Last Monday it rained ALL day.
I'd planned to visit Epping Forest, near where my mum lived for 42 years but not fancying a soaking I postponed until the following day. So on Tuesday I traced the journey made on frequent visits during the final months of Mum's life, cycling to Leytonstone tube, traveling 6 stops on the Central Line to Debden, then cycling the mile or so to her home. Setting out on my journey I passed an undertakers and saw a wicker coffin being respectfully transferred from a van into their premises. It was like the one we selected for Mum last year. I felt little. There is a numbness in me at times, where I observe what I could be feeling but the feeling doesn't come. I'm aware of a level of self protection and wonder if the years anniversary of her death will allow a turning of this tide. The feeling is akin to holding my breath, and soon I may gasp for air and grief might bloom.
Slightly to the side of and separate from reality, I cycled through Debden, turning left and swooping down Willingale Road, swerving to avoid pot holes and cracks in the road. Then right onto Etheridge Road, left along Colebrook Lane, then a final right onto Pyrles Lane. The roads were quiet and clear. I cycled up Pyrles Lane dropping gears on the incline. When passing Mum's house I felt nothing. It is a Council House and we always knew the keys would be handed back one day. The house is so familiar but Mum is no longer behind that door, watching TV in her chair, the memory already feels distant. A quick glance, noticing ornaments on the windowsills, the garden scruffier. While peddling I recalled this time last year and my fears about what I would find, turning the key and opening the door, gently calling Hello Mum, worried that I'd find her in distress, fallen, dead.
Onwards to the forest, memories of walks over the years. Mum surprised me once by asking to join me on a walk to Theydon Bois and back with Jessie our beloved Battersea rescue dog. A photograph from that day sits in my living room of Mum holding Jessie's lead, posing for this now precious photograph. Climbing off my bike, I wheeled it into the muddy forest. There is a wide path into the woods and I enjoyed its familiar gradient, noticing the still bare trees and dark trunks caused by persistent rain. A tree creeper alighted onto the trunk I was looking at, I knew its name because my sister had told me on a walk in the forest a few weeks earlier.
Delight! I was alone in the woods and all around me birds sang, revving up, stating claims for territory, for mates. Underneath their song an unseen stream ran at full spate, swollen from the previous days rain. This wood so familiar, a 10 minute walk from my childhood home and still the trees stagger me, old pollarded beech trees, human in their knobbly forms. It is a very special place, unlike any other forest I've experienced. This part of my life is closing down, my links to the area gone with Mum's death, the neighbours we knew gone also. The thing I dreaded has happened and I survive and move on. It is hard to lose your mother.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a drop-in healing session at the Spiritualist Church in South Woodford. As the healing came to a close a radiant green light filled my closed eyelids and the words, It is hard to lose your mother came into my head. It was an incredible moment and filled me with hope.
