Tag: grief

Blog, Inner Critic, Relationships

After the storm

A month has gone by since my mum passed away.

I returned home two weeks ago and, since then, the intensity of the whirlwind which was her final few days has loosened into an ever-present anxiety about completing the clearance of her flat at a distance.

To do so has relied on the kindness of strangers (lovely removal men, who brought a number of her possessions to me last week), and the kindness of an old friend who – as I sit here, and only just realise – I have known for 30 years this September.

It has been painful, unsettling, and revelatory to discover that I can rely on others to do the things that they promised to do, without resentment or passive-aggression on their part. To be in exhaustion and overwhelm over how much was yet to be done at my mum’s flat, and to have my dear friend Bronwen reply to each new realisation with “Not a problem x”.

It is a form of love which perhaps others take for granted. To me it feels so contradictory to the stories I tell myself about the world, that my nervous system struggles to process it.

As it does with my mum’s death. What a strange sentence to write; undeniably true, and yet seemingly impossible.

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featured, Relationships

Slowly, and then all at once

It’s 6pm on a Sunday in the middle of September, 2020. 30 hours earlier, and despite his wife being about to give birth to their third child, my friend Richard has driven from the Cotswolds to collect me in Hertfordshire and roared up the motorways to North East Wales, so I can see my 86-year-old mum safely. Only a few days earlier she was discharged after 8 weeks in hospital, returning home with a diagnosis of multiple myeloma. And here she was, being stretchered into an ambulance to return again, the four-hourly liquid morphine failing to offset the pain or mitigate the weakness resulting from losing 1/7th of her body weight.

The paramedics explain that they’re going to drive nice and slowly, as my mum’s stomach feels unsettled. She asks why, though.

“They’re going to take it nice and gently, as they have precious cargo on board, mum. That’s what you do when you have something special and fragile to transport”

There’s a beat. And then she lifts her head to address us, her audience; “I told her to say that.”

One of them instinctively lunges towards me to catch me, as I almost fall over laughing.

Last Thursday, the 10th March 2022, marked my bright, funny, beautiful, and cheeky mother’s 88th birthday. But I am sad to say that she didn’t live quite long enough to see it.

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