A Birthday

Today would have been my mother’s 85^th birthday.   This time last year I had no thought that she would not be around for her next birthday.  I just assumed that there would be at least another couple of birthdays, although I’m not sure my mother was so convinced.

After some one much loved dies, I think it is the ticking over of that first year and the passing of ‘special’ days that can be most difficult to bear:  the first Christmas without them, the first New Year, the day of their birth and the day of their death.  I managed to cope quite well with Christmas and New Year: I steeled myself and held it together.  But over the last week or so I have been feeling an increasing sense of dread, the welling up of grief and a dissolving of my carefully maintained composure. 

The last two nights I have gone to bed and cried, missing my mother, wishing that she could have been around for a couple more years, wondering if there was anything we could have done to hold on to her for a bit longer.  All of these things are of course part of any grieving but it was her birthday that was my undoing.  Last night I tormented myself thinking about her last birthday and whether she had any inkling that it would be her last.  I went back and read my diary for this time last year and was relieved to recall that we were all there for her birthday – that she had her two cherished grand-daughters pottering around her house for a couple of days; I’m pretty sure we got a cake to celebrate.  So it wasn’t such a bad last birthday.  There was some consolation in that at least.  But I still miss my mother and although 84 and a half years was a pretty good run, I still feel the loss and the unfairness of losing someone who still had a bit of living left to do.

one week

It is one week since my mother died.  Last Friday morning I drove across town to be with her for the last time.  The Darling Gardens were shrouded in fog and a shimmery,  unreal  kind of morning light .  By lunchtime the day was transformed by glorious late winter sunshine,  streaming through the windows.  But  all this played out in the background,  as I sat by my mother’s bed, holding her hand,  talking to her gently although she probably couldn’t hear me.  I kept holding her hand as various doctors and nurses came and went  and the life of the hospice continued around us – the plumber banging away at the pipes in the bathroom, another patient being moved into the bed opposite my mother  and all the associated business.  Finally my mother was moved to a quite space, a lovely room to herself away from the clatter, and there she spent her last minutes.  I think she waited because she knew I wanted to be alone and somewhere quiet where we could be together for the last time.  I watched my mother draw her last breaths, I held her hand, I told her it was OK to let go, that I would be alright , that everything would be alright.   And then it was over.  Perhaps the hardest part was leaving her.  My beautiful mother, lying still, no breath, and the warmth of her body gradually fading.  I stayed with her for two hours and stroked her cheek and kissed her gently on her forehead and smelt her hair and touched her hand  - all for the last time - and then I had to say goodbye.

In loving memory of my mother.