Today is one year since my mom passed away. That makes me very entitled to random, awkward outbursts and being very emo indeed. Here are some reflections.
For me, her passing (geez, I hate that phrase. Sounds like some kind of bowel movement) wasn’t a huge shock. I had been living for three years knowing it was going to happen, and a year /waiting/ for it to happen. For the last 6 months before her death I had been longing for it to happen. Seeing someone you love wither away like that is heartbreaking. And she wasn’t just someone that I loved. She was beautiful and charming and I could feel myself slowly start to become like her. She lied for me, she took hits for me, and she put up with all of my crap, even when she got so sick.
The years while she was sick are just one big blur for me. I moved house 3 times in 3 years. I’d stay home with mom instead of going out with friends or relatives, to make sure she was ok. I’d wait for her to get home and help her to bed when she’d been out in the pub all night with her friends, trying to forget that she was sick. And sometimes, when it got really bad, I remember picking her off the floor and climbing into bed beside her, telling and re-telling the stories I used to read. My mom always loved me telling the ones where the girl grew up to be a Knight, or the ones where she could fly.
Looking back, I knew she was going to die. I just never thought about it. I just assumed that I’d keep living a quasi-parental role with no real guardian. I never thought what would happen to me once she’d passed away. Even while she was in the hospice, looking gaunt with her abdomen all distended. When I didn’t want to visit her because she looked so awful. When I was so embarassed the one time we took her out to a restaurant because she was so high on medication. Through all of it, I never thought about the next step.
I did my English GCSE exam the morning after I heard the news, and did just fine. I didn’t cry, my best friend brought me coffee and chocolate to school instead.
And that was just how I lived. While my relatives fell into crying heaps I’d rather lie on my bed, thinking about religion and death and story plots. People started to become concerned that I “wasn’t crying”, and even today I get targeted by well-meaning people who tell me that it’s ok to be sad. I was sad that she’d died, I just wasn’t ready to throw myself off a bridge.
I did feel like it wasn’t fair, though. How could a woman who had come through so much, who had (I can tell people now) lied in job interviews to get positions, had the worst personal life imaginable… how could someone survive through over 40 years of life and then wham, be cut down by cancer and be dead before I was 17?
This world is absolutely terrifying when you think of it like that. Why bother trying if you’re going to wind up dead anyway? A friend of mine told me that little in this world is as important as trying. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.
So here’s to one year. A year where I moved back to Africa (which I thought would never happen), a year where I became someone whose parent was dead (and with my parents divorced I also became someone else’s “ward”), and a year where my best friends helped me live where I might not have wanted to otherwise.
Also, a year where I got bloody good GSCE results. It’s good to know I can work under pressure.
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