Read Online Dying by Cory Taylor - Free Book Online Page B

chapel
of the Catholic nursinghome where Mum had spent the last miserable years of her
life. Sarah didn’t go.
    ‘I never wanted to set foot in that place again,’ she said.
    Given our lack of practice, it isn’t surprising that my brother and sister and I
failed so miserably to bury our mother’s ashes properly. Up to this point I, for
one, had never experienced the death of someone close to me. And we were, all three
of us, without any religious belief, all of us clueless about standard rituals and
rites. With no guidelines, Sarah and I were happy to improvise, but this did not
suit Eliot, and he decided to act without us. Even to this day I wish he could have
waited. At the same time, I understand why he didn’t. If Sarah and I were acting
selfishly, then so was he. We all were. We didn’t know what else to do.
    And so that’s where things stood for a while. Eliot kept our mother’s ashes with
him in the Blue Mountains. The idea of a party-like memorial service faded away.
I spent time in Japan thinking about other things. It wasn’t until I returned to
Brisbane a few months later that the question came up of where her ashes were to
be permanently placed. I knew the answer. She wanted her remains to join those of
her parents and grandparents in Brisbane’sToowong Cemetery. She wanted her name
added to the others on the big pink granite plinth dedicated to the Murrays. She
had taken me there some years beforehand to show me. We had packed a picnic and
had sat on a nearby bench enjoying the spectacular view over the city.
    ‘Bury me here,’ she said.
    ‘Happily,’ I said.
    At that stage I was still brushing off any premature death talk. Mum wasn’t sick
then, or not that I could tell. It’s only now, looking back, that I think she suspected
something was wrong, or else why start choosing burial sites?
    About a year later, I rang my sister to suggest a plan.
    ‘I was thinking we could all meet up in Sydney next weekend,’ I said, ‘have lunch
together, drink a toast to Mum, then Eliot could hand over her ashes and I could
bring them back here to do the deed.’
    ‘Where do you want to meet?’
    ‘Chinatown. BBQ King. We could get one of the rooms upstairs. Mum loved that place.’
    ‘Who’s going to call Eliot?’ she said.
    ‘I was hoping you might.’
    The fact is I was scared of my brother. He was too like my father for me to feel
comfortable with him. I hadbeen frightened of him ever since we were children together.
    Sarah, being the oldest, was less easily awed.
    ‘Chicken,’ she said.
    Eliot arrived at the BBQ King a little later than the rest of us. Everyone was there:
his son Ben, then in his mid-twenties, who had been a favourite of my mother’s, Shin
and me and our two boys, Sarah, her daughter and two grandsons. Unfortunately Sarah’s
son wasn’t with us because he wasn’t speaking to his mother at the time.
    ‘Mum adored him,’ I told my sister. ‘He should have been here.’
    ‘I tried,’ she said.
    She stood up when Eliot came into the room and went around to kiss him. I preferred
to remain seated. In his hand he had a large paper carry bag with Bulgari emblazoned
on the side, which he placed on an empty seat.
    ‘Is that her?’ said Ben, peering inside. ‘What an ugly box.’
    He removed the box from the bag and placed it on the table. It was beige plastic,
the size of a small shoebox, with Mum’s name written on the front in marker pen.
    ‘Put it back,’ said Eliot.
    Ben did as he was told, carefully settling the bag back on the seat so it wouldn’t
fall.
    ‘It’s so small,’ said Sarah.
    The talk went badly after that. There was a long argument about what we were going
to order. It was the grandchildren who saved us from ourselves. Ben and the others
regularly steered the conversation back to Mum, making sure the occasion was about
her, and what she had meant to them growing up, and how they still missed her. And
the great-grandchildren provided a useful