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My mother died today. She spent one day more than 83 years and six months sharing the planet with the rest of us. During that time she was variously the resilient forceful and kind mother to two quite loud children and one a little more temperate, introspective but gifted and
eccentric one who struggled as an adolescent living with MH challenges at a time when MH was still seen as a mark of shame. To be fair, she also had her challenges as did so many women born in the late 30s. She never felt quite accepted and beyond her family she never achieved
the academic or professional goals she fancied she might have, though she spoke more than two European languages, if one counts Russian as one. She inspired me to love language and learning and to be passionate about justice in its broadest human senses. For much of my adult life
we spoke a similar language of politics. She was an active member of a union covering mainly public service clerical workers — the ACOA — and would rail against one of its more conservative leaders — a chap by the name of Barry Cotter. I never met Barry but I daresay she
gave him hell. She was also the glue that kept the Italian side of the family together when they began arriving in the 1960s, playing interpreter to not only the Neapolitans but Calabrians, Sicilians and one from Piedmont too. She had done her homework in order to welcome them
to Australia and to the family. There were weddings where the family played soccer trying desperately to avoid destroying the tomato vines carrying the tomatoes that were used for the pasta sauce my nonna would make. My mother became an honorary Italian — and in that sense,
through her extended family acquired a degree of attachment that being Australian had not given her. And yet, she was Australian and desperate for me to be accepted as such, and so she drilled me before starting school on getting my language right, supposing that people hated
‘wogs’ and ‘eyeteyes’ because we didn’t speak the Queen’s English’. Suffice it to say that when I appeared in a kindergarten trying to imitate Laurence Olivier or perhaps that woman who did ‘Watch with Mother’ few were endeared. Only the other Mediterraneans were impressed.
In the latter part of her life, during the mid-90s, she suffered a stroke, and although she largely recovered physically she was never quite the confident person she had been before. Sh3 and I drifted apart politically and family gatherings were strained as we each tried to avoid
causing an unseemly row. We avoided eye contact at polling booths and it was hard to be warm. What I didn’t pick up until about 2009 was the approach of dementia. My father, who had always been eccentric was clearly also in decline and so the sight of silent tragedy also
attended every family event. She declined especially rapidly after March of 2019 and with no functional working memory and a tendency to wander we had no good alternative but to place her in care, where my father who was estranged from her is as well. My mother did not die well
as often people who were once honourable often do on TV, but in a condition too awful to recount. When last I saw her, she could not accept comfort from me — not her fault to be sure — but distressing all the same. I have been studying psychology for some time and the rational
parts of my mind spoke to me of her pain, her waking nightmare and the desire to escape what could not be escaped, so today I grieve for the fine woman lost rather than the vessel in which she found herself in her final months of life. I hope that I can retain my happiest
memories of her at the moment I draw my last breath. 
