My mother died last week.
And yes, she didn’t have a great quality of life anymore. She was no longer the social butterfly who flitted around ours and other people’s lives.
She was lonely with the death of my father only two years earlier. You say these platitudes to feel better.
But she was resilient. She lived independently, something she had always taught us to be, leading by example.
But in the last six months, she had food poisoning, she had covid, and she had muscle wastage. She tried to learn to walk again, and had good days and bad days. Sometimes she switched on and sometimes she switched off. She went down, but she always came back up. That’s what resilience is.
But in the end, she stopped walking and ultimately stopped eating altogether. All of this despite the rather impressive efforts of the food staff who piped her mushed up food to look just like it was meant to – mushed up carrot piped like carrots and a very impressive portrayal of a filet of fish.
It was a rapid deterioration and her geriatrician said she had saved up all her aging to the end.
That means she lived 95 good years and a few months of not so good. And by anyone’s reckoning, that is indeed a good innings.
But at the end of the day, she was my mother and, good or bad (and yes, we experienced both), a girl only has one mother.
I don’t think I will ever get used to being an orphan. My daughter tells me that to be an orphan, you have to be under 18, but my mother always had the capacity to bring out my inner child. So under 18 is exactly what
I feel like right now.
I have certainly cried like a baby. Surely the well must be dry by now.
When my parents used to go on holidays (we grew up on a heady diet of holidays and Sunday picnics), I used to miss the idea that I couldn’t phone them. Too bad, that when they were home, I probably wouldn’t have phoned them that week anyway.
And now, they are on an eternal holiday. I can only speak to them in my mind. But every time I park in what Mum would call the ‘wrong parking space’, every time I play Moon River or Jesse on the piano, every time someone touches the back of my head, my mother speaks back to me.
