I know it’s been a while since I last updated on here, but these have been some of the strangest weeks of my life.
Obviously, losing Mum has upended my world and is hugely on my mind. Whether it’s catching sight of a postcard in a shop and thinking, ‘oh I could send Mum that..’, panicking that I haven’t booked my next diary date to go down and visit her in Kent, or just quiet moments when it is starting to slowly sink in that she really isn’t here any more. It’s going to take a long time I think to get used to the stark fact that my Mum is now forever gone.
Much as the trips to Margate in the last 18 months of her life were long on the motorway, often quiet when I got there as Mum couldn’t remember what she’d done, if anything, that week, I would still do anything to have just one more visit to Room 8 at Yoakley.
To see her face light up as Scrumpy leaped up to lick her. To hear her say ‘I’m better for seeing you’. To explain to her yet again that I do have to cut and file her nails, and that most people think manicures are a treat, not something to be endured.(Well, maybe mine were in the latter category, I never was much good at that sort of thing). To suggest she might like her hair brushed, a splash of perfume and definitely a change out of her adored slippers into proper shoes before we headed out for a pub lunch. Even collapsing and humping her wheelchair in and out of my car boot, there and back, would be the tiniest price to pay to hold her hand again and to be able to just spend time with my Mum.
I know in some ways I am lucky, that I had the chance to say my goodbyes to her over and over, as we gradually lost elements of Mum over the last 15 or so years. Her memory especially, which so sadly reduced her ability to tell us much at all by the end. But also her hearing and her eyesight, her ability to walk, all cruel things that changed what could have been a happier and more fulfilled old age for her into a trying one, but one where Mum somehow remained forever placid and accepting, taking each day, cup of coffee and small pleasure as it came, god bless her.
So this decline, hard though it was, is still sort of better I think than losing a parent suddenly and with little warning. But there is still no one on the earth who is like your Mum and it’s surreal to plan and hold a funeral, when somehow you still expect the person it was for to still be here afterwards and to say, yes that was a good job, and a nice turn out – shall we go out for that pub lunch now?
And there is definitely something much harder too when you lose your second parent. Especially, I have to admit, when it’s the person you loved so much more. There needs to be a bit of mental rebalancing now, as Mum was head of the family, despite her physical limitations, and that top of the pile, most important pinnacle person is now gone.
And of course it feels hard, odd, almost rude to still have to live life now without her. Going on holiday two days after the funeral felt wrong in so many ways, too soon, inappropriate, but also the only thing that could be done. And of course, it was filled with many happy moments, as well as quieter times too, to raise a glass or cup of tea to Mum.
I could have done without leaving the very next morning post-hols for the 4 days in grotty Casablanca that I am just returning from now. Very tiring and again, feeling like a massive intrusion into a time and space when on the practical front I want to sort Mum’s belongings and paperwork etc, as well as emotionally to digest the lovely letters people sent and to be able to think about her, looking back through the photobook I made for her funeral, and for Richard and Cathy to have too. But the work was booked, so I went, and am now thank god heading homewards.
The final step of June madness is this weekend – a hockey tour to Valencia which was booked last year and which I’d normally be looking forward to hugely. I’m sure a good time will be had by all, despite the 4am taxi tomorrow morning.
But for me, I’m looking forward for the first time ever, to my long chemo day on Monday, a chance to catch up with my thoughts as I sit for 7 hours in the familiar pale blue armchair there, and work out the way forward now without Mum. And then during the week ahead, I will again be be able to go and visit her grave, my chance at last – and the first of many I am sure – to tell her that, as I stand there, I am ‘better for seeing you, Mum’. x