I originally started this post in January – I really wanted to record this time before the memories were blurred with time. I am finishing it now, before Zac is born, so that I have the record but do not go back and dwell on it once I have a new little life to celebrate.
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This is for me a record, and for you to read if you wish. My Mum passed away 3 weeks ago, a little bit expectedly but also a little bit suddenly. She hasn’t taken care of herself for many years now and I just never knew if she would be one of those people who just keep on going despite everything, or whether her body would suddenly one day just say “enough is enough”. Turns out it was the later. She was just 60 years old.
Since my mid-twenties, we have had a difficult relationship. Growing up I was always extremely close to Mum; we were kind of a unit, Anne and Belinda. Unfortunately alcohol took away the Mum I adored and gave me someone who I couldn’t even recognise at times. It is an insidious disease, underestimated by too many people. There was a brief period of estrangement in my mid-twenties, followed by a few years of rebuilding and re-establishing our relationship which, ultimately, was unsuccessful. I have not seen my Mum since my wedding day, and had not spoken to her in 2 years and 2 months.
The police arrived outside our house about 8:45pm Thursday January 20. We were in the front garden, having just returned from a walk and had noticed the police car. We hovered a little out front to see if they were for us, though I couldn’t think why. They asked for me, asked if we could go inside to talk (which didn’t seem to bode well) and told me it was in reference to Dorothy, my Mum’s name only in official capacity and used only by someone who has never met her.
I instantly knew it was something bad; in some ways I’ve spent my adult life half-expecting this call and yet even so, when it came, it was a shock.
She had been found that morning, suspected to have passed away sometime between Monday and Thursday. As yet we still don’t have a cause of death nor a specific date. It could be several more weeks before we receive the coroner’s report. At this stage we suspect a heart attack – she was booked in for heart tests in early February and has been having issues with her heart for a couple of years.
This is how you get a crash course on organising a funeral. I guess no-one gets anything but a crash course; it’s not generally something you learn about until you need to do it. I’ve long known that Mum wanted to be buried, not cremated with her ashes scattered somewhere. She always liked the idea of being somewhere solid, so to speak, that I could return to over the years. So I knew a burial was the preference. Her ultimate preference for location was on the Bungeeltap property, where she grew up, but that hasn’t been an option for many years due to regulations on private burial locations.
We had visited Bellbrae Cemetery shortly after I returned from Japan, for a friend’s husband. That day Mum commented how much she loved the cemetery and would love to be buried there. It is a small country town cemetery, with gum trees throughout, magpies visiting, the ocean down the road in one direction and her alpacas down the other. It was the perfect place so first step was to contact the cemetery and find out how one goes about getting a plot, if there indeed were any available.
I also asked for suggestions on funeral homes and was directed to either Kings or Tuckers, the two main ones in Geelong. I looked on both websites to get a feel for them and there on the staff page of Kings was the lovely familiar face of the head mechanic at Mitsubishi who had looked after Mum and I for about 13 years. I don’t even know if he was actually a mechanic or purely the customer service person for the service section of Mitsubishi, but no mind. I last saw him 3 years ago when he offered recommendations on where to buy my next car and at that time he was getting ready to retire. It seems that he retired and then starting working at Kings as a funeral attendant.
That decided me on Kings and when I rang, I asked if it would be possible for Ken to be an attendant at the funeral. They sent around a funeral director that afternoon and thus the process was started, though at that stage I was too overwhelmed with everything to be really thinking much. All I knew was the place, that there had to be a burial and I really wanted to send Mum off with a chant from the ashram. Everything else took a few more days to fall into place, but when it did, it was very quick.
One thing which no-one tells you is that often you will need to have the money up front, or at least within a couple of weeks of the funeral, even where the will stipulates that the funeral costs are to come out of the estate. Having the will state this, and actually being able to access the funds in the time required are two totally different things, so for the first few days my energies were directed to sorting out the financial side of the funeral. Fortunately, after much buck-passing, “no we can’t help you, but maybe they can” it was all sorted and then I realised that I actually needed to nut out the details a little further. By this stage we had an estimated release date from the coroner’s office so we could actually make more concrete plans.
Pam, the funeral director, was fantastic. Very helpful (as you would expect but I imagine not all are) and she really understood some of the things I wanted and worked to accommodate them in a beautiful way.
As it turned out, we had to have Mum cremated but Pam had cottoned on that it was the ceremony of burial and the burial itself which was important to me. At the end of the day as long as that ritual was part of it, I was happy. I’ve realised in the past couple of years that the ritual of returning someone to the earth is important to me. I’ve been to a couple of funerals where the service is in a funeral home and the coffin is taken into the back for cremation and that is it for the actual service. The last time in particular I came away feeling like I hadn’t said a proper goodbye to the person.
Some people I’ve spoken with haven’t been to a funeral done in any other way, so it must just be the funerals which I have been to. y experience with funerals has been that the service is held first, often in a church, followed by a funeral procession to the cemetery, the committal back to earth, then refreshments and a chance to talk to others and remember stories of the person. This order is what I originally imagined for Mum as well, but things changed and ultimately what ended up happening was more perfect than I could have imagined.
Pam made arrangements for Mum to be cremated and ready for burial the day of the service. I took in one of Mum’s wooden boxes which had served as an art and jewellery box over the years for Mum’s ashes to be placed in, and realised that this was far more appropriate after all.
The other thing which was important to me was that the burial happen the same day as the service. My impression had been that cremation couldn’t happen until after the service and then you had to wait a week or two before receiving the ashes. Pam’s arrangement showed me that this wasn’t necessarily the case, although the cemetery protocol did support my suppositions.
When I spoke with Elizabeth at the cemetery and told her that we would be purchasing a place in the memorial garden instead and that we would have Mum’s ashes ready the day of the service, she advised that usually they require 2 weeks notice to accept a family interring the ashes. I’m still not entirely sure why this is, but she eventually said that she would talk to the gardener, bring around the papers I needed to sign and she would arrange it so that we could bury Mum’s ashes on the same day as the service.
I decided to keep the internment a private occasion, with family and close friends only. I thought that I would manage to keep it together at least until halfway through, but as we pulled into the car park and I saw family members and friends of Mum’s who I hadn’t seen in a while, the tears started immediately.
There was initial hugging and greeting in the car park, introducing Rafe to the friends and family who he hadn’t yet met, then we went to find Ken and the plot. Rafe and I had visited a day or two before to check where the plot was so we knew where we were going.
Ken was waiting with umbrellas to shelter us (it was forecast to be something crazy like 36 degrees; fortunately it never reached beyond 28 or so) and rose petals to sprinkle on the grave – something I hadn’t asked for, but that he thought would be appropriate.
The internment ceremony was short, but absolutely perfect.We were extremely blessed to have Jack, a close friend and our wedding celebrant, perform the internment ceremony. This was perfect because he also knew Mum and had seen both the light of her spirit and the frailty of her spirit. The ceremony went as follows:
“Close friends and family of the departed.
We gather here today, to return our friend and sister, Anne Tinney, to the earth.
We are hollow, yet our hearts overflow.
Joy and sadness fill us, in equal measure.
For just as we grieve to say goodbye, so too do our hearts swell with joy
To know that she did live.
Just as surely as the day dawns, so too must night fall.
Just as life fills our limbs and our hearts on our path through life
So too must death take our hand one day.
Anne.
Although you no longer walk beside us in flesh, your are within us all in spirit.
As we stand upon this green earth, beneath this sunlit sky, we remember and honour you
as we say good bye.”
At this stage I went to the site, placed the box of her ashes in the hole and sprinkled the first handful of dirt.
“We commit your body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. May God bless you and keep you, may the universe shine within you and upon you, and may love lift you up, and bring peace to your soul everlasting.”
Jack encouraged others to come and sprinkle dirt and rose petals on Mum’s grave whilst we played a CD from the ashram and I was joined by a couple of other ashramites in chanting “Jyota Se Jyota”. I cannot describe the beauty and the perfection of this moment adequately. It was so right, I felt it all through my being.I cried the whole time and was extremely grateful to have Sue beside me, her voice staying strong when mine wavered.
Once the chant finished, I knelt by the grave and finished covering her up with dirt and rose petals. Finally I placed three rose quartz crystals on her grave. It really felt like I was putting her to bed one last time. I hadn’t anticipated the practicality of scooping handfuls of dirt with long fingernails and ended up with filthy hands and nails encrusted with dirt, but even that felt appropriate. It felt real,and gritty and far more personal than having a full-size grave which would be filled up by attendants using shovels after the internment; in this way, I truly buried mum with my bare hands, exactly as I wanted to, exactly as I felt was fitting and honoured the closeness that we had had when I was growing up. My hands at the end looked like Mum’s did whenever she’d been gardening. She always had amazingly long, strong nails which would collect dirt from the garden but she never wore gloves.
My Dad wrote me a beautiful email in the following days saying how reflective of the relationship between Mum and I that moment was – that it had always seemed like the child was looking after the mother so it was fitting that I put her to bed one more time. It was interesting that he felt the same sense of it that I did.
It was so hard to leave the grave and I think I would have stayed there much longer if there were not the service to go to.
