On the first of June, on a waxing moon, approaching high noon, Joan finally found a seat on the carriage she had been so patiently waiting for and left, completely peacefully. My cousin, Anna, went down to collect those few things I wanted to keep and found Joan still in bed, so peaceful it was as though she were simply holding her breath. The funeral folk came while she was there, we were communicating on our mobiles. Later I phoned the funeral parlour and was told that as there was no-one coming to any ceremony, they'd take Joan up the coast to Palmdale Crematorium and in the process, save me a thousand dollars. So I phoned Anna to give her the good news and she said, “Oh, Jon, how lovely! Joan always wanted to go up the coast one more time.”
Joan Lorraine Willmott-Clarke
23 August 1920 – 1 June 2004
Friday 9 July 2004 at North Sydney Leagues Club from 12 noon
FLOWERS: If you have a garden, or access to one, please bring one flower.
What I always looked forward to with Joan were the conversations I'd have with an intelligent intellectual, a wordsmith, as she reached the end of her life. And we had a connection tighter than an umbilicus though we'd had that too. Once on the phone, she was complaining to me, “I'm sick of this, I want another body.” And I replied, “I think you have to die to get one of them, mum.” And we both laughed.
When the dementia started, around 1995, I didn't know it was happening. But now I remember that that was when I had had those conversations with Joan over a period of some years from about 1992 onwards. I remember one afternoon, she had a glass of wine resting on the arm of her magnificent high chair, the walker nearby (I noticed in all her albums, joan's stick is mostly absent from the photos.) and I had a beer and scotch chaser, typical, and the subject of sex came up, as it does, she being 75 and me whatever, and I'd said something about having sex again and she said “Oh yes, but the man'd have to be under seventy to cope with me!”
And now when I look back on that I see it all anew.
Arrival 12 noon
Sandwiches, tea & coffee and juice available.
Hard liquor may be purchased at the bar.
Formal Proceedings, speechifying, will start around 12.30pm and will finish by about 1.30pm followed by jazz and the afternoon ends with leavetaking by 3pm.
NB The first jazz song will be When The Saints Go Marching In and it will be compulsory to sing aloud as this is how Joan wished to be sent off so please bring your voice.
Joan's photo albums will be on display – you are encouraged to see if you can find yourself in there! Also some few recent letters and anything folk would like everyone to read.
On arrival will include
During formal
Last part
In Raglan Street, Waterloo, with my mother, shortly before getting polio
On card-playing afternoona, the best place to read, write or day-dream was out on the steps
Joan at 24 years
for mum
held by a white leash, the umbilicus to my harness,
trailing behind you like an astronaut space walking,
tethered to the mothership.
strollers come smiling toward you but past your shoulder.
something behind you is amusing.
slowly you turn. I quickly still. you went as if to walk on
but spun suddenly, caught my cruel four year old mocking
your swaying limp. the walking stick lifted to thwack
across the back of my waist.
… later, living together, school for me and work for you,
you told me your childhood.
flat out for months in hospital beds,
endless experimental op's failed to deliver walking,
gave you instead a morphine habit.
when the medicals realise the miracle, the addict got cold turkey.
so beautiful and clumping through teenage till finally at sixteen,
herz stuck a steel rod in one leg
and you swap those clumsy callipers for that thin stick …
half a century passed on whim:
you on one dancing leg,
me on my twin
crutches of grog and nicotine.
tho' now we dwell five hundred miles apart, I feel us closing in.
twice you've come to me, both times escaped.
once to the roundabout of residential care
and now to spend your end waiting for me.
when finally I visited you at narrabeen, that first time
in fear, I found the dementia unmasked.
the blow came back from the past.
I flew home: I couldn't walk.
my back gave out where once you whacked it.
at the last, we held hugging our goodbye.
the metal rod, that wooden stick, remind me
of your glorious life and the gift you gave me,
this wordy existence.