The House of Usher

If you're not in the mood to be depressed, I suggest you find another blog to read.

Last Thursday was a black day for the Baxters. It marked (my grandmother) Bunny's funeral. The day was dark as hell, but all the same I wouldn't be a Baxter if i didn't make some irreverent remark.
So this is where I purge my irreverence and go back to being a good girl.

THURSDAY'S THOUGHTS:

In the last weeks of my grandmother's life, she bloated up from the twig-like figure we knew her as to massive proportions, and changed into this one-toothed stranger with jowls spreading halfway over her shoulders, as purple and black as a severe burns victim, as squishy and bloated as... well a corpse really. Her eyes were glued shut with mucus, she quivered, wore no clothes as she kept losing fluid through her skin, and her mouth was gummy with what looked like glow-in-the-dark putty. It wasn't the woman i knew at all. It was one of the most confronting moments of my life, actually. When Thursday came, however, she was laid out in a white and gold coffin covered in lillies. Mum played a slide show of all the pictures of Bunny when she was young and beautiful (she WAS gorgeous). Afterwards, though, many people would come up to me and tell me what a beautiful woman she was (physically. for the rest of Bunny is a story I shall get to momentarily); people who never saw her in the icu ward looking like a tortured science experiment hooked up to a thousand tubes and plastic bags.

I couldn't help but think two things: (1) how could they fit all of her and her spilling jowls into that tiny little coffin (i mean it was REALLY small) and (2) how ugly she must look in there. I don't think Bunny would look peaceful in death. I think she would look like the thousand cigarettes she smoked and drugs she took, a heavy exhausted mass of flesh who never fought for anything until it was far too late.

Another thing. I was so depressed when they buried my grandmother. Not depressed she was gone. I didn't feel that until about 12:30 today when i asked for my first ever extension on an assignment and the lecturer asked me if I was alright.

No, I was depressed because they buried her out in a place called Pinaroo park, under a tiny little square of cement next to an empty vb can. Pinaroo is nothing but a windbeaten paddock of red dirt out in the barren wastelands called the northern suburbs. my grandmother is condemned to be buried in a place called limbo, to be forgotten forever. at the wishes of my grandfather, who would not bear to countenance such a horrid thing as a cremation.
bunny, you may have wasted nearly your whole life, but even for that you shouldn't be abandoned to Pinaroo.

I want everyone to know - and this can be my official record if needs be - I am going to have a viking funeral. I want to be cremated, firstly, and then for my service, I want everyone who wants to take some of my ashes to do so, so they might spread them around the world for me (because I don't have a home and dont wish to have a final resting place). whatever is left over, I want it to be put into a small boat, along with little mementos and reminders of me that people might have (rings, photos, cards, letters and so forth). Then, hold a beach service, launch my little boat out into the ocean - i forgot to mention, you need to douse it in petrol first - then light it on fire with a burning arrow and burn every last piece of me.
And instead of money for coffins/gravesites/celebrants and so forth, I want everyone to spend the money having a huge party.
No final resting place, no reverence. I don't need a piece of red dirt in the middle of nowhere to be remembered by.

Another dark remark on the day. My grandfather (who has advanced alzheimer's and couldn't remember we were burying his wife) was given a trowell of sand to pour over her coffin as they lowered it into the grave. When he finally understood what was going on, he tried to stand on the raised piece of astro turf trimming the site so we didn' have to see the bare earth. However, it being the edge, it started to give way and he nearly fell in after her. It was too late before my mum managed to stop herself saying 'are you that eager to join her, dad?'

I was about to cry and nearly burst into fits of laughter. how horrible of me.

The same day, I discovered that our old dog has prostate cancer. I was wondering why his balls were so huge. he's not a big dog either; a terrier crossed with a corgie (our old corgie used to live next door to the neighborhood tart, a yappy dog called Alice --> not long after, we got stuck with this mongrel who proceeded to poo and chew his way through our entire yard and shoe collection until my grandfather rescued him from his final journey to the pound). It sounds bad, but one of the biggest problems I have with this is not that he has cancer and will die soon. Its that he farts all the time now, and usually in confined spaces like cars or under a table where we are eating. They smell like dead animal. Poor little thing, I'm so heartless. I guess it doesn't help that he's just not a likeable dog. All the same, I think I'm going to go through a similar post-humous phase with him as I am with Bunny (albeit to a MUCH lesser extent. I don't mean to include the dog and my grandmother in the same category of mourning, just that they never really received much sympathy from me, even in their harder times).

One final thing before I go. I can't get over how my Mum wrote the eulogy. I cried for the first time on saturday for Bunny's own sake, but even then, I couldn't help but blame her for wasting her whole life pretending to be sick. My mother wrote a eulogy which made her look like a loving mother and a go-getting writer. Everyone at the funeral wanted to tell me about what a good person she was, and what a wonderful relationship she had with her son and daughter. It just felt awful because it was so false, and yet I was powerless to stop it. I have spent many a bbq on the back deck at my auntie and uncle's place, listening to my Mum and her brother compete with each other for the worst 'mum story'. She treated them appallingly. She was selfish, rude, embarrassed them in front of their friends (not in the usual way - for example, being stoned out of her eyeballs on valium in front of their friends, lying on their laps and asking them to brush her hair), manipulative, emotionally abusive etc etc. some of those stories were just about 'a current affair' worthy. None of our immediate family would suffer her egocentricity, her million ailments and constant whinging. All she wanted all her life was to be spoon-fed. The world owed her a living. she spent 40+ years lying in bed waiting for it. She didn't get a job, she didn't raise her children, she never cleaned the house or lifted a finger for anyone. How? How can someone waste away a life like that? How can somebody WANT to be dependent? Want to be taken care of?
She scarred many people and never knew how to love selflessly.

When I say mum wrote the eulogy, I mean she wrote the first draft. Nowhere but here will I admit that I helped her write a lot of it. It felt weird, listening to our words being spoken there at the funeral. People cried and were teary during it, but the weirdest thing is that those compelling words were written by the two people who were still the most unforgiving of her. The two people who, even in death, could see most clearly that, even though it is sad she died and tragic that she suffered so much in the last weeks of her life, she was still the woman she had always been; we still saw her as the mother who didn't care for her children, the woman who went to bed one morning and didn't bother to get up for 40 years.