By PHIL JARRATT
YOU need to look after your mum, someone said the other day. You only get one.
Half an hour before I sat down to write this column I received the information that mine had passed away, so forgive me if I’m a little sentimental this evening. It hasn’t been an easy week or so leading up to this.
We sat by her side 48 hours before she went, kissed her hollow cheeks and, frankly, I hoped I never would see her again, at least not this side of St Peter’s Gate. It was too sad to look at the shell of a once-vibrant person with no support systems left, internal or external. And now, just as we head off to dinner with friends in Sydney, my sister phones to say that she has gone.
I sidle into a bar and order two glasses of good champagne. My wife and I toast the life of Margie Jarratt, dental nurse, corporal in the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, Girl Guides commissioner, extraordinary talent with needle and thread, master of the sewing and knitting machine, chef extraordinaire known throughout the civilised world for her Anzac biscuits and her leftovers masterpiece, “bread and duck under the table”.
Mum made my boardshorts for me and taught me to drive because Dad was too busy. She made me eat beetroot and brussel sprouts until I gagged and wouldn’t let me wear long pants to church until I was 14. She could be tough, but she also had a soft side, and enjoyed a slightly off-colour joke and a couple of glasses of scotch.
She was the only one who was able to extract anything positive out of me getting expelled from school.
“This is a good lesson in life,” she said, as Dad’s jaw dropped through the floor. She also had a whacky, and sometimes quite bizarre sense of humour.
We effectively lost Margie a few years ago, around the time of her 90th birthday, when she put on a good show over dinner, blew the candles out, raised her glass and drank the champagne, but clearly didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Since then it’s been a not-so-gradual downward spiral into the fuzzy small world of dementia, from which she was finally released last Sunday evening.
Love you, Mum. May you rest in peace.
My other big sister
As often happens in these times of family tragedy, there are joyous reunions for the saddest of reasons.
Among these, for me, was meeting my other “big sister”, Toshiko Kojima, after more than half a century. When she came to live with us in 1962, the wounds of war were still very raw and real, and for families who had lost loved ones in the Pacific theatre, Japanese remained persona non grata. My father never saw action against the Japanese, but he served in Darwin and Melville Island when invasion seemed imminent, and I’m sure if he didn’t actually share the hatred of the enemy, he heard it expressed often enough for some of it to rub off.
Yet when my father failed to win election to parliament, he turned his civic attention to the service clubs, notably Rotary, where he soon became president and later a Paul Harris Fellow. From his very first meeting, he was an advocate for greater involvement in the foreign exchange student program, particularly with Japan, and when the first Japanese student arrived, she came to live with us first.
I remember thinking how impossibly exotic Toshiko was when she dressed in her traditional kimono and presented sake to her hosts in tiny cups on a beautiful wooden tray. I thought the same thing when she appeared at the arrival gates at Sydney Airport and ripped off her travel mask to reveal the fine bones and clear alabaster skin I’d admired in her 54 years earlier.
But Toshiko was much more than an exotic alien. She built bridges in our community and became a lifelong friend of my parents and sisters. Although she had returned many times to see my Dad when he was ailing and my Mum as a widow, and my sisters had visited her in recent years in the mountain-top cottage where she and her husband are enjoying their retirement, I had not seen her in all those years, and yet it seemed like no time had passed at all.
Toshiko got to say goodbye to her Australian mum, and help my other sisters through the ordeal of those long first hours of bereavement. Just what you’d expect of a sister.
