I hung up and then rang my sons and my brother Kym who lives in Townsville. I told my brother I would contact him again when I knew more. My youngest son, Jack, is in a band and was on his way to Wollongong for a gig that night. He was already a few hours from home so couldn’t come to the hospital. My eldest son Max would meet me at the hospital.

I gathered my bag and locked the house. It was starting to warm up: a stinker of a day. I patted my dogs, Sasha and Bane, who enticed me with their happy slobber and wagging tails to take them to the river for a swim. I was almost tempted.

At the end of the long dirt driveway, I turned right and headed to the freeway. From there it was a forty-five-minute trip to the John Hunter Hospital. Driving in quiet contemplation, I wondered what I would find when I reached the hospital.

When I arrived, I inched my way along the dark crowded rows of the multilevel car park, willing a spot to be available. I’m not lucky at much but I’m damn lucky at car parks, and found one two spots away from the stairs leading up to the footpath. As I walked towards the hospital entrance, the Westpac Rescue helicopter was setting down on the helipad on top of the car park. The retrieval team braced themselves against the rotors’ down draft, waiting on the edge of the helipad for the blades to stop before rushing in. When I worked at the John, I never got used to hearing the ominous sound of the helicopter bringing some poor soul into the hospital.

The hospital was, as always, a hive of activity with people, cars, taxis and buses coming and going. Four ambulances in various stages of dispatch stood in the six-space ambulance bay outside of the Emergency Department, the busiest trauma centre in the state.

The hospital, like all government departments, is a smoke-free zone. I presume this is difficult to police so I held my breath as I made my way across the road and through the noisome haze of smokers sitting at the bus stop and milling around on the footpath, thinking their fifteen or so metres’ distance from the hospital entrance was not a breach of the rules. As I approached, the automatic glass sliding doors opened into the belly of the hospital. From here, the six levels of wards, theatres, pathology, dialysis, other specialty areas, kitchen and cafeteria spread out like butterfly wings. I stepped inside.

I stopped, stilling myself. Taking a deep breath, I strode to the Emergency Department on the right, just inside the hospital entrance.

The ED waiting room was, as always, overflowing with patients. I waited in line with many others as if I was at a supermarket checkout with my pre-packaged ten-kilo bag of indifference. I told the receptionist my name and said that my mother had been brought in this morning. The clerk pointed to her left and said, ‘Go through those doors. There’s a family room down the corridor on your left. Wait there and someone will see you shortly.’

My suspicions were confirmed. I knew then that it was serious. The family room is usually kept for family and friends of critically ill patients.

The sparsely decorated room was windowless and a little stuffy. The hospital’s overworked air conditioner breathed tepid air into the bleak space. The pale walls were punctuated with two nondescript dark blue two- and three-seater lounges. I took my position on the three-seater lounge opposite the door, wanting to be obvious when the doctor came in – a ludicrous notion, since I was the only one in the room.

Max arrived a short time later. I told him what little I knew. We waited an hour before the doctor came to see us. He was tall and slim with dark wavy hair. His wise and intelligent eyes belied his youth; he hardly looked old enough to be out of high school.

‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting but we still can’t stabilise your mother. We don’t know what the problem is. When we do stabilise her, we’ll take her to have a head CT and other tests and hopefully get an idea about what’s causing her condition. I can’t tell you any more at this stage, I’m sorry.’ He turned on his heel, a solemn half nod in our direction as he left the room.

While Max and I waited we talked about Mum’s prognosis and the possibility that we may need to make decisions about her care: life and death decisions. I knew Mum would not want to live without her independence. She had been fiercely independent all of her life. She also would not want to live in a nursing home; it would be Hell for her. Max said he was happy with any decision I made. The door opened. Max and I looked up expectantly. A man entered and sat on the two-seater lounge, ostensibly unaware of us, engrossed in his phone.

Becoming impatient, I told Max I would check what was happening. The ED was huge and sterile – the floor pale grey, commercial-grade linoleum; the walls white; the white and pale grey nurses’ station centred in the room providing an unobstructed view of the patients.

The ED was busy; nurses and doctors chattered, machines pinged and the ubiquitous gluttonous laundry bags filled the walkways. Mum’s bed was being wheeled back into the resuscitation bay. I saw the doctor, who asked me to go back to the family room where he would come and talk with us shortly. I returned to Max.

The doctor arrived a short time later and asked the interloper to leave. Waiting until we were alone, he said, ‘We’ve been able to stabilise your mother enough for her to have a head CT but I’m still waiting for the results. We’ve taken some blood and inserted a urinary catheter. She also has medications on board to keep her comfortable. I have to let you know, though, that she’s critically ill and we may need to discuss what you want to do.’

I knew what he was leading to; his face said it all. It didn’t look as if he had had too many of these conversations, at least not yet. Sadly, with the passage of time, I reflected, he would undoubtedly become more comfortable. I hoped he would maintain his humanity.

‘Just comfort measures,’ I said.

‘I just want you to understand what that means.’

‘It’s OK. I know what it means. I’ve been a palliative care nurse for thirteen years.’

He relaxed. The deeply furrowed creases of his forehead diminished just a little. As he left the room, he said someone would fetch us soon. We waited.

Eventually a nurse came and took us to Mum’s bedside. Mum lay there with intravenous lines in her arms connected to medication pumps, and a vital signs monitor attached to her chest, arm and finger. The urinary catheter bag hung on the bedside. She was dwarfed by the machinery, and as I looked at her, I found it hard to reconcile the tiny, frail, passive eighty-five-year-old woman I saw lying on the bed with the mother she had been.

As I stood at her bedside, I thought I should hold her hand as I had done for so many others at the end of their lives. I didn’t know how I would. I hadn’t voluntarily touched my mother for close to forty years. I reached out, taking her hand, then four fingers, then three, then two, then one. I had to let go. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, not even now.

‘Max, will you hold her hand? She needs to know she isn’t alone.’

He held her hand and we stood there, side by side, embracing each other in silence, oblivious to the organised chaos around us. Her eyes were slightly open but she didn’t respond when I told her Max and I were there. I watched the vital signs monitor: her heart raced and her blood pressure was incredibly low. The effectiveness of the medications was short-lived, her vital signs fluctuating constantly.

The doctor returned. ‘Your mother has multiple issues. I’ve just looked at the scan results. She has a clot in the front part of her brain that’s so big we can actually see it on the film. This is very unusual as normally we can only see the damage that a clot has caused. I’ve spoken to the neurosurgeon and he said if your mother survives, she’ll have extensive deficits. We also found that your mother has cancer in the upper lobe of her left lung. Was this diagnosed?’

‘No.’

‘There are also signs that there’s been injury to the heart … and do you know if your mother was being treated for an infection?’

‘No. Why?’

‘She has elevated white blood cells and CRP – C-Reactive Protein – which indicates she is septic.’ I explained to Max that sepsis was a life-threatening condition. ‘We have a couple of options. We can keep the medications going for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours and see what happens. Or we can remove those medications and just keep her comfortable, allowing the natural course of events to unfold. Do you have any questions?’

I looked at Max, who shook his head.

‘Just comfort measures.’

The doctor sighed, his shoulders slumping softly. Blinking slowly, he nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘OK. Do you have any siblings?’

‘Yes, I have a brother.’

‘Would you like to ask what he thinks?’

‘I can, but I believe he’ll feel the same as me.’

Max and I went outside. Our eyes took a few moments to adjust to the glare of the mid-afternoon sun. The day’s heat and light were magnified by the wide concrete footpath and the trio of tarred roads of the ‘drop-off’ zone at the front of the hospital. People ambled about. Cars, buses and taxis arrived and left in a steady stream. We walked to the right along the one-way access road that circumnavigates the hospital before finding a private shaded area where we sat on some steps while I rang Kym. Putting the phone on speaker so Max was a part of the conversation, I explained to Kym what was happening and what the choices were.

‘Piss her off, just piss her off. She’s nothing but a fucking bitch!’

Max and I looked at each other, raising our eyebrows. I knew Kym’s thoughts would be similar to mine but his vehemence took us both by surprise.

Returning to the Emergency Department, I informed the doctor of our decision, leaving out my brother’s poetic language. He said they would remove the IV medications for Mum’s blood pressure and heart rate but keep the IV containing morphine and midazolam to keep her comfortable. He gave us the option of doing this in a few hours or straight away. I saw no reason to delay the inevitable. A nurse removed everything except for the catheter bag and one IV medication pump.

I realised that Mum had dirtied herself. I told the nurse and offered to help clean her. The nurse declined, saying she would get another nurse. I thought it absurd that I could not touch Mum’s hand but I could wipe and wash her filthy backside.

The staff prepared a private room near the family room where Max and I could spend time with Mum away from the hubbub of the ward. The room was small, the lighting subdued and the furnishing simple: a bed, an adjustable table and two chairs. I told Max that Mum could still hear even though she couldn’t respond. I explained that if he needed to sort out any unfinished business with her, then he should take this opportunity. He shrugged. I thought he would prefer to speak with Mum in private. So, a little while later, I made an excuse to leave the room, giving Max time and space in case he needed to talk with her.

Shortly after I returned, I put my hand on the sheet that covered Mum’s shoulders and, taking a deep breath, I said, ‘Mum I forgive you for everything you have done to me.’

She gave a loud, deep, halting sigh. Her breathing changed and, a few moments later, she died.

Mum had lain on the bathroom floor, naked, for perhaps two days. She had undiagnosed lung cancer, a heart attack, a massive stroke, and was septic. Any one of these could have been enough to kill her but she had waited. She had waited for my forgiveness.

I informed the nursing staff of Mum’s death and told them that she had donated her body to Newcastle University. I had not shed a tear.

Monday

I arrived at Mum’s place early. Placing the key in the lock, I tentatively opened the front door, half expecting Mum to be sitting in her flower-patterned electric recliner, wine glass in hand with the regulation water in the tall blue, gold-ringed glass sitting on the small nest table next to her chair. The silence in the unit struck me. It was devoid of Mum’s energetic residue. Mum had been a force to be reckoned with all of her life and I had thought that even after her death I would feel some remnant of her.

I walked through the lounge room, turned left into her bedroom and flicked the light on: nothing. I flicked it on and off a few more times: still nothing. I entered the combined toilet and laundry and saw that the floor was strewn with medical equipment wrappers. I cleaned up quickly, making the house ready for the deconstruction of Mum’s life.

Max and my friends Lizzy and Lucy met me at Mum’s place a short time later. Max was allocated the lounge room. Mum loved beautiful things, especially crystal. She had a vintage curved-glass timber-veneer china cabinet in which she kept her treasures: exquisitely cut crystal wine and champagne glassware and – my favourite – cocktail glasses with an opalescent bowl and gold stem. Her pride, though, was the Royal Albert ‘Sweet Violets’ crockery set. Mum had wanted her own Royal Albert set for years and when I was a teenager she had painstakingly saved from her pension for months before finally buying the standard set. Then little by little she had saved to add the sugar bowl, milk jug, the salt and pepper shakers, tea pot and serving dishes. She had been so proud of herself when she finally completed the set. We hardly ever used the Royal Albert and no-one other than Mum was ever allowed to wash or dry it for fear of breakage. I held my breath with ingrained apprehension as I watched Max wrap each piece in old newspapers, making sure he gave his charge the respect Mum would have demanded.

Lucy packed up the kitchen, paying special attention to anything with a lid, regardless of whether it was in the fridge, freezer or cupboard. Mum didn’t trust banks so we were all on the lookout for any cash that may have been stashed in some unremarkable receptacle.

Lizzy and I went into Mum’s bedroom to pack up her linen and clothes. Mum’s passion for beautiful things was not confined to delicate glassware and pretty crockery. She had always wanted the fine life but could only ever afford a few of its trappings. Whenever she could she bought the best, and her bedroom was testimony to her love of luxury. The bedroom curtains and bedspread – rose-patterned, thick and luxurious – gave the room a sense of opulence. On her large mirrored dressing table perched a diamond-cut glass tray, vase, ring holder and a crystal clock. Next to the crystal dressing table set, a vintage silver-plated mirror, brush and comb set took pride of place.

I am much more practical than Mum and didn’t like many of her possessions but I did covet the mirror, brush and comb set. I had played with it when I was a child, pretending I was Rapunzel waiting for my Prince Charming to rescue me from my tower. I had struggled to bring my wavy, strawberry-blond shoulder-length hair across to one shoulder, holding it with one hand and brushing in long sweeping motions with the other, imagining it to be floor length or longer. I played out the love scene that I hoped would take place when my Prince Charming finally appeared. Puckering my lips, I would jut my jaw forward, close my eyes and loll my head from side to side as Prince Charming embraced me for our thousandth first kiss. I had seen love scenes like this play out in black-and-white movies for years and often imagined myself as the heroine. The first embrace always seemed so special.

As I packed the multitude of Mum’s clothes, I noticed that sometimes when I lifted my arms up to fold something, the bedroom light flashed on and off. No-one had touched the switch and besides that, according to Judy, the globe had been blown for weeks. After this happened a few times, I mentioned it to my psychic friend Lizzy.

‘Well, Anna, what do you think that is?’

It dawned on me that it was Mum making her presence known. The light never came on again.

A few days later my cousin stayed for a few days on her way home to Queensland from the south coast of New South Wales. We took items to a local charity shop, packed up the last of the smaller items and started cleaning. When we were finishing up for the day, a voice came from a box next to the front door: In one minute it will be fifteen minutes past five. The time kept being stated every few seconds.

I realised it was Mum’s talking watch which, until then, hadn’t uttered a word all day. Again, I think Mum was just letting us know she was around. For the next few weeks, and even now, I have nudges from ‘the other side’.

As Mum had donated herself to science, we had no body to bury or cremate, so we held a memorial in the gardens of the units where Mum had lived for the last twenty or so years of her life. It was a most uncomfortable, stinking hot summer’s day.

Mum

Mum was born in Muswellbrook, a small mining town in the upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales, in 1929, a month before the Wall Street Crash heralded the beginning of the Great Depression. Her father – my grandfather – was by all accounts a very tall, hardworking, hard-drinking and difficult man. I didn’t really know him as he died when I was two.

My grandmother, was a small, no-nonsense type of woman. She couldn’t have been anything else in those days as she didn’t have the luxury of excess in anything except children – eleven children: four boys and seven girls, which she had over thirteen years. My mother and her identical twin Crissie were the youngest in the family. Ten of the children survived to adulthood. Mum and Crissie’s next older sibling, died from a fever in early childhood.

The family lived in a small weatherboard, three-bedroom miner’s cottage near the top of Hill Street. The seven girls slept in two of the three sparsely furnished bedrooms. My grandparents’ bedroom was similar to the girls’ rooms. Their only luxuries were the chamber pots secreted under their beds and three tin bed warmers they filled with coals from the lounge room’s open fire to heat their beds in winter.

On the long semi-enclosed back verandah was Nana’s makeshift sewing room and her pride and joy: a black treadle Singer sewing machine. She made all the children’s clothes, did her mending and redesigned the hand-me-downs to fit the next child in line. This wasn’t so bad for the boys – there were only four of them – but the girls’ clothes were well worn by the time Mum and Crissie got them. Mum told me that in more meagre times Nana made the girls dresses out of cotton or burlap flour and feed sacks. They could rarely afford to buy anything new.

When we visited Nana when I was little, Nana helped me sew small pieces of cloth into handkerchiefs on the treadle machine. At other times, I sat at the machine to see how fast I could treadle. The treadle always went faster than my feet could go and it bashed into my toes and shins but I still tried to keep up with it.

Shoes were also hand-me-downs, so if you didn’t fit any of the shoes, you went without. By the time the shoes had been through a few kids the holey soles had to be stuffed with folded newspaper to keep feet warm and dry. If the kids were in between shoe sizes in the winter, they went bare-footed and jumped from cow pat to cow pat on their way to school to keep their feet warm if the cow pats were fresh – or dry, if the cow pats were not.

The boys’ bedroom was the sleep-out on the verandah. Two large single beds along the house side of the verandah were enclosed in mended mosquito netting. The boys’ clothes were stored in fruit boxes under their beds. The boys’ chamber pot was the gnarled lemon tree down the back, if they chose to run the gauntlet of the nanny goat. Otherwise, it was the redback spider-infested, choko-strangulated, dark outhouse. No refinement was wasted on the boys; they froze in the winter and melted in the summer under the tin verandah roof.

My grandfather was a coal miner who spent a large percentage of his paltry wage at Joe McDonough’s Shamrock Hotel. As a result of my grandfather’s alcoholism, the family often had to rely on the generosity of others to make ends meet.

The household was self-sufficient. Nana had citrus trees and a vegetable garden. Grandfather and the boys trapped rabbits to eat and sold the extras. In the early years of the Depression there were twelve people living at home, my grandparents and ten of their remaining children. Mum’s older siblings got work where they could, as did Nana, who cooked and cleaned for her family. Then for years throughout the Depression, she took in extra washing, ironing and mending to help make ends meet. I cannot begin to imagine how hard Nana worked.

Mum’s parents were tough, but I never heard her or any of her siblings say a negative word about them. As far as I know, despite all of the hardship, they had a good life.

Mum, like her brothers and sisters, went to the local public school. Throughout Mum’s early school life, she was punished for being left-handed. If she even looked like picking up chalk or a pencil with her left hand she was scolded and hit across the knuckles with a ruler or cane. She was told she would never get a job in a bank or work for the government if she was left-handed; she wouldn’t be trusted. So, with much coercion, she became adeptly ambidextrous.

Mum was only ten when the Second World War broke out and she watched three brothers and a sister enlist. Luckily, they all returned, seemingly unscathed. Towards the end of the war, Mum and Crissie left school, and like their sisters, they had had minimal education. It was assumed they would marry and have a husband to take care of them. Education, apparently, was wasted on girls.

They went to work as domestics at Muswellbrook’s Brentwood Hospital. Crissie loved the work and wanted to become a nurse. Mum was more of a party girl and, as she got older and more than a little boy-crazy, often ducked work to spend time with her boyfriends. Eventually, Mum was given her marching orders, and although it meant Crissie would have to abandon her plans for a nursing career, Mum persuaded her twin to leave with her.

At the end of 1948, a month after they turned nineteen, the year that Muswellbrook’s name was changed from Musclebrook, three years after the end of the Second World War and the year the first Australian-built Holden car rolled off the line, Mum and Crissie caught the train and headed to the bright lights of Sydney, leaving small-town Muswellbrook and their old lives behind forever.

*

For months before leaving Muswellbrook Mum had scoured the Sydney Morning Herald for accommodation and jobs. She had secured a room for both herself and Crissie at a ‘Ladies only’ boarding house in Darlinghurst. In its heyday, the boarding house had been a grand three-storey Victorian terrace house, but with the march of time the terrace homes had become accommodation for the hoi polloi.

In the years after World War II, Australia had undergone enormous demographic shifts, with an influx of almost one million migrants and refugees from war-torn Europe. This had altered the face and fabric of Australian life and made possible a lifestyle that previously Mum and Crissie would never have imagined within their reach. Now it was on their doorstep.

When Mum and Crissie moved to Sydney the population was about one and a half million. Unemployment was at two percent. As a result, they got work easily, Crissie as a domestic in a magnificent home in Vaucluse and Mum as a clerk in the Child Endowment office in the city. Luckily for her, she could write with her right hand. All that coercion had really paid off!

They lived a stone’s throw from King’s Cross, a town that on the surface was the centre of Sydney’s multicultural, artistic and bohemian community – but it was also a town that had a dark underbelly, filled with petty crime, prostitution and murder.

It was thrilling