I once described losing my mother as like the sky suddenly falling down. It’s true what they say, you can never really understand what it’s like until it happens to you. I thought it was about time I wrote about how losing her has changed the way I see the world, has changed me and what it’s been like trying to get my head around it all. It is so fab to see your smile again.My mother died just over 5 years ago from cancer and not a day goes by that I don’t miss her. PS My younger baby looks just like you now and I love this. In the last moments of your life, I hugged you and called out these words, I shouted them, head buried in your chest, printing them indelibly on your heart. All day long, whenever we were alone, I spoke them into your ears and whispered them to your hands. These were the last words I said to you on the day you died. I suppose with this letter I want to say I’m sorry. I let you down and I truly, madly, deeply hate myself since you’re gone. I try to tell myself that it was self-preservation and it was, but it doesn’t change the fact that I hate myself. The wall that I built to keep you out as you got sicker and sicker. I cannot go to this place or think of our happy days without the knowledge of what I will do to you in the years to come. That’s the thing, grief really, really hurts. I cannot go there too often though because it really hurts me. I love this place because it once contained you. I think of a certain beach in a certain light, on a certain day. You were talented and you loved other people’s talent. You loved to entertain people but you also needed to be alone quite a lot. You taught me to eat, talk, laugh, walk, cycle, drive, cook, swim and appreciate a serious piece of cheese. You were silly, and good at accents, you held me when I was a baby. My dad who wrote exclusively in pencil, loved dark chocolate and red wine, who could wear a hat like nobody else, who was devoted to working on his tan and owned every CD and record in existence. I cannot bear to think of us together in the days before, when the word Alzheimer’s was a distant thing, a thing that had nothing to do with us. It’s gross and self-indulgent but every time I think of you, the guilt stirs and creeps back into my body polluting my every thought, even the thoughts of the happy days I spent with you. I don’t know why I signed up to it because the truth is that a year on I can barely think about you let alone talk or write about you, not without the death-grip of guilt tightening around my throat. I suspected that writing to you would be a bit of a downer. Then the terror swept through me, terror that you were back locked inside that dying head with not one single pleasure left in this world and all because I just wanted more time.Īfter a long illness everyone talks about the release of death. The relief that I could go and sit in the airless room – a room I thought I hated – where you had dwelled (I refuse to call it living) for years and sit by you again was so profound that for a moment I felt weightless. That when they’d stuffed your mouth with cotton and strapped your jaw and drew the sheet up over your head, it had all been a mistake.
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