My mother’s anxieties about something happening were always there. Now I know why

My mother was outside serving customers at the diner when she noticed her parents drive past. She thought it was weird that her folks were together when they were also meant to be working. But soon her manager was approaching.

“I’m going to drive you home,” he said gravely.

My mother had just turned 17.

“My mother’s anxieties about something happening were always there like ghosts, haunting us through my childhood.”Credit: ISTOCK

Nine kids had piled into a station wagon nearby. Three of the nine were my mother’s younger siblings: 13-year-old fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, and their little brother, aged 12. They were sitting in the rear-facing seat of the station wagon’s trunk.

The car was only going about 50km/h when it met a patch of mud, slid down an embankment, and hit a stump. My mother’s siblings were thrown out through the car’s rear window, which was open. The boys picked themselves up. Like their friends in the front and back seats of the car, they were largely unharmed. But an ambulance was called for their sister.

This is not my story. I wasn’t there. I am aware of those who were there. The nine young people, their friends and families and communities, for whom what I am describing may have been the most unspeakable day of their life: not a story at all.

What should I do with the fact that the events in question are also a part of me, like the curly hair passed down from my Italian grandparents to my mother and to me, and on to my own children? I am writing about an accident. I am also writing about silences: things that aren’t said and can’t be said.

One thing I have learned – conjured into a reality forever shaped by grief – is that some pains are too extreme to be borne. My family are evidence that one can survive such events if they are carried in silence. But silence is also an effective transmitter of information; when words fail, the message is unequivocal.

By the time my grandparents reached the hospital, their little daughter had died. It was three days before her 14th birthday. By the time I was born 14 years later, the accident was ancient history; at least, that’s how it seemed to me as a child, growing up always knowing that my mother had a sister who had died in an event that no one ever mentioned.

I won’t speak for how immediate the accident continues to feel for those directly impacted, for my family members, or for their children. Or for my mother. I can only say that I harboured the sense that my mother’s life began when I was born, because that’s where almost all the stories she told about her life commenced.

My grandmother’s grief over the death of her little daughter dominated the household. Her pain was apparent but it went unverbalised.

ALICE ROBINSON

We are all brought into the world with the icebergs of our family realities, and sorrows, spiking down into the black depths below our feet. With age, I have come to understand just how close to the surface the brief catastrophic instance of that car accident has always been and remains.

An anecdote my mother tells:

“One day we were crossing Lygon Street from the tram stop, and you got all huffy and said, ‘Mum, I’m 13! You don’t have to hold my hand any more!’ My mother was taken aback, she says. “I realised that I was gripping onto your arm in the traffic because you were the same age then as my sister was when she died.”

When I send my mother a draft of this writing for comment, she clarifies the scale of her anxiety: actually, we were only crossing half the street.

“I know what it’s like when something happens,” my mother would say mysteriously when I baulked against the constraints she imposed on my freedom: the personal alarm I had to carry through the park; being tailed by the car when I caught the tram to school; flying as an unaccompanied minor long after the cut-off age required it.

My mother’s anxieties about something happening were always there like ghosts, haunting us through my childhood. Recently, she posted an article about grief to her Facebook page. “I often wonder,” she wrote in the caption, “if I have talked with Alice about [the accident] enough – or far too much – you lose your perspective on things.” My mother and I are both what I would call talkers. Yet, it is also true that in my mind’s eye I only see her sitting pensively at a table alone and in silence. It alarms me to think that she could ever construe herself as talking too much about any part of her childhood, and particularly about her sister’s death, it’s defining event.

Understandably, my grandmother’s grief over the death of her little daughter dominated the household after the fact. In keeping with the times, her pain was apparent – unbearable, my mother said – but it went largely unverbalised.

“Mom would weep at particular times of the year,” my mother wrote on Facebook. “This was especially true for the few days leading up to [the twins’] birthday each year. I still remember how painful that must have been for [my brother]. On the one hand, it was his birthday and on the other it was the anniversary of something that put our mother in a terrible state. I longed for a time when this sadness that we had to bear witness to would be gone – a time when the house could be happy again…”

Two identical wooden trunks were stored in my grandmother’s basement. One contained the mementos of my mother’s youth left behind when she moved away: school reports, old photos. These items fascinated me as a child. Like archaeological evidence of an ancient civilisation having existed in the place where I was now living, these artefacts from my mother’s pre-motherhood life were proof that she had been there long before I came along as witness. The other trunk contained items that had belonged to my mother’s sister: small dresses pristinely preserved in plastic.

I can identify the legacy of the accident in the way I care for my children. The potential for road accidents is a trigger for me, as it was for my mother. When I had new babies, I suffered a lot of anxiety about their fragility, unable to relax at night – even when very sleep-deprived – in case something happened. Over time, I’ve tried to reconcile the enormous risks inherent in parenthood by understanding that no child comes with the promise of longevity. Cold comfort. But acknowledging this reality keeps me grounded in the present moment: the only certainty there is.

My mum might not talk much about her childhood, but she shared some memories in writing. Perhaps it is no accident that I have also become a writer. In my life, I have found that writing is a way of articulating the unsayable.

“What I do remember, like it was yesterday, was Mom and Dad returning from the hospital, walking into the living room where we were all waiting for news (…expecting that [our sister] might be with them) and hearing my father announce that she was dead,” my mother writes.

“He just blurted it out and added, ‘I hope I never see you kids fighting again.’”

“Then he turned and walked out of the room followed by my mom, who said nothing. And there we were. A room full of kids who were stunned by the news that our sister was not coming home. Not now, not ever. And two of the people who were with her, who were just fine physically, were sitting among us.”

Reading this, I think: they – all of them, here and gone – always are.

If You Go (Affirm Press) by Alice Robinson is out now.

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