by Rachael Mullins
February 2026
“What’s your favorite smell?”
No reply.
“Y’know. Your favorite smell.”
…
“Some of mine are coriander, bolognese, a freshly opened bag of Snakes Alive, the ocean…”
“The ocean,” she says slowly.
I’m not sure whether she’s claiming it as her favorite too, or just echoing my own words back at me.
**
Mum’s in hospital with kidney failure. It’s one of the many complications she’s copped while trying to get the upper hand over stage 4 vaginal cancer. With this complication, though, there’s no upper hand left to be had.
**
When I explain the goings-on to a workmate well versed in loss, he says, “say all the things that matter.”
But another thing is, ask all the things that matter, too.
**
I’m a life-long documenter.
I take photos of everything: the dog, my lunch, every mediocre sunset. Trips to the other side of the world and to the next suburb over. Friends, flowers, books, outfits. That rash on my scalp. Online, I track everything that lends itself to tracking. Books are on Goodreads. Films are on Letterboxd. Songs on Last.fm. Recipes on Pinterest. Steps: Pacer. Snores: SnoreLab. Periods: Clue.
Lists are my love language. Keeping a record sparks joy.
Even my first “real” job—fresh out of uni and thrust into corporate life as a technical writer—was about documenting. Documenting how to use accounting software, to be precise. Keeping a record does not always spark joy.
**
When Mum got sick, the soft yet insistent voice urging me to document things got louder. Calling it a voice, though, implies civility. It was more a high-pitched shriek; a seagull’s squawk; a 6am jackhammer. An entire rock gig spent standing in front of the foldback monitor. Feedback and vibration. A roaring, hissing, ringing thing.
And so, I documented. When Mum went to chemo, I took photos. When my brother Craig and I escorted her to get her head shaved, she posed for pictures in various states of baldness, champagne flute in hand. When I joined her for a wig-fitting, a fashion shoot ensued.
I took videos, too. Sneaky audio recordings, even. They started as a way of capturing what the oncologist and urologist and gynaecologist and radiotherapist and all the others had to say (spoiler: lots). They morphed into yet another way of memorializing the mundane: Mum telling a funny story, recounting a memory, saying “I love you”.
And all the way, the inward cacophony: document, document, document.
**
“It’s really about time you interviewed her properly, you know”, my brain says to me. Yeah, I know, but now’s not the right time, I think back.
“That’s what you always say—‘She’s knocked out from treatment’, or ‘She’s feeling good, let her enjoy it’, or ‘I’m busy googling 5-year survival rates again’. What’s really stopping you?”
Just jog on, will yo-
“Tell me.”
OKAY. FINE. She’s being so positive about her odds. I don’t want her to know that I don’t think she’s gonna make it.
…
Got it?
“Y-yes. Th-thank you”, my brain stammers.
By the way, can you do something about that noise? The one that sounds like a sack of drowning cats?
“I’ll see what I can do.”
**
Three days after they told us she only had a few weeks left, I finally set up a tripod and camera and hit record. Ravaged kidneys, high on morphine, breakthrough pain, fuzzy head—ah, yes, the perfect time to ask someone to lovingly recount their childhood.
I’d prepared a list of 101 questions, collated from online articles with titles like Over the Holidays, Try Talking to Your Relatives Like an Anthropologist, and 30 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before They Die. I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean mere days before.
Mum is mostly confined to the hospital bed by now. Long stretches of torpor are interrupted by occasional spikes of lucidness. I take advantage of these moments. This is important, I tell myself.
“What makes you laugh more than anything?”
“What was the best decision you ever made?”
“What’s your favourite smell?”
Her answers are vague, incoherent. Nonexistent.
I feel something breaking inside me. No, not breaking. Quietening.
I thought the most important thing I could do was document, but now I feel like the world’s biggest piece of shit. All this intrusive equipment and monopolizing her time and energy… for what? But still I keep trying in the handful of days that follow, driven by something stronger and needier than common sense.
This is important. Piece of shit. This is important. Piece of shit. This is impo-
**
“The ocean”.
Just my own sounds parroted back at me, or something more? I still wonder.
That’s the thing about someone leaving too soon. It’s up to those left behind to fill in the gaps. But the tools you’re given to do so are blunt and primitive, not fit for purpose. There are unreliable narrators—friends and family—you can talk to, and even more unreliable memories of your own. There’s a trail of insincere social media interactions. There’s a list of 101 questions you prepared with no answers. It’s like trying to craft a collage out of dust.
**
I think back to a month before she died. We’re on the grassy headland overlooking Bongil Beach. The New South Wales coastline stretches away from us, past the edge of what we can perceive. There are seagulls everywhere, of course, and then there’s Mum and me on a bench, faces turned toward the vista, skin warmed by the golden hour glow.
She’s having a good day, I can tell. Her eyes are closed; shoulders loose. The rumble of ocean is soothing enough to conquer even the loudest inner voice. I breathe in. The air is briny. Mum’s smiling.
Maybe the ocean is, after all, her favorite smell.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe this moment is enough.
Rachael Mullins is a creative nonfiction writer and potter from Naarm/Melbourne who now lives in Dublin. Her work centres on the uneasy bedfellows of loss, technology, and neurodivergence, and has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, Yankee Magazine, and ROAM Magazine. Find her on Instagram at @rchlmllns.