Last evening, my mother passed away. It was a routine heart operation, although a pretty major one. They told us there was a risk involved, and we accepted that. She had had a few health scares in her life, and this time her luck ran out.
The old cliche about people being here one minute and gone the next? Yeah, it may be a cliche but it’s true. In that first paragraph, I originally wrote “She’s had a few health scares…” in the present tense. It was horrible having to hit backspace, to get rid of it. To correct the insane, absurd but entirely true and unavoidable fact that my Mum’s gone. My Mum’s gone.
Right now my life is in a holding pattern. Already there are legal things to fufill, things to cancel, funeral arrangements to be made. That will have to wait until morning. For now I’m sitting here with a billion things going round and round my head.
I want to make it clear that the reason I’m writing this isn’t out of some grotesque need to make “content” or garner sympathy from strangers. I just want to put out a marker out into the world, even if it’s through something as insubstantial as a WordPress website on the slowly decaying internet, that my mum existed and that she mattered and that I won’t ever stop being grateful to her.
I don’t want to dwell on the ending, so I’ll tell you about what came before.
She was, at one time, a member of the Official Beatles Fan Club. (I once found in her possession one of the late 60s newsletters / magazines you got from there – the one with Jane Asher and Macca on the front.) But her Beatles fandom utterly paled in comparison to someone else. From the 90s on, I think she may have possibly been the biggest fan of Rik Mayall – unoffically, of course.
I’m only realising now, writing these words in a daze, how important she was to me in terms of comedy and humour. She had a natural wit to her that for years she kept hidden away. Only me and my sister would ever get to see it. In her later years, she decided she couldn’t be bothered pretending to be normal, and would often come out with some bizarre yet hilarious bits of nonsense in conversation, often with people who weren’t expecting it. Sometimes, like your average comedian, she would go too far. Unlike your average comedian, she would apologise.
Of all the things that Rik did, she liked Bottom the best. We have never laughed at anything so hard and as long as that show. Even in her hospital bed, where I talked to her for the last time, she would make oblique references to the series as a matter of course.
She actually became a lot more liberal in her outlook as she got older. She wasn’t perfect, and I’m not going to say she was some paragon of progressiveness, but it was amazing the way she mostly defied the usual drift to the right that old people tend to go through. She may have been shocked and saddened at the Queen’s death, but at the same time she couldn’t help admiring the fury behind “God Save The Queen” by The Sex Pistols. (I never mentioned John Lydon’s current late-period nastiness to her.)
She often recounted a story about Derby Day, around the late 60s or 70s. Her and some of her friends were on the side of the road somewhere near the Epsom Racecourse, straining to peer into some toff-carrying limos chuntering through the downs. She glimpsed Lord Snowdon, who also glimpsed her. She said she never forgot the look that he gave her, a stare of sheer hate that chilled her to the bone. It presumably only lasted a split second, but she would often bring it up.
I have so many memories of her being with me and my sister, the three of us on little outings during school holidays. Going to the video shop and letting us get out a VHS copy of Speed Racer, inexplicably released for the UK market. We’d go to the library, and I might get a Douglas Adams book out, or a “make a daft invention at home” thing by Wilf Lunn. We’d go to the park, she’d let us play and tell us to mind the dog business. (This instilled in me a habit that has saved the shoes of some of my friends.) She’d let me buy a budget Spectrum game. She’d allow my sister to make a entirely undrinkable drink called “powinge soup”, made of Matey bubblebath and talcum powder, that my sister would demand was only for me and no one else and I had to drink it.
Sometimes she’d get so sad. She’d say that her life hadn’t worked out the way she’d hoped. But she was always happy that me and my sister were here, that she was responsible for us.
Sometimes she said she regretted bringing us into the world, as she didn’t realise that things could be so awful. I know this, you know this… but it doesn’t matter. I have to keep going because she loved us so much and she gave us a start in life simply from being there.
I need to keep going and doing things because of her. I need to keep doing daft nonsense to entertain people because that would be what she would have wanted, and it’s one of the few things I’m really good at. Does this make sense? Is it a healthy reaction? I don’t know. Life feels unreal and impossible at the moment. Possibly I sound quite manic at this point. If I do, I think you can cut me slack.
She was genuinely the best mum anyone could have asked for. She wasn’t perfect as I say, but she was my mum, and she was my sister’s mum.
I can’t think of anything else to write. I’m very tired but I can’t sleep. In a few hours the sun will rise, and then life will have to continue.
I miss you, Mum. Thanks for everything.