Eloquent Silence (52 page)

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he’s walking down the road to meet me, the Pomeranian dog, Toodles, at her side. It’s her twenty-eighth birthday and I’ve not long turned six. She’s beautiful to my eyes with her thick brown hair and her warm, enveloping smile. She holds out her arms and I run to her, schoolbag flapping against my back. She holds me, hugs me. She kisses me soundly on each cheek and asks about my day.

We set out for home with Toodles trying to get between my mother and me. Part of the family before I was born, Toodles sees herself as sole possessor of my mother just as I know myself to be by birthright.

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he’s driving away in her Volkswagen, my children in the back seat as she takes them to safety while I make the final farewell to a brutal husband and father.

She’s coming home from her nursing shift to cook dinner for us while I recover from major surgery. She’s driving me to the doctor when I’m ill. Potting a plant for a newly-married granddaughter. Buying a carton of Coca Cola for her grandson so he will have a can in his lunchbox every day, similar to the way I had two squares of chocolate in my lunchbox each day at school.

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he’s seventy-two. Again I’ve had surgery. She comes to my bedroom and brings me a meal on a tray. Four violets in a tiny vase accompany the bowl of stone-cold tomato soup and rock-hard poached eggs, burnt toast and a tepid cup of tea.

Still she tries and I am grateful for the simple fact that her world revolves around me and mine.

She’s peeling the vegetables when I return from work. She slices a tomato and also the bench top. I pass her the chopping board and tell her about its usage, knowing she will forget immediately. She must add her contribution to the housework so that I will have an easier life than she did.

I wanted to look after her until the end the way she looked after me from the beginning. I had to hand her over into someone else’s keeping but she remained the heart of my heart, the very core of my being until the end.

One day in the nursing home when she was a little more lucid than usual she asked me not to let her down. As if I could.

Her final words to me before she lost the power of speech were, ‘I adore you.’

Never goodbye, Mum, never goodbye.

Every day I recall her promise that she would always be beside me even after she had passed away. I am led to believe that the dead are only in another room, waiting for us, loving us still with the same fidelity and strength.

It seems certain to me that some impression of those who have gone before us must always be felt in familiar earthly surroundings. They must have left some enduring trace of themselves even though it is invisible to mortal eyes.

The imprint of those loving hands must forever remain on the shoulder or arms of those they have loved and to whom they have given their blessings. I know the truth of this although science cannot prove it. Nor can science disprove it.

She’s been gone from this world for a decade yet I still miss her and feel the shape of her head as I used to brush her hair and stroke it into place as plainly as though she were here. I want to rush to tell her any news even if she does not understand what I mean or reply coherently to me. I long for her presence in my life. Her photograph still has the power to bring me to tears. My touchstone. My mother.

Life’s greatest treasures are our loving memories.

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I
have to acknowledge the friend I used to work with years ago, Julie Nielsen, who encouraged me in those early days when the drive came upon me to write after a particularly nasty incident in my life that forced me to clear away the cobwebs in my soul.

My friends Jan Mumford and Shirley Jones have always been there for me, and have encouraged me to take up my very limited typing skills again, being interested in what I had to write about. My friends Coral, Grace and Malcolm have been true friends to me in my endeavors and my husband Brian is my moral support through all the hiccups I tell him about.

In this latter period of my life, Julie Harris has been my guardian angel and taken me every inch of the way, never failing to step up to the plate when I get myself into a bind. She flies in, Saint Julie of the West, pokes a key or two and I am underway again.

All lovely people with beautiful smiles who have believed in me.

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O
ne Link in the Chain

More Links in the Chain

The Romeo Experience

Mio Tesoro

Wintergreen

M
argaret Weise lives in retirement in a country town in Queensland, Australia with her husband, Brian. She experienced life as a single parent and shared a home with her mother and children. Finally, her mother had to enter a nursing home and passed away just four months before ‘One Link in the Chain,’ which was largely her story, was first published.

Margaret nurtured a strong wish to write a book all her adult life, thus her deepest desire has been realized with the advent of the electronic age.

This is her sixth book.