38. "Here comes the can-can. Oh, shit the tape’s running out…”

Mary's last recorded words on the tape she made during our 1981/82 oversea trip (see blog 37) are from the Moulin Rouge in Paris: “Here comes the can-can. Oh, shit the tape’s running out…”

And, like a metaphor for the last few weeks of our life together, it does. It is Sunday January 10^th 1982.

On Valentine’s Day 1982, Mary and I are married at Sugar Mountain, our home in New Zealand. There are photos of the occasion, but no audio tape or film. Five days after that, she dies.

According to her sister Anita, Mary’s last words to her and I are “I love you.” But I don’t remember that, although God knows we constantly tell each other so in those last terrible days.

Last recorded words. Last words. You never know at the time, only realising later that really was the last whatever. For ten years or more after my Dad’s death, I regularly travelled to England to see my Mum. Each time I left to return home we made what we imagined would be our last farewells. And yet, on my final visit in 2008, we say nothing. It doesn’t seem necessary. I know. And she is scarcely conscious enough to care. We hold hands.

Prior to Christmas 2002 I went over to Papatoetoe to see Anita, Mary’s sister – Neal, her husband, died the year before - and retrieve the Wedding Album I hadn’t wanted to keep all those twenty years. We reminisce, for the first time, about the last months of Mary's life. Anita’s still hairdressing, working from the garage at the side of her house. After lunch her cousin Eve calls round so we have a right old chinwag, each with our different memories of the wedding and funeral and their aftermath.

We reminisce about Aunt Mary, the sister of Fred, Anita and Mary's Dad. Aunt Mary, upholder of the Catholic faith and the Pohlen family name, the sanctimonious spinster who instructs Mary, when I appear on the scene, to ‘send that man back to his wife and children where he belongs’. Aunt Mary, the dreaded District Nurse Pohlen, who thinks her brother Fred’s married beneath him, her sister-in-law Chrissie but a foul-mouthed drover’s daughter from Wiri and she and Fred the children of Joseph Pohlen, a public benefactor from Matamata - pioneer farmer, landowner, horse racing personality, foundation member of the Matamata A & P Association, the Matamata Roads Board, the Matamata Racing Club, the Piako and Matamata Cricket Association, a Justice of the Peace with a hospital named in his memory, a hospital designed in the image of the Mater Misericorde in Auckland.

We laugh about Aunt Mary, shock though it was at the time, bringing Mary's ailing Mum Chrissie from the rest home and standing with her on a corner of Puhinui Road to let her wave pathetically as her daughter’s hearse and funeral cortege pass on their way to the Crematorium. What a sad last farewell that was.

Later there’s the drama of Aunt Mary’s control of the Pohlen family burial plot, with Mary'’s coffin being pulled up after two days so that Fred, her Dad, can go in beneath her. Chrissie's there too now. Anita says there’s room for one more if I want to join them in due course. Like I’m family. I tell them of the hassle Aunt Mary gives me in the weeks after the funeral to return to her things I have that, in her view, belong to the Pohlen family – a clock, a posthole borer, other garden implements borrowed from Fred – she seems to have an inventory. Later there’s her nonsense over a headstone for Mary and Fred - apparently she spends over $4000 on it - and whether or not Mary’s relationship to me should be acknowledged in any way. The inscription eventually reads Frederick William Pohlen, Beloved Daughter Mary Elizabeth, so that puts me in my place. Out in the cold.

What other memories do I have of those last farewells all those years ago? I do know that at the end I want Mary to die. I want her to die for her sake and for mine. For her, so that she will have no more pain. For me, so that I do not have to go on watching and waiting so helplessly. Through what is to prove Mary’s final night, Anita and I sit each side of her on the double bed in the master bedroom. She takes a turn for the worse and we call the district nurse who comes in the early hours of the morning and administers shots of morphine. David, our Maori friend from Taupo, is snoring on the sofa in the lounge. Mary scribbles a note for us to give him. “You do so snore”, it says.

As the pain and paralysis shift up through Mary’s body from her feet, and the kidneys cease to function, she progressively loses control of her movements and pleads with me to adjust a leg or an arm or a hand or her head to make her momentarily more comfortable. And I vividly remember, and will always remember, repeatedly pressing ice cubes to her lips to cool the burning sensations she is feeling. I mop her face with a cool facecloth and let her suck on the ice cubes that I hold in a tea towel to prevent my fingers freezing to them. And in between times I hold her hand or her head and stroke her face and hair and say little, just being with her day after day and night after night (eleven days and nights in all after the hospital sends her home) like a faithful dog is somehow enough.

At five we wake David. I haven’t wanted to be away from that bed for a moment but, when Mary dies, I immediately go downstairs and through the kitchen out onto the front deck and stand there staring up the hill, numb. I am standing on that deck again later that day when Mary is carried in a coffin out through the front door and up to a hearse; David goes with her so that, in keeping with Maori custom, she will have someone to talk to in the funeral parlour. And I can remember sitting on that same deck weeks later crying inconsolably as a friend tries to comfort me, the first time I have really broken down since Mary’s death. I still can’t look at ice-cubes without being reminded of it all, and I never again keep ice-cubes in my fridge. And I write a visceral poem about those last few hours, as I always ultimately do in times of great trauma, a poem that substitutes for the screams I need but never manage to let out, at any time in my life. Even now, having found it among my jumble of papers (Mum is not the only one who squirrelled things away) I am reluctant to read it. Suffice to say it echoes an earlier poem I had written, to my great surprise when I think about it now, about death entering through cold feet. Written long before Mary even took sick. It haunts me in retrospect to see its theme.