Around the end of January 2020, I went to Midsumma Festival to celebrate with a few friends. I left the afterparty I attended relatively early, as I was quite intoxicated and had to start work early the morning after. I woke up with a blistering hangover. I arrived at work for 7:30 feeling dreadful, then hopping onto the machine to make coffees while trying my best to chat up regular customers and drinking multiple coffees myself. A couple of hours later, I received a text from my mum:

Can you talk right now?

My mother and I prefer to chat on FaceTime as we’re both Hard of Hearing (HOH). She has total hearing loss in her left ear, I have moderate hearing loss in my right. It is easier for her to read my lips via video communication. As we live in different states, communicating through videotelephony has become a normal occurrence.

I went outside for a cigarette break to FaceTime her. The light in my mother’s bedroom was dimmed. She was holding one of my family dogs, Leon, on her lap. Between tears, she let me know that Leon was going to be put down later that day. He had a tumour in his spleen the size of a grapefruit. On top of that, he was feeling heavily unwell for the previous fortnight. It reached the point where he couldn’t stand up without falling over. This was my family pet of fifteen years, and I had to say goodbye to him in this moment. I was aghast. It made things worse that I had to get back onto the machine as the café was getting busier.

Later that morning, I received another FaceTime call from my mum. I excused myself and stepped outside to take the call. My parents returned home from the vet where Leon was put down. Pointing the camera down from my mother’s face to my dog, his body was wrapped in a soft pink towel. He looked serene. My parents, sister and brother were crying, saying their final goodbyes before preparing to bury his body in the backyard. To witness this ‘ritual’ of the burial of a family member over FaceTime felt surreal.  I felt numb. I was short of breath. A tight lump formed in my throat; I was lost for words. I regretted having to abruptly end the call after a couple of minutes. Again, the coffee orders were piling up.

From that moment, I descended into an intense state of grief. It felt more profound from any past feelings of grief that I had ever experienced. I couldn’t look at a dog without crying. The physical distance from my family certainly complicated the situation. I let the inevitable waves of sadness and confusion envelop me, spending the week in states between crying, deep reflection, and feeling empty.

*

Around this time, myself and my friend Karl were curating ‘silences between ticks of a clock’ at George Paton Gallery in the University of Melbourne for its opening in the middle of February.

It was a coincidence that one of the works in the show, Gail Smith’s The Envelope explored the inevitability of her (the artist’s) mother’s death; staged as an installation examining the intimacy of rituals surrounding death and processes of grieving. The work is a basic re-enactment of Smith’s mother’s loungeroom setting. Two chairs and a record player on top of a coffee table convene facing a blank gallery wall. Installed on the wall is an empty envelope. This resembles a sealed envelope displayed on a mantle in Smith’s mother’s home that contains instructions for Smith and her sister for how to proceed following her death. The record player contains a vinyl LP that plays a recorded conversation between Smith and her mother.

The conversation occurs in the garden of Smith’s childhood home where her mother still lives. For Gail, the envelope is ‘disconcerting’; a stark reminder of death in the other comfortable domestic space of her mother’s loungeroom. For Gail’s mother, the significance of the envelope lies in the comfort that upon her death, Gail and her sister Fay won’t have to go through the hassle of having to organise the minutiae that often emerges with one’s passing; sometimes resulting in added stresses. The envelope was originally stored in a drawer, now displayed peeking out behind the clock upon her mother’s mantelpiece. Without any signs of emotion, Smith’s mother nonchalantly describes her preferences for what proceedings must take place after her passing. The use of analogue technology with the recording being etched on a vinyl record reifies the somewhat intangible nature of death into auditory sensations. Some parts of the audio are imperceptible, adding to its enigmatic allure.

In this mother-daughter conversation taking place, Gail’s mother reveals how she would like her body to be treated after the event of her funeral. She details her choices of music that she would like to be broadcasted during the procession, and her preferences for a choice of coffin, leaning towards the environmentally friendly option of cardboard. The conversation ends with Gail’s mother stating that she would want the sound of a curlew’s cry to play at her funeral, with her mother crying while describing this. The curlew, being a migratory bird, carries some significance for her mother; as curlews tend to populate the area where she spent most her childhood near the Lake District of the United Kingdom during the winter season. As winter is the season most commonly associated with death, the curlew’s cry comes to symbolise the cessation of one’s mortal existence.[1]

For Gail, the contents of the envelope act as a ‘handbook’ of some sorts on what path to take following her mother’s passing. Smith’s mother gains agency through her power to control the proceedings after her death by authoring the envelope’s contents.[2] For Smith, the installation is a structure of catharsis, where the collaboration between herself and her mother helps her accept death’s inevitability and experiences of grieving that comes with it. As listeners, we are reminded that once again, we will surrender into a state of entropy; materialising into a spiritual form, or nothing at all, based on what one chooses to believe.[3] Gail’s mother is pragmatic about her own passing, opting for a humanist funeral instead of a religious service.

*

I first listened to the recording of The Envelope in November 2019 at the Victorian College of the Arts Graduate Show. I was transfixed. I went to listen to the recording multiple times while visiting the exhibition to scout artists for the offshoot VCA graduate exhibition at the University of Melbourne. Yet, with Leon’s passing, The Envelope took upon a new meaning for me. The physical distance between Smith in Melbourne and her mother in England gave me some comfort that whilst I was away from my family while grieving, the use of technology to mediate grief as experienced while listening to The Envelope kept me grounded during the process of installing and curating the exhibition. As I was to write the passage in the exhibition’s catalogue essay on Smith’s installation, I met up with her prior to writing to gather some more information detailing the work. During our conversation, I revealed that my pet has passed away a few days beforehand, leading us to talk deeply about feelings of grief. For me, having that conversation was cathartic. It helped me to come to terms with the magnitude of losing a dog who was not just a pet, but who was a loving and attentive companion.

I listened to the recorded conversation between Gail and her mother every day that I would come in to invigilate. It was comforting to be reminded that despite feeling overwhelmed, grief has a place in everyday life. I am no stranger to death. Growing up Italian and a Roman Catholic, I have attended far more funerals than weddings. In the Italian tradition of bereavement, viewings before funerals are a common occurrence. Sitting before the coffin in pews, the congregation repeats Our Father and the Hail Mary numerous times. People would clutch onto their rosary beads for solace. Close friends and family members would kiss the deceased on their forehead. I would have to remember all the names of my ludzies (aunties) and udzies (uncles) who shook my hand and hugged me, all wearing black clothing like it was a common uniform.[4] Like the conversation between Gail and her mother, the significance of death and the rituals to mark death that forms a facet of her creative practice, the ritual of telecommunication between myself and my family members being physically distanced from one another has become the new ‘normal’.

In relation to the feeling of strangeness that marked my encounter of seeing my dead dog’s body through a mobile phone screen, the experience of detachment whilst experiencing very personal and/or meaningful rituals such as saying a last goodbye or celebrating one’s life has become commonplace. The COVID-19 pandemic has separated families, lovers and friends, with the event of a funeral or a goodbye now being increasingly experienced by many behind the depersonalised veneer of a glass smartphone screen. The tech-horror reality of acquainting oneself with the profound loss of life through technology has become more apparent, with my experience being one of many.

Curating The Envelope in ‘silences between ticks of a clock’ whilst grieving reminded me that in the times following our deaths, we are still granted with the agency to command our own narratives. The funeral as a ritualistic celebration of one’s life is the last opportunity that we are given to portray our identities to those close to us in a personal light. Listening to the conversation between Smith and her mother brought home the fact that regardless of not being able to experience a physical goodbye with Leon’s death, the power of technology to share stories and feelings relating to the gravity of death with others is not just an extraordinary phenomenon, but one that can bring stability in periods of grief marked by intense states of sorrow and loneliness.

[1] For the First Nations peoples and traditional owners of the Yorke Peninsula of South Australia, known as the Narungga people, the cry of the curlew symbolises acts of mourning and feelings of grief over the death of a child. Refer to Tidemann, Sonia and Whiteside, Tim. “Aboriginal Stories: The Riches and Colour of Australian Birds.” In Ethno-ornithology: Birds, Indigenous peoples, Culture & Society.  Edited by Sonia Tidemann and Andrew Gosler, 153-181. Abingdon: EarthScan, 2010. Also refer to Berndt, Robert M. “A Curlew and Owl Legend from the Narunga Tribe. South Australia.” Oceania 10/4 (1940): 456-62.

[2] Gail Smith, Universal Inevitability. Victorian College of the Arts (November 2019), 25-26. Accessed 13 Feb 2020.

[3] Raymond Tallis, The Black Mirror: Looking at Life Through Death (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2015), 11-12.

[4] The language for ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’ mentioned derivates from a dialect of Italian spoken in the Puglian region of Italy.