Six Years Later

Sometimes I get the timeline muddled up, a terrible affliction for an historian
I forget which came first, the death or the obsession.

It was, of course, the death.

I started to become an historian four days before my mum began to die. I don’t know what kind of historian I would have become otherwise.
I was always morbid, always. Always thinking about illness, and how bodies are put together, how they go wrong and how they’re fixed. How they’re not fixed. What pushes a body into becoming unfixable.
But watching Mum die was new, with new knowledge of just how much humans can take before they cannot.

Mum’s death was not the first. The first came in 1995 when my friend at school died of cancer, and our choir sang at the funeral. A teacher died, another old school friend, grandparents, a neighbour, another neighbour. Deaths that gently laid on top of each other in my heart. A heaviness, a compression, not destructive, just weighty.

Mum’s death broke my heart. As the eldest daughter, I was at the centre of the storm, and the story. My role was to explain, over and over and over what was happening, what had happened, what happened next. It was not a narrative I could escape. Even now, I cannot tell the story of my life without telling the story of her death. She made me, in more ways than one.

There is a great gulf in understanding how someone dies and understanding how someone dies. My mum died of cancer. That’s how. She died on a bed in the dining room in the night. Another how. She died amongst constant vigils by siblings, children and husband. Another how. She died slowly, but fast. That’s how. There was nothing unexpected.
It was still shocking. How she died became the pivot point of a maelstrom, a strange, bewildered grief shared by everyone who loved her. How could she just die?

We can know the story, tell the story, but we cannot always understand the story.

Six years is long enough for the shock to ebb away. It is long enough for the anger to mostly be gone. The abyss that opened in front of me six years ago, with that first great grief, is less terrifying. You learn to build a pathway, shaky and unstable, but a way through the dark unknown. The grief stays with you, a love with nowhere to go.

I plough my grief into words, and hope this…somehow…keeps her alive.

Everything I do is infused with my mother’s memory.

I love you Mummy.