The Day Mum Died

Death isn’t the end

Pressured into going against my intuition

‘Go home and get some sleep!’

‘I want to stay; I know she’s going to die soon, and I don’t want her to die alone.’

‘You’ve been here for 19 hours; you need some sleep. Your mother has hours left yet. I will phone you in plenty of time to get back here before she dies.’

I didn’t want to leave, but the nurse was insistent. Something in me just knew the nurse wouldn’t be able to keep her promise, but I’d been ordered to go home and sleep, so reluctantly, I did as I was told.

Two and a half hours after crawling exhausted into bed, I was woken by my phone ringing.

‘Come now; your mother hasn’t got much time left.’

What had been a forty-minute trip on empty roads in the middle of the night to get home was now a two-and-a-half-hour arduous journey in rush hour traffic to get back to the hospital.

When I arrived, I was too late. Mum had already passed.

The guilt

I wasn’t upset that she died; she was suffering, and I wanted that to end. But I was profoundly disappointed that I had not been there when she passed.

I imagined her leaving her body, looking down and not seeing me there. Would she think I didn’t care enough to be there for the biggest trip of her life?

The nurse tried to reassure me that it was typical for dying people to wait until their families had left before passing on alone, but I didn’t believe Mum would do that to me.

When Dad died, my mother had left the nursing home just a short time earlier to go home. She was very distressed to find that he died soon after she left and felt she had failed him by not being there when he passed.

I knew there was no way she would want me to feel that.

The tangible presence of Mum’s soul

I took a seat by Mum’s bedside. Her body was surprisingly warm, but the fact that her blood had already pooled underneath her dispelled any possible illusion that she was only sleeping.

Yet, I still felt her presence near.

I looked up from her body and could see a shape hovering a few feet above her, like energy, not solid; bright but not white, pinkish. The shape was smooth, oval and flattened — like a bar of soap halfway through its life.

I tried to make sense of the feeling that was emanating from it.

Have you ever felt the presence of the divine? I would use the term God, but your understanding of God is likely different than mine.

My experience of the divine presence is a vast brightness of bliss, peace and unconditional love that leaves me feeling loved at a depth no human has ever reached.

This energy hovering over Mum’s bed was like that, but on a small scale, and yet, not entirely like that.

It also felt like Mum, and yet not wholly like Mum either. It was like Mum with all the crap taken out, a pure, divine version of Mum.

A parting lesson

People often say, ‘You can’t take it with you when you die’, referring to material things, but in that moment, I realised that’s not the only thing you can’t take with you. All your stinking thinking, anxieties, fears, worries, judgements, jealousies, anger, hate, negativity, etc — that all gets left behind too.

Anxiety and reassurance

Mum was to be buried in the same grave as my dad, who had died four years earlier, and that meant transporting her body about 130 miles to a funeral home near the cemetery.

Stories of people burying a stranger instead of their loved one due to a mix-up at such times filled my mind. I wanted the peace of mind of knowing it was actually my mum in the coffin that we were going to bury, so I went to visit her at the funeral home.

I’ve always found the idea of viewing a body before burial a bit ghoulish, but I understand everyone has their reasons for doing it, just as I had mine on the day I went to view Mum’s body.

I opened the panelled, unpainted wooden door and entered a room with bare floorboards, a rug and curtains. As I stepped into the room, the overwhelming feeling I had was emptiness.

The room was empty. Mum wasn’t there. I couldn’t sense her presence like I had at the hospital, even though she had already died before I arrived. ‘She’s not here’, I said to myself.

I sensed that Mum had long gone into whatever lies beyond this life. I have reasons for believing this life is not all there is, which I formed based on my life experiences. I’m sure you have your own opinions, based on yours.

The coffin was to my right, behind the door, and in it lay what felt like an actor’s prosthetic costume, a discarded outfit for the role of a lifetime.

Her eyes were sunken, and her mouth had been stretched into a smile that wasn’t hers and sewn together. Her skin felt cold and waxy, and she was wearing the sweater I had chosen for her.

I imagine if we meet again, she will have a go at me about that sweater. ‘Whatever were you thinking’, she would say, ‘of all the nice clothes you could have chosen, you chose that’.

Mum was a stickler for appearances. Her neighbour arranged to have her windows cleaned after she died because she knew Mum would be appalled at the thought of people visiting the house when the windows weren’t sparklingly clear.

I knew Mum would rather turn up in the afterlife wearing clothes smart enough for a wedding, but I liked that sweater, and it was warm. I wanted her to be warm. It’s completely irrational, I know, but that’s how I felt. So, sorry, Mum, for the outfit.

A surprise visit ten years on

Ten years later, I had just stepped out of the shower and was sitting on the bed getting dressed when a motorbike tore down the main road that runs parallel to mine.

The speed limit on that road is 30 miles per hour, but from the sound, he (I’m guessing it was a he) was going at least twice that.

‘Ooh, he thinks he’s at Brand’s Hatch’, my mother’s voice said in my left ear.

I was shocked at hearing my mother’s voice so clearly and at the invasion of privacy. ‘Is she often hanging around with me when I’m half naked?’ I wondered.

I was also confused because if that was my mother, how did she get it wrong? Brands Hatch was a racing circuit for cars, not motorbikes, and the boy racer was definitely on a motorbike.

I Googled Brands Hatch and found that in the 1950s, it started as a motorbike racing circuit.

In the 50s, before Dad contracted polio, he had a motorbike and was a motorbike racing fan. I know they visited the Isle of Man TT races, and from this encounter, my mother also knew about motorbike racing at Brands Hatch. I didn’t.