Ten years ago today I was in the little Austrian city of Klagenfurt, capital of the southern province of Carinthia, teaching a four-week summer school course in Australian literature to a group of faintly bemused but entirely willing students from all over Europe, most of whose English -- their second or in many cases third language -- was arguably better than mine.
I remember this so clearly because my mother had died unexpectedly three months earlier and it was my first birthday without her. Hers was a week after mine and of course Mothers' Day was always in that mix as well; I'd spent a few days in Vienna before travelling down to Klagenfurt and the Austrians make a very big deal about Mothers' Day, so the shop windows had been full of pinkified, treacly tributes to Mutti, in large glittery print.
On the way to Austria there'd been a couple of one-off academic gigs in Barcelona and I'd gone into meltdown there one day because the Spanish ATM wouldn't give me any money when I keyed in my PIN, which was, at the time, my mother's birthday. I told this story of symbolic rejection, sobbing, to a robust Australian acquaintance who happened to be staying in the same accommodation for the same conference and she fixed me with a beady gaze. 'You do know you're not fit to be travelling, don't you,' she said.
She was right, and it made me realise I had to decide: either suck it up or go home.
ThirdCat has written a couple of terrific posts recently about grief and its power and weirdness, about what it does to you in the months following a death. You can't ever tell when or where or why it will strike; all you know is that you don't know yourself as well as you thought you did, you're not as tough as you thought you were, and you need to make allowances for coming unexpectedly and completely to pieces for no apparent reason, often in a public place. This when travelling alone in a country in whose language you are not fluent can give rise to all kinds of misunderstanding, and I had reason more than once on that trip to be grateful for my sense of humour. I am not used to feeling weak, but I was too sad for feeling weak to make me cross, which would have cheered me up, so any laugh was welcome.
When I'd first told my European hosts about my mother's death they had both immediately said 'Of course you must cancel and stay home if you need to,' but I'd only given that half a second's consideration when I heard my mother's voice saying '
You get back on that horse,' as sternly, loudly and clearly as I'd heard it eleven years before when I had in fact fallen off an actual horse and was lying winded on some rocks in a dry creek bed in the hills somewhere north of, I think, Whittlesea. And for the third time, there in Barcelona, I heard it again and, in a tired sort of way, regrouped.
So there I was in Klagenfurt on my birthday, prepared to spend it alone (it was Friday, a non-teaching day) in my little room in the modest pension near the university where I was staying. What actually happened was that two huge bouquets arrived together that morning via Interflora, one lot from my father and sisters and another lot from the Bloke. Then my oldest friend L and her partner rang up from the Barossa Valley and sang Happy Birthday. My academic host's lovely wife Irene, chatting about her son's imminent 18th birthday, asked me innocently when mine was and I was obliged to say 'Um, er, actually it's today,' whereupon she whipped up a family birthday dinner complete with cake for me in the next couple of hours, no mean feat for a woman with two teenage sons and a little baby, and they all sang the Austrian version of Happy Birthday to me in perfect three-part harmony. And the next day my best mate (who was working for the UN at the time) detoured through Vienna on her way from Sarajevo back to New York and made the four-hour train trip down the eastern side of Austria to spend the weekend in Klagenfurt and take me out to dinner.
All of which is to say that if you know someone who's recently lost someone, going the extra mile for them in the way of a thoughtful and/or generous gesture might save them a black day. And they will never, ever forget it.
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