Losing mum

 Warning- This post deals with subjects some people may find upsetting.

2023 is the year I lost my Mum. It was a loss that I felt particularly as I had been her primary carer for seven years though I never classed it as that till someone pointed it out. Such an endeavour inevitably took a lot of time and took its toll on me too. Mum had dementia but thankfully she was still able to converse and understand stuff. I’d been looking after her at home as best I could but after she went into hospital in May last year it soon became obvious she would not be able to return there and we had to look for a care home.

 

When you say `care home` it triggers a certain reaction from people and its not a positive one. People always say `I could never go into a care home` or `I could never put my relative into a care home` but mostly there is no choice. The care home mum spent her last six months was thankfully an example of a good one. The staff did as much as they could to make her comfortable and they worked long twelve-hour shifts. I thought looking after one person was hard work but imagine dozens, each with different needs and behavioural traits. I’d go in and see her each evening and at weekends, visits that both of us looked forward to. The staff said she smiled more when she saw me walk in than any other time and I hope that I was able to cheer her up even if, due to the nature of her illness, it was only for the time I was there as her short term memory was quite poor. One of the traits of dementia can be that the sufferer stops recognising family and friends and the strange thing was that while this had started to happen when I was at home with her, when I visited her in the care home she always knew me.

In February she celebrated her ninety sixth birthday and the staff made a fuss of her including presenting her with a large cake. I wish I could have been there but when I did arrive later, she was still enthusing about it which itself was rare. I am so glad she had a good last birthday. Remarkably the only piece of footage I have of her is on that day as one of the staff thoughtfully filmed her getting the cake. Somehow, instinctively I knew how important that short clip was when I first saw it.

Less than two months later I got a call to tell me she had fallen earlier and was now in a bad way, probably she had another stroke. She was asleep mostly after that but on the Wednesday of that week she woke briefly to complain she was too hot so I moved the blanket whereupon she was cold so I put it back! Then she drifted asleep again. This basic exchange was our final conversation. Unlike in the films there was no big goodbye, no drama, just the ordinary.

It is very difficult to describe what its like to lose someone who had always been there for your entire life. It leaves such a void which you cannot be filled. Yet I was so lucky to know her for so long and to progress through the journey from her looking after me to me looking after her and everything in between. Unlike many people in my situation there is no unfinished business, no lingering issues, just the ups and downs of a parent and child.

For the funeral I wrote the eulogy, a summation of her life, at least what I remembered as people of her generation rarely documented their lives as we do now. I’m not one for public speeches on any occasion so a celebrant read it out professionally sounding like he had known her when in fact they’d never met. During this speech the sunshine which had been hiding away broke through and I looked at it’s rays filtering through the branches of a nearby tree. Then our chosen music played. Who said life can’t be like films? As much as a funeral can ever be described as such it was a perfect goodbye. I thought Mum would have liked it - simple, dignified, respectful.

Eight months later I am moving on I suppose, as we must, yet often I think of mum and what she would have said, what she might have thought. I always used to be sceptical about the sort of things people said about the person always being there in your mind but it is true. She is gone but she is still there. I will see something quite trivial and for just a millisecond think I’ll have to tell her about it but it happens less as time goes on.

I know that grief is a difficult topic to talk about and analyse as it affects people in different ways and this post reflects nothing more or less than my personal experiences. What I can say is that it does get better. At first it is easy to fall into the mind set of thinking of yourself- your loss, your grief, your pain. “What am I going to do now?” Then it becomes about them as you approach the funeral. There is so much stuff to do, things you never imagined beyond all the administration if it.

Yet the hardest time I found was afterwards. When all the sympathy and ritual is finished, when everyone goes back to their lives, what then? I found the answer is time. I decided not to look into what seemed like an endless night but focus on what was happening there and then, day by day. After all the majority of our time is spent on small, ordinary things and if I focussed on those the bigger things would come later.  

If anyone asks how you cope with grief I can’t give a definitive answer because it is different for everyone. What I can say though is its better if you have good memories of things that did happen rather than regrets about things not said or done. I was lucky to know my mum for such a long time, a lot of people have not had that for whatever reasons. So if you don’t see your mum much or there’s been a fallout, or you’re just too busy then my advice, for what its worth, would be to change that. Take the time to see them while they are there rather than always regretting not doing so. Its too late when they aren’t there and then that’s on you. Good things don’t last forever so appreciate them while you can.