theeeese is nice

http://clemensbehr.com/

NYC 2011 / Clemens Behr from Everything and Me on Vimeo.

'meine mutter erwartet zu viel von mir' - a funeral zine

i made fifty copies today. felt good and productive. though perhaps it was more a therapeutic experience for me, rather than something that will interest and engage people that read it.
on the first page a family tree is printed. goes something like this;
jorja and tobi - my siblings
james and paula - my parents
adrian - mum's parents
janice and max - my grandparents (mum's parents)
john - my great uncle (janice's brother)
lyn - john's wife
doreen and lesley - my great grandparents (janice and john's parents)
graeme and rose - janice and john's siblings
i think thats all. this is so confusing. i'll scan it in sometime.

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The night I found out John had died, I slept well; I was in mild awe of the permanence of death, but felt hardly what one could call grief or loss.

I had struggled with the familial/moral obligation of contacting and including someone in my life just because I know that time is running out.

Lyn and John were, in a sense, my mother's surrogate parents. She lived with them for a time. They offered to adopt her but refused to help Janice financially or emotionally, though she suffers from bi-polar. Perhaps that was a time when constructive measures could have been put in place to prevent the progression of her illness. That being said, I don't know if bipolar works that way. Later, when Janice 'offered' mum and Adrian to Lyn and John, they chose not to formally adopt.

Mum went in and out of foster homes and youth refuges. The lack of stability she experienced during her childhood prompted the consolidation of a very specific idea of how she wanted her adult life to be; solid predictable and safe.

In three months i'll be the same age as mum when she and my father met; eighteen and one.

I feel that, in some sense, I have lived in the shadow of my mother's upbringing. My feelings are never warranted because she had things so much worse. I am reminded of it by her regularly. My mum has good intentions. She loves me and wants to protect me, but everyone feels relative to their own experience, and I think she finds it difficult to view me as a separate individual.

When Jorja and I were younger, Lyn and John looked after us often, moving down to Melbourne to be with us. John was cheeky and made me laugh. He read to me all the time and we would have afternoon naps together. I used to write to them a lot. They spoilt Jorja and I with presents and ice-cream, but as we grew, they slowly started to slip out of our lives. As I discovered more of my family's past, I became increasingly reluctant to include them in my life. I never knew the specifics, but due to family politics with mum, they stopped writing back to me, John would return birthday presents unopened and only a year or three after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, did we see them again.

My last memory of John was a number of years ago. Mum, Jorja, Tobi and I visited Lyn and John whilst we were in Cairns for Adrian second wedding. As we left, John pulled Jorja into a rough hug and demanded them to “come here and kiss me like you kiss your boyfriend.” They laughed it off and pushed him away. He then turned on me, appearing more frail and hopeless than I had ever seen him, “how 'bout you, Maddie? You'll kiss me.”

When ma heard of it a year or so later, she sobbed and clasped my hands tight, as if she thought I would disappear. It made me think that perhaps my mother had terrible history with her uncle or, was it that she knew about significant misdeeds of his towards others?

Somewhere along the line, ma told me about a party Janice had taken her and Adrian to when they were quite young. She and her brother were put to bed so that Janice could socialise. Mum woke up late in the night to yelling. She ventured into the lounge room to see John and Rob beating Janice with their fists and a leather belt. They later dumped her in the river at the back of the property. Frightened, mum had gone back to bed. Janice, wet and crying, gathered her children into a car and rammed John's mustang twice before driving away.

Due to leave for Queensland on Sunday, I called ma the day before to organise where and when to meet in order to travel to the airport. She was already there. Thus leaving me to spend twelve odd hours in two planes and two cars with my mother's husband-to-be, whom I had never been alone with before. I held my tongue. I was upset, mostly because of the lack of communication. Somewhat because I was suspicious of an ulterior motive to get Sean and I to spend time together. We arrived two days before the funeral. 

Lyn and John had moved back to Scottsville in Queensland after his cancer entered its last stages. The house was not what I had expected, being used to their various self-renovated retiree-bliss houses with Balinese decorated swimming poosl, open plan living spaces and cantaloupes. The garden was simple and tame, with a view of mountains and bushland; acutely reminding me of how absurd the notion of clearing plant life for an English-esque slice of the world to claim for oneself, truly is.

Family events make me want to chain smoke. Matt, a friend of my sister's, had hitchhiked with Jorja from Brisbane. Their sincerity and lighthearted nature brought relief from constant interrogation from relatives that I hadn't seen in six years – or being subject to listen to my mother creating a synopsis of my life; positive, yet always with a scathing undertone, masked by flimsy jokes and sarcasm.

On the night before the funeral, under the yellow light of the laminate kitchen, Lyn confronted Jorja about the echidna spine in her ear. “You're all so alternative. You didn't used to be like that.” She claimed that Jorja's appearance was disrespectful and awful, giving her an ultimatum to take out the spine or not attend the funeral. Lyn berated us under her breath for not visiting before John died. We're made to feel guilty for not visiting, but when we do, our character's are constantly denounced and insulted.

Debby, Mark and two of their three sons arrived that night. Her sister's husband had died the week before and yet mum was the one taking care of Lyn. The first conversation I had with Debby, she told me that she has gone back to uni to study social work. Previously a school chaplain, she said she found it frustrating that she would “fix” the children when they came to her, but they would go home and the next day she would have to “fix” them again. So through further study Debby will be qualified to gain access to people's houses and make sure that “parents know what is best for their children”. With eyes aglow, she told me what she wants to do most is work with Aboriginal communities in central Australia.

Great.

As soon as we arrived at the church - a little white bungalow sitting on the edge of a park of burnt grass - ma criticised Jorja for having a small hole in their black singlet. In blaring white sunlight we greeted relatives that we couldn't remember ever having met and hugged the few that we knew. We made our way into the church and sat in the front row. Looking at the coffin felt anti-climactic; a body in a box. I don't understand the concept of making somebody out to be a saint merely because they're dead. It makes things seem fantastical; lamenting the loss of an idolised image rather than a flawed but wonderful human being. I don't ever want to be underground.

Mum had asked if I wanted to do anything during the service – a choice between reading a bible excerpt and singing 'Amazing Grace' with her. The former I refused on the basis of not being religious, the latter because I have an immense dislike for the song. When I opened the funeral booklet, there it was; 'Amazing Grace sung by Paula, accompanied by her two daughters, Jorja and Madison'. I laughed, but couldn't ignore the weight in my stomach. I leant over to mum with a questioning look. “Don't feel like you have to,” she said with a pat of my hand, “[Lyn] just wanted your names in the program.” We already featured both on the front page and in the eulogy. Though it made me feel manipulated and submissive, I opted to sing, knowing that Lyn and ma would be comforted by it. Jorja remained in the pews.

At the cemetery the sun light burned into my neck. Lyn sobbed 'goodbye my darling', grasping the edge of the coffin as the rest of the family threw flower petals. Silent tears slid across my cheeks as I saw Lyn's shoulders shake. The box was slowly lowered into the ground to the song 'working class man'. Some people sung, some cried, others kept there distance, quietly watching on.

Raeleen came only for the duration of the funeral, leaving directly afterwards.

For the three nights we slept in a property owned by Terry's son, the former being a childhood friend of John's. The house was on the second story, below which was an outdoor kitchen and a subdivided bungalow that housed five or so miners. The sickly feeling of being an estate owner with slaves living in an outhouse crept into my bones. I introduced myself to them when I could, but none of the men were very talkative.

The balcony was my solace. It sat overlooking a beautiful expanse of bush, where a number of boney horses were grazing. Skin prickling with heat under a sun uninhibited by any sign of cloud, sweat trickling from beneath my knees when they were crossed for too long, reading comics or silently sipping on gin and tonics with Jorja and Matt

Relying solely on cars for transport was frustrating. Without a license, that meant constant dependence on others and no freedom to leave when I was more than ready; from dinner at Lyn's, from the wake, from the entire state...

I went on lots of walks, not wanting to smoke in front of the family. The streets were wide and open, sandwiched by dying grass and abandoned farming machinery. I never ran into anyone, the only sounds were the dull beats of old pop songs coming from open windows and the occasional ute speeding by.

After we returned to Melbourne, post funeral, mum recounted a night when Janice was particularly drunk, she told Adrian that he was the product of an incestuous relationship between her and Lesley, her father. In the morning, Janice denied it, claiming that his father was a stranger, whom she had fucked in the back of a car one night.

Mum, never knowing whether this was true or not, asked Lyn what she thought. Steadfastly denying any possibility of incest, Lyn went on to tell mum that soon after John's three year old little sister, Rose, had died, Lesley took him to the pub to share the following; Doreen had been devastated by her daughter's death. In frustration that Doreen wouldn't 'snap out of it', Lesley forced himself upon his wife, resulting in her pregnancy with Graeme. Lyn seemed to use that as a defence – trying to prove that an affair between Janice and Lesley would never have happened. But if a man is willing to rape his own wife, surely he would be harbouring more sinister sexual potential.

Lesley killed himself when he was in his fifties, overdosing on barbiturates. Doreen stopped functioning, forcing her to move in with Janice when ma was four. When mum left in the morning for school, Doreen would be on the verandah, swinging back and forth on a chair and still be there when she got home. Janice couldn't handle taking care of her mother, finally deciding to admit her to a nursing home. Doreen's depression was so restricting that she was moved to an intermediate hospital, where she was heavily medicated. Unresponsive to treatment, they moved her to a psychiatric hospital to receive 'intensive care' and shock treatment. By the time mum was sixteen, she had only visited Doreen once while she was there. The hospital had terrified her. Doreen no longer recognised mum or Janice and ceased to be able to make coherent conversation. After fourteen rounds of shock treatment, she died. The funeral was at the hospital. Mum said she remembered Janice wearing a black skirt with a huge split in the back, exhibiting her thigh-high gartered stockings.

“There is so much that you don't know,” ma tells me. I think, for the moment, I'll keep it that way.