Toni Le Busque's stories.

This morning I woke up at 2.30 am and finished this drawing while my Aunt*, who lived with my mother, told me about the last few months of my mother’s life.

While she talked I thought about the painful way in which both of my parents died.
My mother prone, on a sofa, in extreme physical pain, rotted inside from undiagnosed-until-way-too-late cancer, and my father in horrific mental and emotional pain that tormented him until he hung himself.

My mother was cremated last Thursday.
My brother, Jason, and I sent her off to burn in the bottom of the range coffin, the Buronga, I think it was called.
And I didn’t request any flowers be put on the coffin.

Nor did I follow the hearse to the crematorium.

But my brother, Jason, and my Aunty Didi and I slept in bedrooms next to my mother’s and we got up whenever my mother moaned and we gave her the drugs that stopped the pain.
And and we changed my mother’s pissed-in pajama’s at 3am and put her on a commode while she apologised for having wet herself.
And we fed her from little bowls of ice cream and jarred cherries that was all that she could finally eat.
And I held her hand while she wept from what I could see in her eyes was such sorrow and terror and futility. 
And we listened to her senseless blabbering at the end of her life.
And on the last night of her life we listened while her body heaved and gurgled, mechanically and desperately drawing air in over whatever lump or pool of filth was sitting in her lungs.

My mother told my Aunt how happy and proud she has been that we had come to be with her as she died.

So to those people who’ve known my family for more than 30 years, who professed to be her ‘best friends’ and who snubbed me and my brother and my mother’s sister at my mother’s wake for having her cremated in a basic coffin, unadorned by floral arrangements-You can eat my excrement.
Better yet, you can eat it in a sandwich.
Might even make the bread myself.
And I’ll serve it up to you on a nicely made up table with a white table cloth and the best cutlery I can find. 
Might even fork out for a waiter.

And with the money YOU have the nerve to think I should have spent on flowers, I might even buy you a bottle of wine with which to wash down your meal because, oh, how we know you all love a little drink or two.

And to REALLY make it up to my mother, who would have oh, so desperately not given a toss whether she had flowers on her coffin or not, I’ll buy you each a bunch of little roses and sit them in pretty little vases on the table so you can think of her while you dine.

Buon Appetito a tutti.

*My Aunty Didi, my mum’s sister-in-law, her flatmate and an extraordinary woman who ‘nursed’ my mother for the last 3 months of her life.