Months, years can go by and then in one blinding second, a simple reminder can take you back to somewhere you forgot ever existed. Be it a smell, a touch. A song. A memory you’d completely forgotten about, suddenly lived as if it happened a second ago.
October 2014. My mum, on her second cancer diagnosis, recovering from chemo. My brother, my nieces, all at the family home, enjoying an autumn day. My brother is in the kitchen holding one of my youngest nieces. She is almost 2. The Cinematic Orchestra playing on the speaker for some background noise. My beautiful, gorgeous niece, singing along. I was lucky enough to capture it on my phone. 20 seconds of pure joy, until she curled into my brothers shoulder and hide from the camera.
I’ve not heard that song for sometime, or seen the video. Until today. Sometimes memories are forgotten, pushed down into our subconscious. The ones we really don’t want to remember or the ones we wish could. I’ve not watched anything with my mum in it since she passed away. I can’t bring myself to. I can hear her voice clear as anything in my mind. Calling my name. But to hear it in a video. To see her, still alive. I’m not ready.
Making a start clearing out some of her things was hard enough. Finding foreign money she’d saved for holidays she never took. Always wanting to, but ultimately another surgery got in the way. Surgery so she could live, but not in the sense she should of. No transatlantic flights to see family, no weekend getaways. No change of scenery. Just bland hospital walls with the paint peeling and waiting rooms with the same magazines that people thumb through, but never really read.
I couldn’t bring myself to clear anything else. It feels so final. It’s gone from a home to a house. Yet, everything there is a reminder of how much a home it was. How much love and joy was encapsulated into 2 floors and 8 rooms. Now it’s just a shell. Keeping all my mothers worldly possessions under cover until I can till bring myself to be pragmatic enough to clear it without sentimentally getting in the way. I don’t know when that day will come. If it will ever.
My best friend said goodbye to her father last weekend. A long battle, and an even longer end. The memory of it all, comes flooding back like a tidal wave. The deflating feeling that your lungs get when you can’t get your breath back. That’s how you feel the first few days, few weeks. And slowly you learn how to breath again. Until something suffocates you, reminds you and you’re back to that first moment of loss all over again. That moment of shock when you can’t tell what’s real from what’s not. You can’t separate fact from fiction. Words are spoken but you can’t hear them. You can’t form a sentence without having to go over and over in your head what words you’re trying to say.
Words absolutely fail me. I want to tell her, with time, it will ease. Tell her to take comfort in family and friends. I want to tell her it will get better. That in time, all the good of her father will flourish in her sons and that she’ll see how all the love he had for her, is passed down, and in that, he’ll live on forever. I’ll say it because I want to believe it. I want to believe that with time, grief will give way to hope, and the crushing depression that hangs over my head like a fog will clear and I can carry on doing the things I did to make my mum proud. So I wouldn’t be a let down of a daughter.
It’s over a year now, but still. That moment will live with me forever. The one memory I wish I could forget. Not because I want to forget my mum. How could I ever. But because I want to forget the absolutely crippling pain of knowing you’ll never get to make any more memories with someone. It’s a painful process, dredging up the past. Warm happy memories of times when we were the luckiest family. Then the not so lucky times that you try to suppress. The times when you realise how fucking hard it was for my mum at times. Those are the memories you don’t want, the bad times. The guilt ones. The ones that made you realise how much she sacrificed to make her own children happy, despite being desperately unhappy at the time, because of someone else. The guilt comes back again, and the good memories dissipate like clouds over a scorching sun. All you’re left with is the bad. And all you wanted was a happy home.
I can’t change the past. No amount of grieving will bring my mum back. No amount of guilt will atone for any bad I’ve ever done. So put one foot forward and keep moving. Slowly.
@specsygurl
tetheredinthedeepend 