Tears of the Moon - Di Morrissey [4]
Life starts at birth. Forget all the baggage because there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it anyway. I tried to let you be free. You find out what you need to know, when you need to know. Sometimes knowing too much can be painful.
Lily wasn’t sure what to make of this remark but realised she wasn’t going to get anything further from her mother. Her then-husband Stephen told her not to worry about it. He was relieved that his erratic and volatile mother-in-law kept to her own path in life. He regarded her with long-suffering patience that didn’t endear him to Georgiana. When Stephen and Lily divorced, Georgiana was delighted. When she visited she could now have the attention of Lily and Sami without the ‘interruptions and interference of that man’.
Lily was adamant that Stephen continue to be involved with Sami’s life. ‘I didn’t have a male role model and a girl needs a dad.’
Her academic ex-husband, vague about the nitty-gritty of life, nonetheless was a devoted if distant father—distant due to them being in different cities.
Lily sighed. How she wished she had sat down with Georgiana and insisted she tell her all she knew about her family. She had a thirst to know about her mother’s background and now it was too late. Too late to understand her rebellious, flighty, independent mother who had lived life at full speed. She’d never even called her ‘Mother’, Georgiana had said it made her feel ‘old’. Even in her later years, Georgiana continued to flirt, to look years younger than she was. When she visited Lily she told her granddaughter Sami to call her Georgie, not Granny.
Lily and Sami had thought it amusing at the time, but now Lily found her mother’s dedicated zest a pathetic attention-grabbing tactic.
When Lily was growing up, her friends had envied her such a glamorous, funny and slightly eccentric mother. In reality, Georgiana had been selfish and self-centred, and now Lily resented the loss of family this had caused.
While wallowing in her personal loss it suddenly occurred to Lily that she was doing what Georgiana always did—excluding everyone else. She had gently broken the news to Sami of her grandmother’s death. Her daughter had then flown from Melbourne for the simple funeral, but with impending university exams Lily had encouraged her to go straight back to Melbourne.
Now she wondered how her daughter was dealing with this first, unexpected, death in their small family unit. They should be sharing this. It didn’t seem sensible that in this society mourning was a private affair. Where was the ritual, the wailing, the sharing, the support and continuum of death shown by other cultures? Was this why she was finding it so hard to let go of her mother?
A twinge of bitterness hit Lily as she stretched and went to the wardrobe. Apart from the satin-covered hangers it was empty except for an old leather suitcase that Lily knew held the core of Georgiana’s life. She had once pointed it out to Lily and told her, ‘When I die you’ll find my life in there.’
Lily had never looked in the suitcase but had persuaded her mother to take out her will, share certificates and deed to the unit and put them in the bank.
Lily dragged the suitcase out to the middle of the floor, took a sip of wine and unbuckled the old-fashioned catches. It smelled faintly of mothballs and she lifted the tissue paper off the top to reveal a disorderly stack of photographs and letters. She randomly leafed through several letters from one pile. There were love letters between Georgiana and the numerous men in her life. Others were from people she’d met in her travels whom she’d written to for some time until lack of contact and interest had seen the correspondence fizzle out.
Familiar, though childish, writing in another pile caught her eye. Lily was touched to find all the letters she had written to her mother while at school were carefully bundled together. Georgiana hadn