The Farm
The Farm is a large piece of land in Calliope, Queensland, owned by my grandparents. It’s not actually a farm at all but that’s what we all called it. I grew up spending every Saturday there from breakfast until just before dinner time. Every Saturday. Me, Dad, my brother Jamie, Grandad and Grandma. Breakfast, morning tea, lunch and cups and cups of tea.
Life advice was dispensed and absorbed, card games were played and I learned half of everything I know now. I learned to drive, to operate power tools, to deconstruct chook sheds, to shoot a rifle and to look out for snakes. It was a second home and I felt very close to my grandparents in those years.
Then in early 2009 I moved away to university. I wanted to be gone and I didn’t want to look back, because who does when you come from a small town? I moved as far away as I could (which turned out to be 830 kilometres).
I phoned at first, but I’ve never been good at phone calls. I speak too quickly and too quietly and I run out of things to say and I desperately want to hang up as soon as they answer. So the phone calls died down.
Before I moved, Grandma had given me a stationary set and asked me to write to her. I think I wrote once and then never again. I didn’t know what to say. I’ve never felt comfortable sharing the boring minutiae of my life.
During the first year, I drove the 10 hours to home as often as I could. I’d visit my parents and my grandparents, but more and more my perception of home was shifting. It was no longer Calliope, but Townsville. I had a new life up there.
The second year I visited during the university holidays and at Christmas. The next year, it was only Christmas. The year after that, I had obligations to go to my new boyfriend’s family Christmas so I didn’t visit at all.
November 2013.
2012 had been my partner’s family’s turn for Christmas, so I hadn’t seen my grandparents in about two years. I hadn’t phoned since March, Grandma’s birthday.
It had been my birthday on the 21st and they’d forgotten. Usually I’d call because they never wanted to bother me at work or school and “weren’t sure when to call”. But I hate calling people. I never know what to say, I mumble, they can barely hear me half the time and I didn’t want them to feel guilty for forgetting my birthday… so I didn’t call. I knew I’d see them in a few weeks for Christmas. I was definitely going to this one.
And then, a week before Christmas, Grandma died. They said it was a massive stroke.
Suddenly I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken to her, or the last time I’d visited. The last memory I have is from Christmas 2011. She gave me a look — one that I had been on the receiving end of before — and I snapped at her, “Can we not talk about my weight today?”
She had died during the holiday season in a small town, so the funeral wasn’t until January.
Christmas went on without her and without the fruitcakes and we all felt the weight of her absence. We all smiled but it was out of courtesy and a false sense of bravado. If you looked closely you would have noticed the laughter usually present at Ross Family Gatherings was muted, and the alcohol consumption was skyrocketing.
I don’t usually drink but I drank too much and I threw up in the back yard in the middle of the day. My uncle, the host of the event, was seesawing between drunken cheer and drunken tears. I was comforting people left, right and centre.
A cousin was locked in the bathroom bawling, refusing to let her sister in. I figured I’d better try and help, so I knocked and, to my surprise, she let me in. She’d clearly been crying a lot, so I tried to comfort her as best I could. I ended up crying just as hard as her. We were both sobbing and clinging to each other even though we had grown up in different places and didn’t really know each other. We talked and cried for about half an hour, which was as long as we could reasonably hog the one bathroom.
The funeral was in January and there was no viewing. The family in attendance, myself included, wore sunglasses inside to hide our tears. The facade was poor at best. I guess you could say we try to be a stoic family.
I didn’t get a chance to visit the Farm that trip. We drove straight to the funeral and then home again. I ached to be back there, inside of my childhood, playing cards. Grandma’s death didn’t feel real. How can someone be there one day and gone the next? Gone forever. Everything had happened while my back was turned. All I could do was just to keep living.
For the next year, I teared up every time I saw an old lady. (Seriously, I had to run into the toilets at a crowded train station once because I saw a frail elderly lady on her own and started sobbing uncontrollably).
There was nothing to say that hadn’t been said, so I didn’t talk about it. I buried it. Looking back now, I should have tried to cope with my grief instead of ignoring it. I suppose that’s why, when my other grandma died in May 2016, I cried uncontrollably at work so much they told me to take some time off.
I remember, about six months after Grandma died, at mum’s 50th, he was talking to me and my partner and asking us if we were going to get married. We started saying that we disagreed with the institution of marriage, blah, blah, and I realised he wasn’t listening (which, to be honest, is not unusual. He’s a talker, not a listener). His eyes had gone glassy and he said, “Ma and I were married for 60 years. 60 years. That’s a long fucking time.” And then there were tears in his eyes and they spilled over into his beard and he was saying “I’m sorry” and trying to hide his face.
January 2016.
I had missed yet another Christmas — this time due to work — but I was able to visit my family in early January. I was only there a few days, but on one of the days dad took me out to the Farm to see Grandad.
It was raining the day we finally went to the Farm. We spent a lot of the time on the veranda, in the usual spot, drinking cups of tea from the same mugs that we had been drinking from for as long as I could remember. We didn’t mention Grandma at all but once again her absence loomed large.
It was in the sheets that covered her sewing area; in the piles of cushions, now stacked in a corner, that she used to sit on to ease her arthritis; in the absence of her quiet, dry, sarcasm and her cheeky, gleeful giggles. And it was in her hat, the one she’d never wear again because her body was now ashes and ground up bones.
I had been gone so long but everything was still here. Everything except Grandma. The only changes Grandad had made was the TV. Before it was a small box type thing, and now it was a massive 60" flatscreen.
He talked about that TV more than he talked about her. But what was there to say? Everything had already been said.
The photos in this story (except for the one right at the bottom), I took that day in January 2016 using a vintage 1960's film camera. I learned after the funeral that Grandma had been a bit of a photographer herself in her youth and I deeply regret never talking to her about it.
Despite getting into photography while the Saturday visits were still regular, I had never documented the place like I did on that visit. The memories I had existed only in my mind, coloured by time and emotion.
Writing this all out, I’m sure it won’t be interesting to anyone who’s not me, but some things stand out as life lessons:
- If you love someone, tell them and make the effort to let it show. Always.
- People die when you’re not looking, so make sure you’re always watching.
- Don’t be ashamed of grief.
- Talk about it. Whatever it is — talk about it. Let it out.
