I'm currently working on a project that involves me reading my old blog posts, and as I have nothing of any interest to tell you about my week, I thought I'd repost an old post I liked from ten years ago, with apologies to those of you on Twitter who have already seen it this week.
A map of grief
In the last year I have progressed from intense grief for the
loss of my mother, to a place on the map that is not so bleak. I miss my mother
and think of her often, but now when I go to stay at her house with brothers or
sisters, I enjoy the visit. Eleven months ago, I felt differently and wrote
this…
Losing my mother
Sometimes, it’s a comfort having my mother’s things around me -
her Austrian jug on the windowsill, her mahogany chest in the bedroom, her
Piers Browne painting on the wall. Sometimes I hate to look at them.
Sometimes I like to see her photograph – her smiling, strong,
straightforward face. Sometimes I can’t abide it on my desk. I never had her
photo on display before she died, so if I have it here now, she must be dead.
And I don’t want her dead. I don’t like the new dispensation.
We have been clearing out her house in monthly weekend bursts,
ever since she died at the end of last October. It’s April now, and I’ve just
spent a weekend there. The weather was achingly beautiful – clear blue skies
and sunshine, the full bright light of early spring skies, lambs in the fields,
daffodils in the gardens and on the verges - and a brother and sister to keep
me company.
Over the months we’ve been denuding the house of personal,
sentimental and valuable items, and now it’s like the holiday cottage it was
when our parents bought it, 50 years ago. It no longer feels like our mother’s
home, but like a cottage we all feel comfortable in. We know how everything
works – that there are two immersion heater switches, and both of them must be
on for the heater to work, that the draught for the fire points to the right,
that you have to thump the washing machine in the middle of the door at the top
to get it going. But it does not feel like the place where I took my babies, my
children, my teenagers, to visit their grandparents, and latterly went on my
own to visit my mother.
We have a lovely photo of her, taken 6 weeks before she died.
When we visit the house, we take it out from behind the bookshelf curtain and
stand it on the shelf, and see her wise, healthy, loving face, and when we
drink our wine at meals we toast her.
It was good to be with my brother and sister at the weekend,
comforting to have a hug and a laugh, to share memories and to miss our mother
together. But the only time I got that rush of the safe, the cosy, the
familiar, was when I was standing at my mother’s sink, washing up. At that
moment, she might have been still alive, sitting in front of the fire, doing
the codewords puzzle from the Telegraph, turning on the radio for a cricket
update.
When Peter and Jen set off on the Sunday morning for their long
drive south, I waved them off, and sat under the front wall on the bench that
Ma put there (to catch the last of the setting sun) and I looked at the house.
Behind me on the road, two hikers were walking down the lane and
when they saw the estate agent’s sign, the woman said, “I could live there,”
and her partner agreed.
“It’s a tidy garden.”
“A very tidy garden.”
“And look, it’s big – there’s an extension at the back.”
They walked out of earshot.
I didn’t feel sad at the thought of someone else living there,
or outraged at the thought of someone talking about my mother’s house as if it
was on the open market – after all, it was! I ached because she wasn’t there.
No matter how many times I go up to stay with a brother or sister, she won’t be
there. It wasn’t a chore to visit her, a woman in her nineties. She was
vivacious, alert and chatty and she had a great sense of humour, a ready laugh.
She was good company, and easy. And she was a rock.
Not one of my siblings – and I love them all – is a substitute
for her. She wasn’t there on that bright spring day and she won’t be there in
May for my nephew’s wedding, when the May blossom is out and the verges are
thick with sweet cicely and cow parsley. She won’t be there to smell the Arthur
Bell roses in June, or the lavender in July. She won’t be there to enjoy the
colours of Crocosmia Lucifer in August, or the Michaelmas daisies in September.
I have to get used to losing her. To having her missing from my
life. To have her gone, out of reach, unavailable for hugs or chats or
encouragement, to live without that unfailing love that made the world feel
safe.