A moment that changed me – saying goodbye to my mother when I was 10
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Version 0 of 1. It was mid-November in 1985 and I was 10 years old. When I said goodbye to my mother that night, I had no idea that it would be the last time I saw her. It would also be the last time I saw our home, our cat and, it turned out, it would be the end of my childhood. Say goodbye to your mum, the kindly ambulance man said. I put my arms around her waist and complied. I didn’t tell her I loved her. I didn’t say much of anything. I thought she’d be back, like she always had been before. Thirty years later, the abruptness of that moment remains etched on my memory. It marks the transition from the safe and secure life I had known as a child, to the uncertain world of adulthood, a place where cruel and random things happen. A world in which I was effectively alone. My mother, it turned out, had breast cancer. She was 32 when the diagnosis came, and a single parent. I later found out that she had told just one other person, but even then, she didn’t let on how ill she was. Perhaps she didn’t know. She hid her mastectomy surgery and subsequent rounds of chemotherapy from me. I find this astounding now – having had a double mastectomy and chemotherapy myself, age 36, my mother’s faulty genes passed on. She told me she was frequently in hospital because of a bad back. How she explained her hair loss – she wore a wig, and I vividly remember her fretting about the possibility of it blowing off in the wind – I simply can’t remember. I didn’t tell her I loved her. I didn’t say much of anything. I thought she’d be back, like she always had been before That night in November, she was 35. She had a bad nosebleed; it would not stop. A side effect of the chemotherapy, I now know. Sitting on the side of her bed, trying to stem the flow, she said she thought she’d better go to hospital, just in case. She arranged for her friend to come and pick me up. Two ambulance men turned up in our small flat with a stretcher. There was a bit of a joke and a laugh, because of course my mother didn’t need to be borne away on a stretcher. She simply walked out of the door with them and got into the back of the ambulance. She died in hospital three days later. I can’t remember how I felt that evening, not really, but to my adult self it sounds frightening. But life had been different lately. My grandmother, her mother, who helped bring me up, had died a few months previously, and I had been thrust into a strange, half grown-up world. I was trusted to be home alone for short periods. When she was there, my mother was often in bed, and I roamed around the flat until late in the evening, untethered, alone. But of course I wasn’t grown-up, not at all. My mother’s death was a seismic event. But it has made me what I am today. From an early age I knew that life was unfair and upsetting. That loss is the reason I got married – and quickly divorced – age 30, the reason I subsequently spent six years in a relationship with someone who couldn’t meet my needs, not at all. It’s the reason l went to university and became a journalist. My love of words is undeniably down to my mother, an avid reader who taught me to read before I went to school. Today, I am independent, strong and frequently uncompromising. Grief is not linear. It strikes at inopportune times. At a slumber party in my early teens, I read the message in a classmate’s birthday card. It said something like: “Happy birthday darling, we love you so very, very much. Love from Mummy and Daddy.” I broke down completely, because I realised that no one would love me like that ever again. I was a big hit at that party. No wonder I didn’t have many friends. Today, I mourn different losses. I’ll never know what she would make of the world, of me. I’ll never have an adult conversation with her, a glass of wine. So much lost, forever. But now I am 40, and I am newly in love. Amazed at our good fortune, my boyfriend and I, on many nights, sit and recount our lives to each other, and I find myself reliving this moment for him. But this time it’s different. It has taken me years to understand that the love and safety I have been craving for so long are now inside me. I will always miss my mother, and the moment she walked out of the door and never came back will stay with me forever. But three decades later, I know I can live with it. |