Submission 35

Dear Mum,

It took me a long time to start this. You left a little over five years ago now, but you were with me for almost 27 years.

In all that time you loved me so utterly and completely, with every bone of your being, you told me every day I could be anything I wanted and meant it. You battled so much in your life, and yet most people just knew you as someone who cared, someone who brought light and life into the world.
It is such a shame, but perhaps often true, that it is only after people die that we come to truly understand what it might have been like to be them. When you got ill, I did my very best to understand what it might be like to feel the pain you did, but of course I never could have known truly. It’s stupid and ironic that only in death we see someone’s whole picture, their whole life laid out like a story. If we had all that information, perhaps we would know how to help people better while the are here.

Your story was amazing and tragic and fascinating and painful. You lost the love of your life in the most brutal way, and only now I’ve fallen in love do I have some inkling of what that must have done to your sense of self. Losing a father figure was a different experience to losing a partner.
My own grief for both of you has been hard. I’ve developed a way to keep you in my life, but have had to create a special space that I can choose when to open. When left uncontrolled, my grief can seep and swamp every part of my life and it feels like it can easily suffocate the beauty of actually living. To me, now, this makes complete sense and is nothing to be ashamed of. But eventually, if possible, you have to find a way to take grief with you. It shapes who you are, the decisions you make and what you prioritise in life. I no longer care about things I used to, and in some ways your death set me free of certain things that were holding me back.
We grieve because we love, and I was left with a deep fear of love after you left. We were so ridiculously close as mother and daughter, your loss was like having most of my vital organs ripped out. But the last year of your life was so painful and chaotic that I also experienced deep relief. An emotion people fear to admit, but a very real one for those who are carers for those in turmoil and pain.

I love when people ask me about you, it’s one of the best things people can say. What was she like? It lets me share you with new people.
Of course I wish you could have met the man I love, the puppy you would have adored, seen my home, where I live, everything I am now. But in all likelihood my life would’ve been different anyway if you were here. And I don’t regret anything I have now. So instead I choose to see you as here anyway, in the way I am and choose to live my life. I hear your voice in the car when I sit too far forward in my seat to drive, and when I mix up certain words, or get scared of thunderstorms still. Your love, your reassurance and your unfaltering support.

So thank you, for everything you were and still are. I know you’re proud, I can feel it every single day.

Love you millions and millions,
C