The first Christmas without Mum, we felt her absence in the small details no one makes beans lik

Publish date: 2021-04-11
‘They were part of the fabric of every family Christmas’: Elizabeth Quinn and her mother with a pot of ‘Gran's beans’‘They were part of the fabric of every family Christmas’: Elizabeth Quinn and her mother with a pot of ‘Gran's beans’
Christmas

Last year at Elizabeth Quinn’s Christmas, the green beans were served whole, al dente and bright green. They were nothing like ‘Gran’s beans’

This festive season, a combination of coronavirus, distance and the rising costs of air travel will mean an incomplete family gathering for many.

Any absence is felt keenly at this time of year, but the first Christmas after the loss of a loved one has an added layer of poignancy.

The newly minted King Charles acknowledged as much in last year’s Christmas address, his first as monarch. In this, and I suspect only this, he and I had something in common: we had both had the privilege of loving, and that year losing, a nonagenarian parent. It was a loss felt no less profoundly because it was the “natural” way of things.

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Last Christmas, the absence of my mother was felt not in any obvious ways – there was no empty place set at the table – but in the small details. Every year, we prepare the same dishes: one sibling does roast vegetables, one does the pudding, and so on. On Christmas Eve this year, my mildly panicked sister sent a last-minute text: “Anyone doing beans?”

Mum’s beans – “Gran’s beans” – are an institution in our family: handpicked from the local market and individually de-stringed with a sharp curved fruit knife, a task which took up the best part of a day as she got older. Come Christmas Day, the beans were simmered with a pinch of bicarb soda, salt and sugar until they were limp and grey.

Her children (my siblings and I) endured a lifetime of flaccid, colourless “greens”; her grandchildren adored them. Love them or hate them, they were part of the fabric of every family Christmas.

Last year for the first time, the beans were served whole, al dente and bright green. Never was an upgrade so halfheartedly received.

Last Christmas, I gave my daughter Helen Garner’s book Everywhere I Look. It was a late-in-life favourite of my mother’s, the short story format well-suited to her shortened memory span. Tucked inside my gift to my daughter was a bookmark on which I wrote my hope that in years to come, she might find as much joy within its pages as her mother and grandmother did.

The bookmark was a nod to my current bookmark of choice, a greeting card I found after Mum’s death, written to me in her dear handwriting and thanking me for “the very kind things you do for me, and all the loving care you take of me. The entire family is so good to me that I find it hard to believe.”

I derive an inordinate amount of comfort from reading that card. Not every day, just sometimes. The significance of my present was not lost on my daughter. We shared a long hug, a silent acknowledgement of the presence we so keenly missed.

Every Christmas, my youngest brother puts together a family calendar, a labour of love that features photos of every one of Mum’s growing brood of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren as well as various plus ones. The photos are strategically placed in the appropriate birthday and anniversary months, bookended until now with an image of Mum whose January birthday had always entitled her to first and last place. (It’s a 13-month calendar.)

Last year, in the months after my mother’s death, my brother-in-law took up painting again and chose my mother as the subject of his first portrait. It captured her air of engaged interest, her willingness – no, expectation – of being amused and her surprise at our devotion.

It was reproduced on the back cover of last year’s family calendar. The image is of a smiley, crinkly eyed woman in a red jumper, holding a glass of red wine.

We who gathered around the dinner table last Christmas, and who were fortunate enough to have grown into adulthood and beyond in her company, raised our glasses and gave thanks for our time together.

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