Trent Dalton - Love Stories

For Kathleen Kelly

Dear Kath,

I got your gift. Might be the most beautiful gift I ever got.

Im looking at your face in the funeral booklet as I write this letter. Kathleen Kelly 15.01.1931 25.12.2020. You look like an angel, Kath, some strange Irish cross between early Kate Hepburn and every star in the Milky Way.

You bowed out on Christmas Day. We all thought that was kinda perfect. The memorial was beautiful and true. Lakeview Chapel, Albany Creek Memorial Park. You were so loved, Kath. You must have done it right. Life, I mean. You must have known the point of it all: live a life so full and selfless that latecomers struggle to find a spare seat at your funeral.

The January heat outside the chapel broke the airconditioner and the photo montage broke me in two. All tears and no tissues. Funeral photo montages get me every time. The journey of it all. You as a kid. You as a mum. You as a grandmother to all those grandkids who did you so proud in that chapel.

Judy and Greg, those beautiful children of yours, said the most beautiful things about you. True-love things. Maybe thats the trick to parenting: just love your kids so hard and so fully that when you go they wont be able to spit out a single word about you without trembling.

They told the love story of you and Jim. They told the love story of you and the sixty-seven years you spent in the Jack Street house, how much you loved the people in your neighbourhood, how you listened to all their stories for hours until the hours turned into years and the years turned into decades. You knew the secret to it all, how the greatest gift we can give to the world is to shut up and listen to it.

Greg spoke of you and your beloved Olivetti Studio 44 typewriter, the sky-blue one that youd been tapping away on since the early 1970s, writing fiery letters about womens rights and human rights and doing life right to politicians and principals and popes. He spoke about the letter you wrote to the Catholic Leader in 1970, railing against Canon Law demanding the covering of womens heads in church. You were so furious and brilliant. I cannot see anything disrespectful about a womans bare head, you wrote. Surely it is what is in the heart, not the scrap of fabric on the head, that counts. I turned to my daughter Beth beside me when Greg read that bit out. Shes fourteen now, Kath, and she nodded at me because she heard every word you said.

After the memorial service, as per your instructions, we all went out to Gregs car in the parking lot and he pulled out an Esky filled with the thirty stubbies of XXXX Gold that were still chilling in your fridge the day you were rushed to hospital. We gladly sank those stubbies like you wanted, Kath, and we toasted your good name. I told Greg some things he didnt know about you, like how you wrote me those beautiful and tender emails when Dad was finally killed by the durries. Hes not dead while his name is still spoken, you reminded me.

Then Greg told me some things I didnt know about you, how you cut my journo stuff out of the paper and glued the clippings into those sacred scrapbooks that documented your life and all that you cared for. I was so touched that a mates mum would take the time to do such a thing. Well, wait till you see this, Greg said. And he leaned into the boot of his car and pulled out your sky-blue Olivetti Studio 44 typewriter. She wanted you to have it, he said.

I told Greg that Id write something special on your typewriter. I said I would write something filled with love and depth and truth and frankness and heart because you were loving and deep and true and frank and heartfelt. I said it wouldnt be cynical and glib, Kath, because I cant do cynical and glib anymore. The global market for cynical and glib has been flooded. The cynics bob up in your cornflakes, pop out of your toaster in the morning like a burnt slice of mouldy Tip-Top. Some four million people and counting are dead from a virus and, hell no, I dont feel like being sarcastic. I feel like being open and true and right flippin here, right flippin now.