Last October, I had to make the grueling decision to put my mum in hospice. My mother suffered from high blood pressure all her life since she was a about 16, which lead to strokes and caused her vascular dementia. Dementia starts off slow at first, like pushing a boulder uphill but once you reach the top, gravity takes over and its all downhill from there. The past few years her decline seemed quite rapid, particularly to me since I was the one who lived the farthest away and didn’t see her daily. I did talk to her regularly though and those conversations were becoming more and more difficult but every visit it seemed she was losing yet another life skill; balance, walking, eating with utensils, holding cups, brushing her teeth, showering without assistance and dressing. Over time our roles began to switch and was becoming the parent and she was becoming that unruly teenager that she hoped I would have to pay me back for all the hell I had unleashed upon her.

I must admit, my relationship with my mum has always been difficult. Although she was my first close relationship, she was by far, my most complex one. We were so different in so many ways. And yet, some days, I see her in myself and I struggle to find the joy in that. Although my mother passed away in November, I’m just now getting ready to have her memorial. I just couldn’t properly plan anything before now and I’m still not certain I’m ready to do it in April on her birthday. I spent three weeks at my mother’s bedside with her while she died and wouldn’t change any of that time. I only wish that she would have been able to talk but the last stroke she had in February of 2021 left her non-verbal but lucky for me, her very expressive eyes told me all I needed to know. Those were the same eyes that would strike fear in me as a child when she would glare at me from across a room when were visiting at someone’s house and I was doing something she didn’t like. We were expected to be very well-behaved. My mum was very poor growing up and we weren’t at all wealthy when I was young, so we had to be well-mannered, clean, and well-dressed to make up for being poor; and my mum didn’t want us being “those” kids who would show up at people’s houses and beg for sweets and sodas like street urchins. She would make us sit perfectly still and when we were in someone’s home we had to keep our hands behind our backs while looking at other people’s things, something I still do today. My mother could give a look that could send shivers down the spine of a corpse! You always knew what was going on behind those eyes. I have those eyes and they give me away all the time!

She was the first person in my life, but I was the last in hers. No men, just us. Just like it should be I think. Even though we’ve had a difficult middle between those two points in time, I’m sure if you put those two times together, side by side, they’d be pure perfection; both of us in a hospital type bed cuddling and comforting each other while only one of us is able to speak. I was able to let a lot of anger and resentment go while watching my mother die.

When you watch someone die and see their body break down you can’t help but see their humanness, their helplessness and that calls your humanity. I once questioned if I even loved my mother. Well, I got my answer, yes, yes I do. No matter what had happened before, no matter what she did, no matter what I did, none of that mattered because here she was frail and helpless and weak. And absolutely nothing in me could turn away. For the first time in my life, I was able to say to her “I forgive you and I hope you forgive me too” and I meant it. And I felt a weight lifted from me and the veil of anger I had carried for so long just wasn’t there. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten the past or that I see my mum as a saint because I don’t. It just means that I can talk about the past without that painful connection to it.

I got to see my mum truly as just another flawed human being and not my mother and care-taker, which quite honestly, she wasn’t that great at to begin with. There seemed to be a different spirit to her, a child-like spirit in her final weeks. However, when I noticed her breathing slowing down and she was getting nearer to death, I could hear a voice inside me scream, “Mummy don’t leave me!” The child in me rose up and held on to her.

Although it was sad and painful watching my mother die, there were parts that I cherished. I can still see her face clear as day when I played one of her favorite songs from the movie she and I used to watch a lot together, The Color Purple, and she just beamed with joy. Her eyes light up and she looked right at me and smiled. I always cried at this song because the jazz singer Shug found her way back to her father and I had a terrible relationship with my own dad. I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that I didn’t exactly win the great parent lottery. My dad was a narcissist and mum, well she was obsessed with having men in her life and making them the center of her universe and obsessing over her weight because that’s what she was taught, which led to all sorts of self-loathing because she didn’t have the perfect Twiggy like body. She was the classic Mediterranean full figured woman with dark olive skin and my dad, was your classic racist asshole who liked to venture off into darker parts but then put her down for skin color.

Anyway, back to the jazz singer Shug, she found her way back to her preacher father who didn’t like her loose lifestyle by singing a song she sang when she was the star of the church choir, “God is Trying to Tell You Something.” Although I’m a non-believer, I love that song and now it has even more meaning since my mum and listened to it in her final days. That song ran through my head for months after she died and still does from time to time. I still wake up some days and just cry. With dementia they say it’s the long goodbye and that’s quite true. I’ve been saying goodbye to her for years. Although she’s physically gone now, she’s been leaving mentally for years. The past 5 years have been particularly difficult as she’s been hard to get along with as she’s become even more combative. She struggled with her own illness as much as we did and I hate to say I wasn’t always as patient as I should have been. It was clear to see that she was struggling with the demons of her childhood and that she had been dragging them around with her, her whole life. She was never able to see me because she had such a heavy veil of anger she could only see shadows and everything was scary to her. My mum was always afraid. That’s what drove her anger.

I try to focus on the positives with her because we had too many negatives and focusing on those would keep me locked into her way of thinking. Although our relationship wasn’t perfect, one thing I was always proud of was that my mother knew me. I remember in my early 20’s when a good friend of mine at the time who was in her early 30’s died suddenly and we had to go to her apartment and get rid of certain things her Catholic parents wouldn’t have liked to see in their grown daughter’s house like vibrators and lingerie. I thought to myself then, I don’t want anyone to ever have to do that for me. My mother knew about my life, the good, the bad and the perverted. I told her everything! We talked about sex, we talked about men, we talked about jobs, friends, and life. There were many years that I talked to my mother nearly daily. I still miss that the most. I often wonder what my mum would have said if she could have spoken in her final days but maybe it’s better that she couldn’t. I’m working on accepting what is instead of thinking about what could have been. I used to wonder, “What would my life had been like if I had had normal parents?” What if? And what if the sky were pink with polka dots? I’m learning a lot lately about how deeply I can involve myself in mental masturbation. It’s not going to get me anywhere and it’s not going to change what was, so what’s the point of spending time on it?

What I am spending time on now is how I’m going to memorialize my mum? Well, normally we try to honor people’s lives and how they lived but with my mum I’d like to honor her life by living a life she would have liked to live had she had different circumstances and less fear. My mum didn’t value her health and worked herself to death all because she thought that if she devoted herself to a job endlessly she could be seen. She never felt seen and she desperately wanted to be seen and valued. And somewhere down the line she was told that if you show up every day and work really hard and be quiet, you’ll be rewarded. Yeah, you’ll be rewarded with more work! Endless amounts of work! She didn’t know how to self-promote or negotiate a salary. Things I learned way too late in life because she taught me how to look for jobs. I did the same thing most of my career. One reason why I find it uncomfortable to talk about my accomplishments because it sounds like bragging and feels like arrogance and I feel like it comes like that and it probably does because I feel so uncomfortable about it. One of the things I constantly work on . One of the truly sad things about my mum’s life was that she truly had no idea how beautiful she was. She never saw her beauty and only learned to pick herself apart until their was nothing left but hatred, so I would like to say a few good things about her. She had the best laugh. She laughed with her whole body. I guess that’s why I got so good at making her laugh. And somehow, she seemed to allow herself permission to laugh at my raunchy humor. She loved animals and she was great with flowers. I’m shite with plants. And she made the best cakes and even had a small business doing wedding cakes for a while. She was fucking resourceful. That’s what she learned from being poor. She could make things look amazing and not spend much money at all and I definitely inherited that ability from her.

Another thing I’ll do to honor my mum’s life is self-care. I’ll make sure to get massages and manicures and pedicures. My mother didn’t do any of that stuff for herself. Actually, I’d like to start a fund for single mums, so they too can have a self-care day. They rarely have the money for that type of stuff.

Next month when the few of us in my family get together to remember my mum, we won’t sit around and talk about my mum like she was a saint, we’ll speak the truth about her; the good, the bad and the ugly. I’ll encourage them to practice self-care and to also find ways to remember a life she would have liked to have lived had her circumstances been different. I don’t know where she is now or if she gets to come back. I’m not a religious person but she was. I hope where ever she is that she’s at peace. If there is such a place as heaven, I hope she’s sitting on a big fluffy cloud stuffing her face with cake and never gains a pound and hears nothing but people telling her how beautiful, smart and worthy she is and she is filled with a sense of calm and peace. And if there is a place such as hell and it is what the show Lucifer suggests, of our own making, then my asshole father gets to watch her eat cake from hell, but can’t say a fucking word about her weight and he gets to hear nothing but people telling her how great she is and he has to live with the overwhelming sense of fear he instilled in others.

Be at peace mum. I miss you.