My mother is the smartest person I know.  She reads every quarterly essay, and even though we currently live in Brisbane she also has shelves full of The New Yorker and other worldly journalist publications of which I’m sure she’s read every word.  Long form journalism is kind of her thing.  While reading though a New Yorker with her a few years ago we burst out laughing at a cartoon in the middle of an article.  It was a picture of a man at a bar with a strange lock of hair across his otherwise bald head with the caption, “the dread lock comb over one night beta test”.  We took a picture of it convinced that every friend on social media would find it just as hilarious as we did, but alas you had to be there.  It pops up on our Facebook memories at the same time every year now, and we comment and share it with each other to keep the joke, and our seemingly singular appreciation of it alive.

We weren’t free range.  We lived on the whim of an ever changing idea that never settled, and that’s quite a different beast.  By the time our friends hit social ideologies and counter cultural edges we had long since grasped the concepts, as well as our privilege allows, due to a thorough head first education in them.  In my 20’s when she ran as in independent in the federal election she gave my address as her headquarters before traveling across the NT trying to rabble rouse and expose the racist government’s tactics.  I received savage letters from red necks with letterheads.  Her fliers, delivered by me while pushing my own sleeping daughter, were reused by racist ideologists who hated her.  Threats scrawled furiously across them were sent to a small family house in Alice Springs, where I lovingly made banners in her name.

She told us young to never accept anything but complete and utter adoration from a partner in love.  Her credentials in the matter are still strong after over 35 years of friendship and marriage to her biggest fan.  I took that advice so seriously that I’ve only been with one partner of 14 years, who was quickly and happily convinced early in our acquaintance that I was and am the smartest, most amazing human on the planet.  Which I don’t contest or contradict, other than to say that I owe it to my mother.

They wouldn’t let me in with her when she had the first ultrasound.  I took her out to brunch and tried to stay up-beat, glancing at her collar bone where I usually tickle her with my chin when we hug.  The swollen skin there nonthreatening to the naked eye.  She told me I could touch it to make sense of it but I wouldn’t.

By the time we shaved her head the strands had been falling into her lunch in clumps and driving her crazy.  We filmed it for posterity and laughed.  This was the first time she’d had hairless legs and armpits since the 70’s.  Her head is large and rounded, like her mind.  We joked about her looking like a big baby, but really she pulled it off.  She survived treatment by watching mindless television and eating sweets unapologetically.  Seasons of 90’s sitcoms (that pass none of the current tests we demand for representation or political correctness) coupled with fruit danish and chocolate with tea.

After the doctors were shocked at how well her body had responded to the first round of chemo, we considered making thousands on chocolate and fruit danish as the best new alt-med.  We didn’t want a fraud case on our hands this early in the game so we kept it to ourselves.  Her hair grew back, gray and peppered, none of the strawberry, but it was never too soon to suggest the dreadlock comb-over.

EDIT : Mum died in August 2017

You can read her eulogy here