1. I lost my mum to motor neurone disease in 2019. My mum was only 70. It sounds silly but at the time (I was 39 years old) I felt that I was far too young to live without my mum. That inner child shouted & screamed from inside me. I was left behind and how on earth could I live without my mummy?
2. Two of the things my mum loved most in her life were playing the piano and singing. When she was poorly in a hospital, but still without a diagnosis, I remember her saying to me, “I will get through this by singing.” She lost her voice shortly after.
I grieved not hearing her ever again, before I physically lost her. I remember having a 10 minute conversation where mum was trying to tell me to push her glasses back up her nose, as they had slipped. Something so unbelievably simple that she couldn’t do for herself or even ask me to do for her.
3. I have found that the things that drove me absolutely mental mad about my mum are the very things that hurt so much now they are gone. They are the things that make her, her, and no-one else does them, or will ever do them again. For a long time after her death, when waking up in the morning, the reality and truth would drift back into my mind and I would say inside my head over and over ‘my mum’s dead, my mum’s dead’.
4. There were so many people at mum’s funeral, the day is a hole in my memory. I wish I could remember all the people who were there, and all the conversations about her that day. At the funeral people feel ‘comfortable’ talking about your loved one, it’s an ‘appropriate’ time to talk, not so much when you bump into a friend when shopping at Tesco on a Wednesday evening, when your grief is beating out of your chest like a jackhammer and the big elephant in the back of the shop belongs to you.
5. For me, my four year old niece is the main person in my family whom I feel comfortable and enjoy talking to about my mum. She still remembers her even though she was only two years old when Mum died. It’s breathtaking how my niece’s mannerisms mirror my mum’s. The peace I get from this is immeasurable. Mum lives on in us all.
