Remembering Mum

This was taken a few short months before her diagnosis.

I’m 47, the same age as Mum was when her body let go and said enough. For two years she fought cancer, in the end it won. I want to tell my story, the story of a 13 year old and how I processed sickness and then as a 14 year old, how I processed her death. In part I want to give a voice to those who have walked the path I stumbled through and in part as a tool for me to work through this strange year, the year I become older than my mum. I’ve written it as a series of snapshots because that’s how memories are. It’s strange the things we remember and yet each memory is significant because it’s what our mind has chosen to recall and that in itself tells the story. People often say children are resilient and to an extent that’s true, but it’s not the whole story. Every childhood trauma leaves its mark and how it’s handled at the time by the surrounding adults is often what dictates how a child will heal. Dad was a mess after Mum died and unable to support me and therefore I bottled everything. In some ways I’m still working through it now and that’s ok, that’s one version of normal, because there is no normal, everyone is unique and so is their journey through grief. Telling our story is one cathartic way to help us heal, so here’s mine.

November 1990. It was the evening of the school dance competition. I was dressed in my costume ready to perform, ‘Big Spender’. We’d been rehearsing for months, ready to rip off our science overalls, pretending to be housewives and reveal our glamorous outfits portraying women escaping from drudgery. It was a mature theme, but we all thought it one big laugh and yet that night I was to begin to realise what adulthood meant.

The nerves were kicking in but Mum and Dad would soon be here and that would provide some calm in my stormy mind. I was ready to walk over to the sports hall, as it was our turn next. As I left the holding room I walked straight into Dad, he told me he needed to speak to me. “We’ve just come from seeing Mr Skilton, it’s cancer, you’ll be going home with Rachel”, no emotion from him or myself. Mum was there but she was hustled off and that was it. Ready to dance; just keep moving became my mantra.

The dance went off without a hitch, I was a good girl, no fuss, no tears, no feelings.

Rachel took me home to her house, I remember her house so well, the loft rooms of the dormer bungalow, the sliding cupboard doors with games. Every other memory of the next week has gone, no recollections, just emptiness.

The night before her surgery, to remove the cancerous section of her bowel and to reroute her bowel to form a stoma, Dad took us all out to a fancy French restaurant. Mum choked back the tears and played with her food. Dad had no idea how to handle this.

The day of the surgery we went to visit Mum. She was in a room on her own and was suffering with terrible heartburn. Dad went out to buy some peppermint cordial, I just sat with Mum. I loved her so much and I needed to be with her.

On return from hospital it was found she had an abscess on the site of the wound and so she went into the private hospital to have them attend to her. I liked that hospital, it was near my school and I went once and sat with her. We watched ‘My Step-Mother is an Alien’ and I ate delicious chicken sandwiches which the nurse brought me. That was a good day, I got to be with Mum.

When she got home a district nurse came to pack the wound each day, they were nice ladies and they made me feel safe, they were a calm presence in my world which was spinning.

One Friday, in an effort to rediscover normal, my parents picked my sister and I up from school, with pillows in the back of the car. We both knew what this meant, a weekend away. We were off to Wales, but I’m not sure for whose benefit? Mum spent the weekend in bed with Welsh district nurses coming each day to pack her wound.

Mum started to recover and one day she was having a bath and I accidentally walked in on her, I was so embarrassed and backed away, but she invited me in, she said I might as well see her stoma now. It was dark pink, like the inside of your mouth, it was on the left side of her tummy. I didn’t want to see it, but I didn’t want to make her feel bad, so I said it looked ok, what was I supposed to say?

For the next year Mum battled with her colostomy bag as the humiliation of life with her bottom on her front frequently assaulted her. I recall a holiday in Tunisia, in a beach hut toilet, she was trying to mop up the mess when her colostomy bag over-filled. As if that wasn’t enough, Mum started going through the menopause and I remember her desperately trying to clean up from the flooding that came each month, her body was being battered from every side.

I loved the days before she returned to work, she was increasingly well and I even came home from school once to a Victoria Sandwich. Soon she was well enough to go back to work and life started to briefly settle down.

February 1992. Mum was late picking me up from school, but finally her red Volkswagon Golf pulled up at our pre arranged spot. It was always a treat when Mum picked me up, she was a busy working woman and it was often Dad who got me after work. I climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s back” was all she said. I don’t remember anything else until the chemotherapy. Months of no memories as my mind blocked out what I couldn’t bear.

I remember the hair loss. Her efforts to style what was left, to hold on to her dignity. I remember the herbalist, a place where she collected brown bottles of hope, to go with the doctor’s brown bottles of morphine. She was never called terminal but everyday I climbed into her bed and she would ask me if she was going to die. I always reassured her she wasn’t, what was I supposed to say?

The Jehovah’s Witnesses kept coming round but thankfully their visits ended and the vicar’s began. Mum was looking for meaning, I suppose she was looking for God. I used to sit on her bed when the vicar prayed, I knew to bow my head, it was part of the process, but I felt nothing.

Dad was always sure she wouldn’t die, he regularly told her she would dance on his grave. No one danced.

July 18th. Her lips were blue and she had no energy. Dad said it would be good for her to get outside. It took an age, she shuffled down the stairs on her bottom and diligently sat in the deckchair.

July 21st. I had a school trip. As I left that morning, I said, “I love you”, she replied, “I love you too”, those were to be our parting words. All day I walked the Dovedale paths, not knowing my journey forwards would be much more treacherous. 3.30pm I was collected from school by the vicar and my sister. “Mum’s died” she said. I laughed. It wasn’t funny.

I got home the house was packed. Police and Mum’s friends filled the rooms. I needed to do something, to be busy. I saw a need to buy milk for the visitors’ cups of tea. I’d never done the three mile ride to the shop, on my bike, and I asked Dad if I could go. “Let her go” spoke up one of my Dad’s future girlfriends.

As the funeral neared, my sister and I went shopping and bought matching funeral clothes from River Island. Black pleated skirts and purple silk shirts.

I didn’t cry at the funeral, I felt like a fraud, embarrassed by my lack of emotion. The church was full of Mum’s pupils, she was a popular English teacher. I held my head down and tried to look sad. I needed to play my part, but I felt nothing.

The next day I got a summer job cleaning out cats. I worked, I felt nothing, keeping busy kept me from thinking. My childhood had officially ended.

It took 7 years for me to cry and then only briefly. I’ve been told you need to feel to heal. I’m trying, this post is a step.

Grief is complicated, childhood grief perhaps more so. But this isn’t the end of my story, because of God.

He stepped in and gave me himself, he called me and I became his child. When my mother had gone and my father was lost to drink and other women, he saw me, for he is ‘El Roi’ as Hagar referred to him in Genesis 16:13, ‘the God who sees me’.

He is also the God who cares for the orphan and he delights to ‘settle the lonely in families’ Psalm 68:6. He has done that for me. First he gave me a church family and then he gave me my husband and children, what a gracious God we serve!

Our eldest son recently got married to a wonderful young woman. Yet again he’s shown me his goodness and restored to me the broken years.

Everyday I am thankful for what he’s done. Sickness and death are part of our fallen world, but God is a redeeming God and he won’t leave us in the mess. He, ‘will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten’ Joel 2:25. He has a plan in our pain and will lead us through it, we just have to keep our eyes on him.

If you’ve got to the end of this, thank you for reading. Everyone has a story to tell, if you want to share yours, I’m listening.

Blessings to you all.

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