Ten Years

A letter to my mum on the tenth anniversary of her death.

Mum and me, 2012

Ten years, and it feels like a lifetime and also like no time at all.

I have to tell you that it doesn’t get any easier. Well, easier’s not the word I’d use. It gets more familiar: a stone worn smooth by the passing of time. It’s still a heavy burden to carry - I don’t think it will ever feel any lighter - but I’ve learned how to carry it . Some days, I can make it seem effortless. Looking at me, you wouldn’t be able to tell I was carrying anything at all, I’ve folded it down so small and tucked it away out of sight in my back pocket.

Ten years, and I’m very aware at the moment that there is always a small girl inside me who wants her mum. Not just a small girl, the adult woman is crying out for her mum too. But I’m supposed to be a grown up, capable of understanding that death is forever and that you are not coming back, so I tell myself it must be my inner child that’s weeping.

Ten years, and I feel like I should have learned better by now how to be OK in your absence. The death of a parent is a common-or-garden loss, one we can all expect to live through in the ‘normal’ pattern of life. You made it look effortless, when your mum died, only six years before you. At least, it looked that way to me as your adult daughter. I wish I could talk to you now about what it was really like for you when she died, or when your dad died thirty years earlier.

Your death was the roots being scraped out of the world. I knew it was coming, both as an abstract concept (one day my parents will die) and as a concrete reality (your mother has months not years to live). When it finally came, I was almost willing it on, because by then there was no other possible ending and it was so hard to bear witness to what the brain tumour was doing to you. Your death was still a shockwave that continues to travel through me, through my life, shaking my sense of self and my understanding of the world.

I think of that final goodbye, the day before you died. You were deeply unconscious by then, no sign during our visits that you knew we were there. No flicker beneath closed eyelids or twitch of your fingers against mine.

I think of the weekend before that, when you had slept and woken and slept again in the hospice bed, smiling to open your eyes and find us there. Your hand gripping mine surprisingly tightly when I said goodbye.

I think of the week before that, when I hugged you goodbye in the high backed armchair we’d moved into the living room for you. When I thought it might be the last time I saw you alive. You were awake and alert then, curled within my arms as I told you how much I loved you and thanked you for being such a wonderful mum. You couldn’t speak anymore, the tumour pressing down on the part of your brain that governed language, but your eyes replied to mine.

I am still so ashamed that I left on that final Sunday, took the train back up north to Durham, to my husband and three year old son. I want to shake that younger version of me and tell her to stay, tell her that her mum will die the next day, beg her not to leave that hospice room. But I know that present day me only knows these things because past me lived through them. This wisdom is hard won. And at the time it felt as though we would continue on forever in that liminal space between death and life. I knew you were dying, but I couldn’t imagine or accept that you would actually die.

Like my first experience of birth, I learned lessons through my first experience of a parent’s death that will stand me in good stead next time, but came too late for you to benefit from them. Thank you for teaching me.

The way the tumour robbed you of speech and, I’m increasingly certain, of language in all its forms, feels particularly unfair. No final words for you. I don’t know if you were scared or at peace in those final days and weeks. I don’t know if there was anything you wished you could tell us, anything you wanted to ask us.

You left a letter for us each to open after your death, but they were the letters you’d written to us before your first brain surgery over a decade earlier. I was so angry when I opened my letter, written to a previous version of me, to my 21 year old self, single and newly relocated to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to study for a Master’s degree. It was not a letter to present day me, 33 years old, married, a mother, putting down roots in the house we’d recently bought in County Durham. It felt like a betrayal. It felt lazy almost, until I realised that perhaps you could not write us new letters, perhaps language had abandoned you so completely that writing had become impossible.

I wish I knew if you were scared. I wish I knew if you could even understand the words we spoke to you by the end. Just like you wrote to me in 2003, I hope you knew how much you are loved.