Well, I've put this off long enough! Today, I spent the afternoon `doing out' my mother's bedroom, ready for my sister to come visit...and Mum has lived in that room for 36 years, so you can imagine how much family history was sorted through, this day. It's six weeks, now, since Mum died suddenly, and I've coped fairly well, I think, on the outside, anyway! I'm a good bit older than my sister and brother, due to the war, and I remember a lot more about Mum than they do. When my daughter decided to make a photoboard for the funeral and wake, we had over a hundred years of photos to choose from...and, as with any family-head funeral, lots of skeletons had to be allowed out..released for the day, perhaps for ever!. Mum had told me where all the documentation I would need was to be found, in the event of her death...but she didn't tell me how many questions would be answered, and how many more inspired, by that bundle of austere documents. Because I was a wartime baby, there was just Mum and me at first... Mum had been pregnant with me when they'd married, in the big Catholic Cathedral in Melbourne,...married by `Special dispensation'' I found from their marriage certificate...My protestant grandmother had told me that none of the parents had signed a permission form, and my mother was under age, but, as a child, it had never occurred to me to ask why MY parents never celebrated their wedding anniversary as other kids' parents did.. So, with Dad away, I grew up with my Mum and my Gran, One of the artifacts I located today, and set aside for my brother was the picture of the young, uniformed father I had been encouraged to kiss goodnight , every night. So, Dad came home from the war...not straight away, because he'd been in Changi, and they fattened them up first...but also because he'd gone into the Army as a muso, and the army found him a job in a Singapore hotel...where one of his duties was to tell the owner which of the many bandsmen on the payroll weren't actually playing! But apparently the Japanese hadn't destroyed everything that made my father function, because nine and a half months after this strange man came into my life,in 1947, I had a little sister...and my grandmother never forgave my mother for this new turn of events! My Dad didn't take terribly kindly to having what he called a `readymade family'..(ME). He bought me mechano and took me fishing, but I remained, obstinately, a girl. He coped better with my sister, who adored him, and better still when my brother arrived in 1949. What the war rent asunder, no family could retrieve... I married at 19, very much against my father's wishes. Ironically, noone admits to having signed my permission certificate, either! By the time my daughter married, (for the first time), in 1985, there was just the four of us.....my father having succumbed to a cancer the Repatriation Department acknowledged as caused by the privations of the prison camp. My mother embraced a new life. She had money, she had a house, she had beloved grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. My brother, the late starter, made her a grandmother the same week my daughter made her a great-grandmother for the second time. She thrived on this new, independent life. She had her crafts, her hobbies, her guiding, her friends....and the children! So life went on..and we hadn't really allowed for it all to end...until July 2nd., when Mum died on her way to post Dad's 14th memorial notice in the paper...the whole embarrassing bit....collapsed in the street, police called, gaping lookerson, etc. And I had a funeral to organise... I'm not a stranger to this, you understand. The great chasm between my parents and my grandmother hadn't extended to me, so I'd had the grandmother's funeral to organise in 1965....and then Dad's in 1983, my brother not having, as my mother put it, `the stomach for these things...', and my sister being, as usual, away!. And, as funerals go, it went well. I selected a coffin handpainted with flowers, and chose burial clothes dignified but feminine. Both my sons came home, one for the first time in more than twelve months, and we were able to capture a really great family photo! My sister materialized and declared herself determined to reaquaint herself with the family..and help raise the next generation! I met cousins I knew about but hadn't ever spoken to..and now I'm in EMail contact with them! My brother told me how much he'd in awe of me he'd always been, and made me realise I'm now the female head of the family....AAgghhhhh! And Mum's guiding friends came to the party and fed everyone... The Reverend, (Mums brother-in-law-....my uncle), spent a long time talking to the lady, (Mum's best friend), whom he'd been supposed to marry, after the war, but stunned her by asking "have we met?" and pointing out another lady, on the photoboard, as his intended! And after the reception, the party proceeded to my house for a jolly wake enjoyed by almost everyone..... But me....I just miss my Mum! I keep picking up the phone to call her, and storing up things to tell her..... and when it's all over..something vital is missing..... now we are three... or rather.... My mother left her house to my brother but the contents to all three of us, with my husband the executor, and so we have the task of documenting and compartmentalizing a lifetime of 76 years. Well, I'm a librarian, so it comes easier to me, perhaps... But then, just last week, my husband's parents, twenty years older than my mother and retired to a nursing home, decided they wanted THEIR house put on the market, and all THEIR belongings shared out among the family, and they summoned the family to gather for that very purpose. Which sounds fine...except that each time someone tried to carry something out the door, the matriarch would cry out,"Where are you going with that?" (etc.). Which meant that each member of the family went away feeling like a vulture, vowing never to return. Whenever any of us try to talk to her, to reason with her, she points out.. ."It's all very well for Nellie! SHE'S dead !But I'm not dead yet!" But since the house is up for sale and will sell quickly one wonders which Good Fairy my mother-in-law thinks is going to clear everything out for her. And that, I'm horribly afraid, is going to be another story! Sometimes it isn't easy, being the middle generation! These days, folks, I'm almost afraid to tell you to "WATCH THIS SPACE!"

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