‘After losing my mother, I still find her everywhere around me’

This story is part of the May 14 edition of Sunday Life.See all 13 stories.

It’s easy to spot me as a toddler in any old family photograph. I am the child closest to my mother, either holding her hand or touching her clothing. If you were to ask me for my first memory of love, I remember it as a lack – an ache in my chest, a homesickness when my mother was absent from view. Home was wherever she was.

My mother was a university science graduate who only ever wanted to have babies. My school friends remember her as always smiling, driving around in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle bulging at the seams with children. She owed her excellent education to the largesse of her childless, widowed Aunt Rose, who disapproved of my mother’s ever-increasing brood. It was unsurprising in light of what we signified in terms of a return on Aunt Rose’s investment. We children felt her disdain and returned the favour.

My parents lived in a modest bungalow at the bottom of a park. From its front gate, my mother had a direct line of sight to the stately home at the top of the park. Described in the October 1930 issue of Home Beautiful as an “interesting” residence, its main feature was a spacious bay window above a semi-circular porch, capped by a conical roof.

The architect had designed it for his family. One year after its construction in 1931, my mother was born. Thirty years after that, she was the young mother of four children living at the bottom of the park, gazing up at the fairy-tale castle with its Rapunzelesque tower. She had fallen in love with it the first time she saw it. She didn’t covet it: the notion of being able to afford it was preposterous. She was just delighted to be living with a direct line of vision to the house on the hill. She often drove past it just to gaze at its beauty. On one of these drive-pasts she saw a For Sale sign.

“Ask them what they want for it,” my father said when she told him. Money was in short supply, unlike my father’s inexhaustible reserves of self-belief.

Against her better judgement, my mother summoned the courage to knock on the door of the house. The rest is somewhat hazy history. The death of the owner’s mother, combined with laws of probate, led to an offer to sell on condition that no money was to change hands for a full 12 months.

It was a condition my father was only too happy to accept and one of many financial risks he took in the course of his life, most of which paid off. This was one of those times. Moving to the top of the park was the only move my parents made. The next 60 years saw the birth of a fifth child, followed by 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. It spanned 60 Christmases and innumerable birthdays. The house and property grew to accommodate the hordes. Eventually my father bought the house next door, kept the back garden and sold the foreshortened house and land.

My mother was a university science graduate who only ever wanted to have babies.

The resulting L-shaped block was my mother’s abiding source of joy. She developed a love of gardening that began with roses and moved on to native plants. The garden evolved with whatever was her current preoccupation; at one time a riot of rose bushes, at another a wilderness of native flora. Every spare moment was spent in that garden. She was never happier than when she was out there. My lasting picture is of her dressed in an oversized old shirt of Dad’s and wearing gardening gloves that are wrapped around a pair of secateurs or the handles of a wheelbarrow. She is smiling her crinkly-eyed smile.

Every spare moment was spent in that garden. She was never happier than when she was out there.

Dad, meanwhile, was adding rooms to accommodate our growing family. The result is a rambling, old building with rooms that seem to go on forever. First-time visitors love to explore its hidden reaches. Builders marvel at the sturdiness of Dad’s additions, such as the highly engineered spiral staircase curving down from the upstairs back room to the garden below.

In the six decades of my family’s caretaking, this beautiful old home has been transformed from grande dame to beloved-but-faded old showgirl. The keeper of so many childhood memories and teenage secrets. Love made and lost. Revelations of births, deaths, marriages and infidelities.

In recent times, it has been my refuge, a kind of return to the nest, only this time I am the carer and my elderly mother is the object of that care. In the five years since my father died, I’ve slept two nights a week in the upstairs master bedroom overlooking the park, once the private realm of my parents.

Age and infirmity has forced my mother to live entirely downstairs. The aptly named sunroom has been the centre of her universe since Dad’s death and she has settled there – surrounded by books and looking out onto her beloved garden – with gratitude. Her love of books and writing has been lifelong. As a child she was a precocious reader of “unsuitable authors” such as Georgette Heyer before graduating to Rebecca West and Jane Austen in her early teens.

I inherited her love of the written word; an obsession with all things Austen was one of the many ties that bound us. I marvelled at her ability to recall every character and every nuance of plot of the Austen oeuvre. The works of Jane Austen would have been her Mastermind subject.

As a child, I was either holding my mother’s hand or touching a piece of her clothing.

As the onset of dementia began to rob my mother of short-term memory, I discovered the beneficial effects of the familiar on her sense of herself. Together we would watch the BBC series Pride and Prejudice on high rotation. The joyful tinkle of the theme music would elicit a smile and an “I love Dad” from my mother. She meant Mr Bennet. We would both groan every time horrible Mr Collins appeared and roll our eyes at stupid Lydia. She never tired of watching it.

As her health needs began to demand more of my attention, I would buzz in and out of the room, stopping in every so often to say “How do you think it’s going to end?” We’d both laugh uproariously, even after she had stopped remembering how it ended.

We celebrated her life with champagne and laughter in the garden she had tended so tirelessly, now neglected but redolent with her spirit.

When my mother died last year – in her beloved sunroom, surrounded
by roses – we five children took great comfort from the knowledge that her final view was of the hanging baskets and native plants my sister had placed in her line of sight. We celebrated her life with champagne and laughter in the garden she had tended so tirelessly, now neglected but redolent with her spirit. In the weeks and months leading up to her death, I had time to prepare myself for the loss. What I wasn’t prepared for, was the impact of selling the house.

The process of clearing out 60 years of memories left me utterly bereft. I recognised the ache in my chest from those childhood separations. The house was inextricably bound up with memories of my mother. Preparing it for sale triggered a phase of renewed grieving, which felt like losing another family member.

My mother didn’t have a lot of fancy furniture but she did have a beautiful antique mahogany bookcase. In preparation for its move to my house, the upper half was unscrewed from the base. It revealed a thick layer of dust and a smoky film on the glass panels from decades of the open fires she so loved. I spent the afternoon cleaning every surface until it gleamed, then selecting books from her collection to house within it: books she had loved as a girl; books about native daisies she had co-authored; books she and I had shared. It was a labour of love and an unexpected balm to a sore heart.

As the book-filled boxes scattered around my living room slowly emptied, I felt the constriction in my chest ease. I placed a few of my mother’s favourite framed photographs in among the books and stood back to admire my handiwork. Her beautiful bookcase blended into my chaotic living room, giving it a character and grace it had previously lacked.

Late last winter, I visited my mother’s garden for the last time. Spring had come early to her pocket of paradise. Though overgrown, it still yielded armfuls of native correas, violets, sprays of dark-pink flowering gum and wattle. The air was heady with the scent of eucalyptus and her presence.

It was the last time my home would be full of the flowers from her garden – the house belongs to someone else now. But traces of my mother are everywhere around me: in her books, her favourite mug, in my brother’s crinkly eyes. The best parts of me.

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