The Day My Mother Died

I’m glad I was able to love my mum before she left this mortal coil

In the week leading up to my mother’s death around 3am on February 2, 2016, I had a pretty intimate conversation with her.

I had finally gotten around to trusting her and realized that she wouldn’t hurt me if I shared some old memories with her. She’d mellowed in her old age.

We’d had a fairly complex relationship over the years and had caused each other much pain.

In that week before she died, quite suddenly, I’d told her about my first kiss and I reminded her of the time it happened.

As a family we often ‘went camping’ when we were kids. This involved towing an old caravan out to a vast field alongside a river that ran along the boundary of the Kerrs’ farm in South Canterbury in the South Island of New Zealand.

The Kerrs were a farming family and they kindly let us camp on their farm over the long, hot summer holidays with our ponies. My mother loved horses and had some success breeding tiny Welsh mountain ponies.

Willow trees lined the river beside our campsite and their branches dripped into the water.

Even then I knew this was idyllic. We were the only people for miles around and the only sounds were the burbling of the river, the odd sheep baaing in the distance and a constant buzz of cicadas.

Mum and Dad slept in the caravan which had an awning off it and we kids slept in sleeping bags on ex-New Zealand Army stretchers in an old canvas tent a few meters away.

We had been camping there for a few days when a couple of other families arrived for a barbeque. Mum remembered the occasion which would’ve taken place around 1967.

But she hadn’t known about The Kiss

She chuckled when I told her over the phone and she remembered Hamish, the boy who’d kissed me on that hot summer evening.

I developed an enormous crush on him and wrote him letters which he didn’t respond to — my first painful rejection of many. I was only 14 and he was at least four years older, a gulf in those days.

Hamish died a few years later, tragically, of natural causes, one day when he was out for a run.

He would be the first to die in a long line of people I was close to over the years. As a result I got used to death and dying and read authors like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross so I could understand grief a little better.

I even did voluntary work as a carer for people with AIDS in Sydney in the early 80s so I could better understand the death-and-dying process.

But no amount of preparation prepared me for Mum’s death.

I got a phone call from my sister Belinda to say Mum had ‘had a fall’ and was in hospital.

The details were sketchy: she’d fallen down some stairs while she was staying at the home of another sister, Penny, north of Auckland and was in North Shore hospital with broken ribs and a torn shoulder.

I called Annie, my youngest sister, and she filled me in with a few more details.

‘She’ll be fine,’ said Annie, reassuringly. Mum’s injuries were definitely not life threatening; some broken ribs, that torn shoulder and a bump on the head.

The phone’s scary ring woke me up with a start around 4.30am and my first thought was ‘What on earth could be so important?’

It was Annie apologizing for something — ‘I’m so sorry’ — and then everything seemed to slow down.

She said mum had just died.

I froze and couldn’t find any words so I just pressed ‘end’.

It was still dark and I didn’t know what to do. I wondered if I could go back to sleep and went back to bed, lying on my side with my tears seeping into my pillow.

Sleep was definitely not an option.

So, I got up and made a cup of tea. I was on auto pilot.

I felt numb

I sat in a chair looking out of my window to the sky which was getting light with the dawn, and sipped my tea, remembering Mum.

It was as if everything — the buildings down on the street, the clouds, the cars stopped at the lights, the furniture in my apartment — was draped with a blanket of gloom.

We’d become close in the past few years since I got sober.

My relationship with my parents had never been an easy one and we’d had many fractious times. Their politics were way right and I’m way left. They disapproved of me big time and I felt rejected and spent many years in therapy trying to come to terms with the pain of it all.

Early in my recovery, I remember going to a meeting and sharing about the ‘love fest’ that had developed in my relationship with my parents since I’d quit drinking.

After the meeting, one of the old-timers, a crusty old dude with a twinkle in his eye, said to me something I’ve never forgotten.

‘Funny how other people change when we get sober.’

I chuckled and understood immediately what he was saying, somewhat ironically, and have often shared that moment with people in early recovery who are struggling in their relationships with family.

It wasn’t my parents’ fault, it was me all along; seething with resentment at their draconian rules — wanting them to understand me when I didn’t understand myself, or what drove me to drink.

The disease of addiction, which is in my genes, is a powerful force and can lead a person along some pretty rocky roads.

But with sobriety, I’d been able to learn a new love for my mother and was just starting to trust myself to get vulnerable with her and tell her things like the first time I kissed a boy.

That was a big step for me and I was relieved that it went well. I was worried that somehow she would tell me off because I was only about 14 at the time. But it was a chaste kiss and nothing else had happened.

Except that I became besotted and my first experience of that ended in rejection and hurt because Hamish had ghosted me.

And now Mum was gone

Even today, six years later, I sometimes think there are things I’d like to let her know about.

I know she’d be thrilled, for instance, that I got my first robot recently. When robots first became a thing, I remember her calling them ro-bos, and wondering why she mispronounced the word.

She loved innovation, and her iPad which she bought herself some time in her 80s. I think it helped her think of herself as ‘keeping up’ and being a bit modern.

She was 89 when she died and still fit as a fiddle.

Anyway, my robot vacuum cleaner is a marvel and I reckon mum would’ve marveled at it.

Thanks for reading.

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