Close encounters with a distant aunt
A death in the family is also a time to mourn lost relationships.
WHEN my father died in September last year, I had to make a phone call to his sister, the much-feared Aunty M. "She won't want anything to do with us," he'd warned me once when I had mentioned it would be nice for us to visit this widowed and childless aunt in her 80s who lived less than an hour's drive away.
My call was so tentative she kept asking me to speak up. "It's Elwyn's daughter, Susan," I managed, finally.
"How marvellous," she said. "Would you like to come to tea? I haven't seen you since you were 10 years old."
Her voice was as strong and assured as my father's.
"Elwyn has died," I ventured. She was quiet for a bit. "How sad. He was the last of the boys."
It had been a big family - three boys and six girls - and a poor one. Harry, their father, had handed over all his wages to his wife Eliza Margaret and they had never wasted a penny.
It took several calls to set the date and during those conversations Aunty M let slip that she had once criticised Elwyn for his drinking, a reprimand he didn't appreciate. Harry was a thrifty teetotaller; Elwyn, a journalist, lived large and well.
For my reunion with Aunty M, I take along my elder son, Justin. I am not sure why I need back-up, but it feels right.
Aunty M, too, is prepared, and has invited her 93-year-old gentleman caller, who I now know as Honorary Uncle B.
She is standing on the footpath when Justin and I arrive. I try hard not to cry; she is the absolute image of my father. Abundant white hair, clear blue eyes (his were a wonderful green), posture as straight as a rod, a defiant chin.
We are introduced to Honorary Uncle B and the photo albums soon come out. My father was a twin and so was Aunty M; as the centrepieces of their brood, Harry and Eliza Margaret had two sets of twins, boys and then girls, just a few years apart.
We look at pictures of the small house and all the children lined up like the von Trapps in their copper-boiled and thoroughly starched white shirts and blouses.
My father is wearing braces and has a mop of jet-black curly hair, just like mine and Justin's. It's the family trademark feature; Justin had only seen his grandpapa with white hair.
The black-and-white pictures are small and frequently out of focus. Cameras were things of mystery back then; film was expensive and picture-taking was reserved for special occasions.
Aunty M said none of the neighbours had had a camera. Perhaps they were the penny-wasters, the drinkers, and I imagine Harry being called on to photograph them and the little ceremonies that would ensue.
In the pictures of the sets of twins, it looks as if the pairs have been mixed up. Elwyn and Aunty M are near-identical and their actual twins look like each other.
"Everyone thought we were the twins, Elwyn and me," she says.
Justin and I visit Aunty M and Honorary Uncle B every couple of weeks. We took them "to town" a few months back and it was the first time she had crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the centre of the city for more than a decade.
We visited the hotel where she had been general manager in the late 1960s, a remarkable feat for a woman at that time. She was aghast when the receptionist told her the tariff. "I'd want more than a bed for that," was her crisp reply.
I reminded her that I had visited her there.
"Yes, I know, with your mother, when you were 10 1/2. You had short hair then."
Her memory is tack-sharp. Did she ever wonder what had happened to me, had I married, was I a parent. "I kept track of you," she says, but she doesn't say how.
Justin is tall and built like a rugby front-rower and he and Aunty M make an odd couple as they walk to and from our various lunch venues. She's feather-light and he could fit her under his arm; I bring up the rear with Honorary Uncle B, who says on grand days like these you have to wonder what the poor people are doing.
It's exactly what my father would have said.
Then back at Aunty M's we go through the albums again. I stroke my father's face in those long-ago pictures and sometimes Aunty M takes my hand. She wishes it hadn't gone so wrong with her and Elwyn. "But that's families for you," she sighs.