My mum is gone

On Wednesday 19th April, my mum died suddenly.

She was beset with a multitude of illnesses over the past 12 months, including sleep apnoea, fatigue, and breathlessness. Each time she would go to the hospital to get it all checked out, and then return home fairly normal before getting sick again.

I have spoken about my mum here before. We were semi-estranged due to her partner, a malicious and abusive man. No longer able to take his disrespect both to her and to me, I left home. Our relationship waned for a while before I accepted her demons, and the cruel childhood she endured that perhaps limited her maternal skills.

But I loved my mum. We had fun. Lots and lots of it. The only reason I’m into true crime is because we used to watch criminal investigation shows on the Discovery Channel when I was a kid. I’m a writer today because she gifted me a love of reading. I like Stephen King novels because even in primary school, she let me take her books off the shelf and read them. Every summer, she took me to work with her because it ran a 6-week play scheme for its employees’ children. We would get up early and take the 345 from Peckham to Clapham Junction. She would pack snacks for me to eat on the way. I would then wait for play scheme to start, sitting on her spinning chair in the office with a hot chocolate and bag of Minstrels from the vending machine. Clapham Junction has always been associated with that time. I can’t ever go past on a train or a bus without thinking about her.

My mum struggled with a lot of things. Unlike some parents, she didn’t mind putting herself first. Sometimes it would hurt us, and her decisions would create unsettling ripples. I think all three of us, her surviving children, carry some burden, some scars, the bruise of drowning, because of these decisions.

She struggled physically. Towards the end of her life, she chose us. She never divulged just how unwell she was. As my sister and I went to her house to collect her things, I found items in her handbag that had no purpose there: mortgage details, energy bill statements, pension company contacts, solicitor receipts. When my sister called around local funeral homes, they told her my mum had taken out a fully-paid funeral plan last year. She was getting ready to go. But she didn’t want us to worry about anything. She remained happy and upbeat, concealing as much as she could, putting our pleasant obliviousness above her discomfort.

We were upset with her these past two months, because she kept on popping into hospital and only telling us after she had been discharged. We didn’t understand why she was having all these breathing issues and not keeping us in the loop. Over Easter, she texted us all again to say she was back in hospital, but unusually, they were keeping her in for a few days. I marched over to the hospital ready for war, to tell her off, to rant at her, that if anything were to happen, her partner would never tell us. He didn’t like us.

My anger melted on my tongue. I hadn’t seen my mum since September 2022, her birthday. I would have visited her on Mother’s Day, but my son had an infection, which gave me one, and she was wary of getting sick.

I looked at her in the bed and saw a spectre. She was acting normal. We laughed and joked, and finally, I chided her for her carelessness. During the conversation, she told me that whenever she died, she wanted to be cremated, and for her ashes to be scattered on her son’s grave. That son died when he was a baby in 1990, a year before I was born. One of the many tragedies of her life that I never appreciated, that I never properly considered when assessing her during times of my own anger and disappointment.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went outside to get us some lunch. I felt my heart grow thick. I gasped and cried in the hallway, looking crazy, calling my husband to say “she’s sick, she’s really sick!” I then sent a message to my sisters. I don’t want to alarm you, I said, but mum isn’t well. Be prepared the next time you see her, because she isn’t the mother you remember. I listed everything I saw on her body that gave me cause for concern. They panicked and googled everything and panicked some more. For the next ten days, we called and messaged her on rotation, reminding her to keep us in the loop whenever she felt unwell. She felt our love for her. She thanked me for caring, and said she would be more mindful.

And then the call came. I had been out all day on Thursday 20th April. We were driving past the cemetery in which my brother is buried. My phone rang. By divine instinct, my husband parked the car. I heard the choking gasp of my older sister down the phone. My heart went thick again and clogged my ears. I couldn’t hear anything. A word whispered through the cotton in my head. Someone went to bed and couldn’t be woken up. Dozens of ambulances and police cars and coroner vans flooded that person’s road, invaded that person’s house, tried to revive that person, and then took them away and put them in a fridge. I still couldn’t hear properly. Just my sister gasping and saying words that were crunchy and dry because the cotton in my head was so impenetrable. I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. This death, whoever this person was, had nothing to do with us. We didn’t know anyone in a fridge. We didn’t know about coroners or where to find one. No one had ever cut up our bodies except for self-harm and caesareans. Nothing made sense.

It’s been just over a week since that phone call and I still don’t understand it. I talk about my mum as if she is someone else’s relative. I can’t imagine her in past tense. My son does something cute and toddler-ry and my hand pauses over her photo. No, I say. You can’t send her that video. Not yet. Send it to her later. She’s just gone somewhere.