CHARLOTTE GRIMSHAW
The mothers in the last room
One day, my mother got a call to say her mother, my grandmother, had just died. She wasn’t confident driving out of town and she asked if I would take her to view the body. I dropped what I was doing, and soon we were speeding down the Southern Motorway to my aunt’s house at Rotokauri, near Hamilton.
In the car, my mother brooded. Her expression was grim and faraway, her mood was dark. Occasionally, she let out an angry, bitter laugh. Gran’s illness from cancer had begun with familial co-operation and goodwill, but had exploded into warfare as Mum and her two sisters fell out.
First, the eldest had arrived from Sydney to stay in Gran’s flat in Tauranga. The arrangement had worked well until the middle sister decided she should take over the care. This seemed unnecessary and perverse to the others, since the Sydney sister was well established in the flat. Her care was exemplary; Gran was happy.
But the middle sister would hear no argument. She arrived in Tauranga, put Gran into her La-Z-Boy chair and loaded her – in the chair, so we were told – into a vehicle (I pictured a flatbed truck or ute) and drove her away, over the Kaimai Range to Rotokauri.
The other sisters were outraged. Gran was in agony, she was fragile. Imagine how it must have been for her, bumping and jolting over the mountains. Wrenched away from her snug apartment, her own bed, and for what reason?
Having stolen Gran, the middle sister issued strident and defensive reports. Gran was happily installed in her La-Z-Boy. She had a nice room. She was receiving foot massages from one of the young male cousins. Foot massages? This provoked a fresh wave of outrage. Gran, a shy, private person, would hate that. It was awful, it was too weird.
The forceful commandeering of Gran was mystifying to me, a glimpse into a dynamic I couldn’t understand. My mother and the middle sister had sometimes been described as “two peas in a pod”. (The eldest was not so close.) It seemed that my aunt simply refused to be sidelined. If death was a drama, she needed to be at the centre of the action.
Now, though, another main character was limbering up in the wings. With me at the wheel (her dim, puzzled chauffeur), my mother was heading along Exelby Rd, ready with harsh words for the sister who’d turned death into a debacle.
The old car, the powerful Cortina, droned up the steep driveway and we emerged into the blinding light of a sunny afternoon. My aunt’s house was set on the ridge; below us was dreamy Lake Rotokauri surrounded by raupō, flax and paddocks. We could hear the high cries of sheep.
The front door opened and my aunt rushed out. She never stopped talking. I tried to describe her verbal onslaught in fragments I wrote over the years, my first youthful
