I feel bird-like, a lightness of being that fairy wrens must feel. More feather than flesh.
I scrutinise my body. To see oneself in an old woman’s body is disturbing. Thankfully, I won’t wake to any more teeth rolling loose in my mouth or endure the bone-deep ache of rheumatism when the weather changes. I won’t see Edwina’s sudden intake of breath, as she sees purple marks blooming out on my saggy arm-skin where I’ve bumped myself. 
That body! My jawbones jut out, remnants of fat on my body thoroughly used up, so much that my larynx sticks out amongst the loose skin of my neck. The hollows of my cheeks are waxy and deep. My face looks more like a beak than a jaw. The blanket doesn’t quite cover my feet; toes tiny and slightly pointed, nails thick like claws, blushed blue. 
A gateway. A space between spaces. Unspeakable things happened to me in my life, and I am glad to have torn apart the bonds that kept me in my body. But I sense there is still work to be done, a task that requires my consciousness, my attention. 
A door opens with a hiss. The mortuary room is clinically sealed, and the texture of the air drops as Edwina walks in. 
I have always loved being a mother. I loved her- still love her- with every bit of me. I was unmothered myself. My own mother neglected her basic duty to protect me. Seemed oblivious to the many sorrows of my life. I was a wounded human, so I did everything I could to protect my daughter. 
Edwina’s eyes are wide. She is tense and still. The sleek blackness of her dress is raven-like. It’s rare she’s not wearing something floral and flowing, or that she’s not wearing a paint-stained apron or has pencils in her hair or ink on her nails. Instead, she’s wearing makeup, a formal gloominess in the way she bears herself today. She’s been speaking to someone, but the echoes of that conversation ebb away. 
Edwina takes one startled look at me and looks away. I can’t blame her. She circles around the edge of the room, past the deep, square metal sinks hung low on the wall, and the locked metal cupboards. She stops for a while at a timber dresser covered in purple silk, under high, frosted windows. There’s a fan made of a bird’s wing: silky, midnight blue feathers. A male Satin Bowerbird. One of my favourites. There was one that made a bower in the overgrown parts of my backyard. When Edwina would visit as an adult, we’d go and look at what it had collected. Blue pegs, tobacco bush flowers. Litter from the street.
She picks up a bundle of white sage, smells it. She weighs a large brass singing bowl in her hands. I wonder what she is thinking. She moves further around the room, past metal benches, to a side table. There’s a large clay vase with banksia pods inside. Warmly, I remember reading May Gibbs to her when she was little. The Big Bad Banksia Men. My clothes are laid out next to the vase. 

The last moments of my life were the breakers hitting the shore. Most of my senses were gone by then. My consciousness was different, more expansive. My body- the body that had been the container for so much trauma, that had repelled and repulsed me- was in a state close to bliss. I had soft melting edges, drowsy and dreamy. And as the waves bore me to the shore, the expansiveness grew, and at the same time, a drawing in on my life force to the very centre of me. No longer large enough to fill even my emaciated body. Waves of stagnancy, arrest. And then, with a rasping hum, breath would re-enter me.
Stagnancy again.
And a gasp.
Hearing is the last to go. I hear her voice, anxious, enquiring. 
-What we are seeing here, it’s a sign that the end is very close. It’s called agonal breathing. It’s not true breathing, but a primal reflex.
-Agonal. Does it hurt? Is it agony?
-No, it’s not. It’s a bad name. She’s on the syringe driver, she’s very comfortable.
And it isn’t agony. In fact, it’s far closer to ecstasy.

Edwina continues tending to me in the mortuary. There are wings, the long sweeping wings of a barn owl, printed onto a shawl. She wraps me in this after she washes me. She handles my body with such care, like she is the mother, and I, the child. With one hand, she lays the shawl around me and lays me back down.
She places a small fairy wren figurine in my hands. Wraps my fingers, tainted blue from death, around it. 
There is no warmth. But there is the ghost of warmth.
She goes to the bench and lights the sage. Thin strands of smoke levitate upwards, curl into calligraphy. She takes up the bowerbird wing with her other hand and walks around my body. With wide, graceful gestures, she bathes my body in smoke, like her arms are wings themselves. Like she is transforming into a half-avian creature. 
-No more pain, Mama, she whispers. No more pain. 
She puts the smouldering sage back on the bench. Thinks again. Takes it up, and smudges herself.
Her leaving is a bold, brassy resonance.

Time passes, but I have realised that time is infinitely more complex, and less important than we think. I am rendered differently now. My body has been disposed of. Immolated. Alchemized. I move at the speed of light, of thought. I am not static in space. I choose to be with Edwina. 
I watch her as she parks in front of her tiny house on a friend’s bush block. It is a small modern thing, brutal grey lines, both home and art studio to her, a nest for all she is. Before she built it, she had spent years in a cycle of moving in and out of my house, sometimes as a saving strategy, once after a particularly nasty breakup, and a couple of times when she found share-housing intolerable. I know what strength it takes to find a stable home of your own as a woman: I left home at fourteen, but in my heart, I had left my family years before. Perhaps even before memory.
The car is full of another load of boxes; the detritus and diaspora of my life- her artworks from childhood, my photo albums and old camera gear, my gardening tools, books from her childhood, and my hermitage. 
Where am I going to fit it all? A dragging, guilt-ridden heaviness overcomes me. These words enter me with force and clarity. These words are not from me; they are external. 
Careful- this one could come loose, the words enter me with weight, as she slips her forearm under the box she carries. With this thought, a mix of focus and resentment impresses on me. 
It’s her, her thoughts, or feelings, or some kind of impression of her, imposing itself on my consciousness. 
I am rendered differently indeed!
She carries the box to the veranda safely. A long, bereft tone of bereavement lingers. 

-Mama, she wails, in the night. Just once. This is the only time she talks to me. She doesn’t realise she can. 
With her tears painted grey in the dim light, I see how alone she is. All this time, I thought I was enough for her. As a child, I never let her have sleepovers. Would require her home by ten pm when she went out to parties as a teenager. All of it, a frantic bid to protect her. But she has few close friends now, no partner. And of course, no contact with the family I left as a teenager. 
I have left her, completely alone, as I watch her shuddering breath, I realise the role I have played in her isolation. 

In the grey light before dawn, she lies underneath the old patchwork blanket in her bed.
Dull morning light. Monochrome. Like grief.
She reaches into the bedside drawer and swallows a plain-looking tablet. I wonder for a second what it is, but with this obtuse intimacy with which I can now see into her life, it is revealed: an antidepressant. I hate this, hate these chemicals she is taking into her body. Hate more that I never realised how much she was hiding from me. There were times I suspected she was depressed. A couple of mysterious hospital stays she would refuse to talk about. A flatness that rarely left her, unless she was talking about her art. 
There are silences that have been passed through the generations, I see. 
And I know this now, too, in this moment: she was protecting me from the knowledge of her own difficulties. Always trying to appear like she had an untroubled life. To see my own pain, as she sees it: a looming, undefined monster, a foggy, dark thing. 
But I was silent too. Carried on with my gardening and my bird watching, and my library trips, a rhythm that made us both feel like life was normal. Bearable. 
Raw grief. The chasm-
Her regrets are a constant cacophony. I wish I had her favourite music downloaded for the mortuary ceremony. I wish I could have found that favourite green dress of hers. And further back: I should have visited more.
I should have reached out to some kind of professional to help her.
I should have asked her about her childhood. 
I wish she could have told me what happened to hurt her so much. 
She doesn’t pay any attention to her vintage cupboard filled with art supplies, now hidden by boxes. But I do. I want her to see it, to get back to her art, desperately. Throw out the boxes and everything in them; I implore her.
I fear for her, I do. 
Sometimes, I need to float away, just for a spell. Out into the bush. The looming escarpment above us, the cadence of the river below. I flicker amongst the solidified sap spilling out of tallowwoods. This dark and wet place is where I go, for respite. 
Will I exist forever, watching her? This is my purgatory.

I watch her rise from a deep sleep, mid-morning. I have been watching her dreams: strange, disconnected, discordant things: of sprouting feathers in her back, long grey heron feathers which she finds in her bed, in her clothing, the shafts of sprouting quills inflaming her skin. Of being able to understand bird language, the cacophony of a dozen species at once driving her insane. Of me, trapped in some thin, dark place between worlds. 
As she wakes: those feathers. They were so full of beauty! 
But Mum- she is dead, and her whole being constricts and writhes, again, like it does every morning as she wakes and remembers. She is gone. 
I remember: when it first became obvious (after some time of ignoring the signs) that I was truly, irredeemably sick, Edwina came over, carrying a heavy ceramic pot of chicken soup. I ate a few spoonfuls to placate her, ensure she didn’t feel put out. Her eyes were so eager on me, with every steaming mouthful, she must have been convincing herself that she could care for me enough to ensure survival. 
She couldn’t, of course. And I was more than ready to transcend that body that had been my vehicle through a hard life. But I said nothing, and instead took more spoonfuls, even though the nausea grew, bilious and squirming. 
As I watch her get up for the day, touching the back of her neck where she sprouted feathers in the dream. She makes a coffee, takes it out to the veranda, and sits in the sunshine.
Her thoughts grow quiet amongst the laughter of kookaburras and magpie songs. There is a hollowness in her that doesn’t just come from grief. I see, in my misbegotten omnipotence, that she has been trying to mother me all her life. She has always sensed the shape of the trauma in me, without knowing the colours and form of it. It has haunted her, shaped her, as much as it has haunted me. My unmothered space.
I had been trying to fill that hole too, in other ways. Ignoring it, deflecting it, pouring myself into my own maladaptive patterns. Restricting my eating, withdrawing from the world. Trying to mother from it. We were both caught in this circle. 
This one solemn thing, this knowledge, it makes all the difference now. If only I had realised it in life. 
And with that, that bright bursting regret, things transmute again. 
Soaring
Soaring

The expansive lightness of a warm thermal

Bearing me up                                                          light flickering in iridescence

                        Through mist

                        In the morning                                                                                

Off the

            Escarpment

                                                An Eagle Takes Flight