I started writing about Mum about two hours after I learned she had passed away. My Dad had shared the news with my brothers - Robert and Peter - and me about 10 minutes after her official time of death.
Through tears, I just started writing. But it was hard to organise my thoughts.
And, as Pete and I had shared photographs of Mum on our social media accounts after we got the news, family and friends who knew about her long battle with frontotemporal dementia realised what had happened, despite our lack of words accompanying the images.
I was overwhelmed with so many kind words that I couldn't focus on writing.
And it felt too raw anyway.
I needed time and space to come back to it. Which I've been kindly given.
So, the thoughts, memories and feelings I've pushed down in my heart since that Tuesday evening have been able to bubble back up, and I could finally allow them to play around the edges of my mind.
Memories of a woman who was creative and resourceful.
Over time, after Mum moved into the nursing home, her clothing gradually needed replacing. When it did, my Dad struggled with finding replacements from clothing shops. She had made her own clothes for most of her adult life. Very little of her clothing had tags inside the collars, along the side seam or at the waistband telling him what size she was because it had been stitched together using her own sewing machine and overlocker, using fabrics she selected herself and patterns she'd perfected over many years, sometimes decades.
She didn't care for passing fads or seasonal styles. She made clothes she felt comfortable in, both formal and casual.
As we were growing up, she also made most of my and my brothers' clothes. I probably didn't own any store-bought knickers until I was almost a teenager. The bathers we wore in our kidney-shaped swimming pool in Aspley were all made by her.
Growing up, I had a favourite plum-coloured dress with floral-patterned panels, which she made.
As a tween and then a teen, I finally owned my first pairs of denim and corduroy jeans, and I went through a phase of wearing hand-me-down surf wear Rob had tired of. But often, these were paired with knitted vests my Mum made for me.
When I moved back to Melbourne to go to college and spent many a night out on dancefloors of indie clubs, I must have told Mum about my habit of putting my money in my socks by my ankles. And about the loose change bruising my ankles as it banged against my skin while I danced because none of my club clothing had pockets.
She quickly produced a solution: a collection of small "pockets" made from off-cut material with a strip of velcro across the top. She sewed the other half of the velcro strip (the soft side) into the inside of the waistband of polyester trousers I wore under skirts at the time, so I could wear the trousers with or without the pockets. When I danced, the pockets held my ID, bank cards, notes and loose change. When not in use, I could pop them in the washing machine to clean them of the sweat I produced over three to five hours of dancing.
When I could no longer get the trousers and skirts I liked in the shops, and other people's cigarettes had left burn marks in mine, we found almost identical material in Spotlight. And Mum made new trousers and skirts for me, using the originals as a pattern.
Many years later, she used the same skirt pattern (a simple A-line) to create a range of skirts I could wear in a business environment, complete with lining. I picked out the colours, and she did the rest.
I still have all those skirts though they don't currently fit me. But I wore a different colour almost every day of the week, matched with shirts and tops bought new and secondhand, along with matching tights and shoes. They served me well for many years, and if I could fit into them and had to be more corporate again, I would return to wearing them.
I lost count of how many dresses and skirts she took in, took up, or redesigned for me. I would buy brightly coloured and boldly patterned dresses from charity and vintage shops and take them with me when I visited for her to adjust. She was more than happy to, in most instances. Though, when I was a size 10, and I took her a size 16 dress, after wrestling with it for a time and finally successfully transforming it, she told me never to bring her anything above a size 14 again.
When we lived in Darwin, she took up screen printing and would decorate her homemade t-shirts with distinctive floral designs.
She embroidered clothing, cushions, and pictures that hung on our childhood bedroom walls.
She taught me to knit as she made jumpers and knitted vests for herself (though I barely remember how to do such things now).
She explored and took me through almost every late '70s and early '80s crafting trend: macramé, papier-mâché, tie-dye, patchwork, crochet, découpage, etc.
She even made a doll's house for my Littles using patterned contact paper as wallpaper.
She also loved to take photographs. I don't think she ever saw it as more than a hobby (though she and Dad both sold prints, postcards, etc., on RedBubble), but there is at least one photo of her with a telephoto lens in her 20s.
She was always armed with a camera during holidays and whenever one of us kids had a dress-up or other important event. And, over her life, she captured so much of her time living in various parts of Australia and Papua New Guinea and her extensive travels before marriage and with Dad and us kids.
When the letter arrived to tell me I had been accepted into the Diploma of Illustrative Photography course at Photography Studies College in Melbourne, she called through the bathroom door to hurry me out of the shower as she was possibly even more excited than I was to find out whether I had got in. (Mum would never open other people's mail without their permission, even when we were small children, so she had to wait for me to dry off to find out!)
Memories of a woman who encouraged my creativity and learning.
Before I fell in love with photography, my Mum was enthusiastic for all three of her kids to learn an instrument. She researched and tried to find musical instruments matching each of our temperaments.
She had learned to play the piano growing up but would honestly have admitted she never grasped it that well. She loved the sound of piano music, so I think she was thankful I took to it and played for so long.
She bought me a piano when I first started learning around four years old with the idea that if I didn't take to it, she would play it. I don't think she ever really had many opportunities, as I often sat on the piano stool practising, even during the week after I said I didn't want to play anymore when I played even more than usual.
Every time I visited after I moved out, she would encourage me to play. She would listen to anything I wanted to play while she made dinner around the corner in the kitchen. She was as happy to listen to me playing hits by Madonna from the 1980s to Radiohead songs she probably had never heard the originals of, as well as classical and modern pieces I learned for various exams over the years.
It was like an extension of our time together when I was in late primary school and sat at the breakfast bar in our kitchen as she prepared dinner and read to her whatever book I was devouring. I honestly couldn't tell you what I read to her, but I presume at least some of it was Judy Blume's novels. I'm sure I didn't read any of the terribly saucy Jackie Collins novels I used to borrow from the library or the Sweet Valley High series I was prone to reading in grade six. But I'm sure the content wasn't even that important to her.
It was initially a way to encourage my reading and help me with new (to me) words. But it would also have been a way to relieve some of the tediousness of making dinner for five most nights of the week and to feel less alone and like a servant to her family. I know Mum enjoyed cooking, but I'm sure there were days when she would rather have had a break. I probably never thought of it that way at the time. In retrospect, I was an analogue version of Audible for her.
Memories of a woman with a wickedly impish sense of humour.
It's probably safe to say I got my dirty mind and love of double entendre from Mum. Possibly my love of puns. And she, in turn, probably got her sense of humour from her parents.
When Mum and Dad ran a motel and restaurant in Stawell, a small former gold-mining town in Victoria, she loved to pick up dirty jokes from the sales reps who regularly passed through. She relished retelling them to anyone who would listen. I rarely had the talent for joke-telling, but Mum truly enjoyed sharing those jokes with the staff and guests and the belly laughs or groans they inspired.
When we were kids, Mum never seemed to shy from causing controversy in the neighbourhood. She raised a bit of a stir roaring down the incline of our suburban street in the billy-cart my Dad made for us kids (using the wheels from my pram to my initial mortification but then enjoyment). Apparently, that was a bit much for our north Brisbane neighbourhood.
To this day, I don't know why Mum put a pig's head in our oven (maybe pig's cheek recipes were popular in the '80s?), but I do remember finding out that several of the neighbourhood children's parents expressed their horror that Mum gave their kids the teeth of said pig to take home.
That was one of the hardest things to grapple with when Mum's dementia took hold. She literally lost her sense of humour. Her laughter was almost entirely absent for much of the time after she was finally diagnosed.
There were exceptions: the day I arrived in Tasmania in October 2019, mere days before her 74th birthday, she knew me. She was pleased to see me. She proudly told anyone who would listen who it was that had come to visit.
Though her recognition of me slipped away within a short while with the distraction of being in a hospital and her confusion about the various things attached to her body, every now and then that day and the next, a wry grin would sneak across her face. And we poked our tongues out at each other playfully on one occasion. They were the last moments of humour I shared with Mum in person.
There were the odd moments on Skype calls when I returned to London where I would see glimmers, but they were 'blink, and you'll miss them' moments.
I was wearing a summer dress with thin shoulder straps one night when one of the carers helped Mum and me have a call, but my long hair obscured the straps causing Mum to think I was naked and to make a cheeky joke about it. And another time, when the carer told Mum she was talking to her daughter, she made a self-deprecating joke that I was too pretty to be her daughter.
Pete took two self-portraits of him with Mum in the last few years that capture her true essence in what I imagine was a brief moment of her old self re-emerging. I will forever be jealous of that moment and that he managed to freeze it in time. But happy for him that he had that moment and caught it for all of us.
Memories of a woman who exhibited endless affection.
Those self-portraits also capture Mum's all-pervading affection. Another aspect of her personality that was all but obliterated by her dementia. She went from being one of the most affectionate people you could know to someone who often seemed repelled by human contact.
Mum was always giving hugs, asking for hugs, kissing all of us on the cheek, and open to us kids curling up into the crook of her armpit or sitting on her lap as we watched television or when guests visited. Her family was like that, and she encouraged that environment in our home.
Dad and his brother had grown up in a loving but not physically affectionate family. My Mum gradually and proudly brought the affection she was accustomed to into their lives.
When I was a child, my uncle would shake the hands of my brothers and me as a greeting and on departure. As we grew older, he had been so well trained by Mum that hugs replaced handshakes.
Memories of our ever-changing relationship.
My almost 46-year relationship with Mum went through many stages.
Almost without fail, she was an encouraging and supportive guide when I was growing up. She saw my potential in many areas and nurtured it. She encouraged my love of reading, music, photography and learning, even if she didn't always approve of what I read, the music I enjoyed, the photography I created and the beliefs I earned through my learning.
In my teens, she was protective and supportive but let me find things out for myself. To forge my own way. Maybe she figured she had no choice, as I was often headstrong and stubborn. But she would also have known she'd prepared me well for those years. In my formative years, she was always open about puberty and sexuality. And tried to reinforce common sense and self-worth.
When I left the family home, she took me completely by surprise by saying goodbye through tears. I had presumed she would be glad to have another child out of her hair, and I was excited about what the future held and looking forward to that. So it had never really occurred to me before that moment how this event would affect her.
But in those next few years, I saw Mum as my best friend. We spoke on the phone for hours at least once a week. I knew I could ask her about anything. I gave her updates on my life, and we talked about everything and nothing.
I called her each time I realised I hadn't been paying enough attention to what she'd taught me about cooking, laundry, or whatever. Despite my parents giving us plenty of guidance on cooking and implementing a monthly meal where the three of us prepared a three-course meal, I had forgotten even the basics of boiling water. And I sought her advice on methods to know if my eggs were safe to eat because I'd taken them out of the carton, put them in the fridge door, not kept the use-by information and couldn't remember when I bought them.
In my late teens or early 20s, I spoke with her one evening to say that I'd often felt she was there for my brothers more than me as we grew up. It wasn't recrimination. Just telling her honestly how I felt.
She took my comment as intended and told me honestly that she had often felt I didn't need her as the boys did. That I always seemed to be so self-sufficient. I never really seemed to need anyone, as so much of what I did and enjoyed didn't require anyone else. That I always seemed to enjoy my own company.
Our strong relationship was based on our ability to talk honestly like that. As I moved into my thirties, we seemed to lose some of that and grew apart.
Memories of a woman with insatiably itchy feet.
When I moved to the other side of the world for the first time, I gave my parents another excuse to travel. So I was able to see them and travel with them in 2001.
My parents shared an insatiable passion for travel. They travelled a lot before they met but even more together, including with us kids.
We also moved so much during my childhood and adolescence that people would ask if my parents had been in the RAAF, especially having lived in Darwin and Stawell. At the time of Mum's passing, my parents had lived in five of Australia's eight states and territories.
Mum's last international trip was in 2017 to the UK and Ireland, and I joined my parents for a road trip around mainland England for some of their time here. It was a difficult trip.
I'd had difficult holidays with Mum before because we clashed more often than we agreed by about 2010. And, on some trips since then, I'd felt like an interloper.
But 2017 was harder as her (as yet undiagnosed) dementia was evident. It caused stress for my parents as Mum frequently put valuable items like her passport in unexpected places. So there would be frantic last-minute searches for the item with the possibility that she had left it somewhere (thankfully, she hadn't).
When I was travelling with them, Dad and I would discuss our hopes for the next day (we knew they would often only be hopes as we didn't know what Mum might cope with, how far she could travel, and when she might suddenly change her mind and refuse to do something she had been enthusiastic about earlier in the day), and Mum would often become paranoid. As though she wasn't entirely sure who I was or why I was there. Or that we were talking about her behind her back (which we were, but only because of our love for her, trying to figure out what would be manageable).
Despite how difficult that trip was and how far dementia had already impacted Mum's memory and personality, I loved seeing moments like the one I captured between my parents in the photo above as they walked through London: still reaching for each other's hands after 47 years of marriage.
One of my strongest memories of Mum will always be her love for Dad and their love for each other, though dementia obscured her feelings for the last four years of her life.
Memories of a woman who was quite different to me.
Despite my grandparents being quite progressive in many ways, Mum grew up in a home where you didn't talk about politics or religion in polite company. So over the years, as my views on both became more outspoken, particularly about politics, Mum and I often clashed. I would have healthy discussions and debates (though quite heated at times, I wouldn't have called them arguments) with Dad and my uncle that Mum found quite stressful, which I, in turn, found hard to understand.
Despite the conflicts that arose from those exchanges, when the conversations turned to her family, the places we'd lived together, and so on, we would find common ground again. And we would pore over her photo albums, and she would tell me stories of her family.
I wish I'd encouraged her to write down those stories and experiences. Some of them stick with me still, but as I only have two cousins and she had 36, keeping track of the who, let alone the what and the when is hard enough. I don't know that her brother carries those stories the same way she did, and with most of her cousins passing before her, I fear many of those stories are forever lost.
I think Mum and Dad's overarching hope for all three of us kids was for us to be happy, whatever that meant for us. But I think Mum also struggled with the fact that the paths each of us took were quite different from her own. And maybe different from what she would have wanted for us.
I know, for example, that she would have loved to have been a grandmother. But, for various reasons, that never happened.
Now just memories.
We knew this day was coming for years, but it still feels unreal in many ways.
It's been about five months since things started to feel imminent, but I've been grieving since the last time I left Tasmania on 31 October 2019. Knowing it would be the last time I'd see Mum alive and hold her as we hugged in the Devonport airport. I couldn't contain my tears as the stewardess went through the safety instructions once we'd boarded the plane and taken off.
We managed Skype calls here and there with the help of the supportive staff at Mum's nursing home and Dad when it timed in with his visits. But we'd had to give that up when it became evident it was too stressful and confusing for Mum.
Our last Skype call was in early October 2021, and I couldn't return to visit since.
When the nursing home advised in early to mid-February that Mum had lost the ability to swallow and hadn't eaten anything for two days, we knew the time for false alarms had passed.
Her time of death was at 06:10 AEST. With the time difference between Tasmania and London, she passed away at 19:10 on 28 February GMT. But, in reality, she died on 1 March. For the evening, I could almost pretend her death hadn't yet happened.
Before she passed, I asked Dad in one of our Skype calls if he could take a photograph of her after she passed when the time came. He did and sent it to my brothers and me via WhatsApp when he was with her for the final time.
As you'd expect, it's a hard photograph to see (and I'm obviously not sharing it here). But it was a way for me to acknowledge her passing fully and for the reality to sink in as I was so far away for so much of her illness.
Although the grief has come in waves for so long, and things became "final" two weeks ago, I'm still not sure it will hit me fully until I can visit Dad in Tasmania and be in their house and feel her permanent absence.
Rest in peace, Margaret Alice Hyde.
24.10.1945 - 01.03.2023
I love you,
Miss Mouse.