eleanor

In May 2019 a dear friend died of ovarian cancer. As the first anniversary approached I saw a call on Facebook to make an offering or gesture by water at 11am on the date of her death. 

I got to the river in good time and gathered a handful of wild garlic, cow parsley and jack by the hedge, twisting and weaving the stems into a circle. Hunkered down in my chosen spot I observed sunlight reflected from the waters surface flickering upon the pale undersides of overhanging leaves and dippers dart from bank to bank, weaving invisible threads of flight. At 11am I placed my offering into the river and watching it float away, felt connected to others making their gestures in still and following waters and seas. A small thing but one that bought Eleanore and her loved ones into my thoughts these past few weeks.         

it is hard to lose your mother

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. 

the 'c' word

A year ago today my mum and I went to the doctors on Pyrles Lane for her most recent blood test results. As we sat and waited for the taxi mum applied her lipstick and my heart leapt as I noticed her jaundiced skin against the pink shade. We had to swap shoes, as her swollen feet wouldn't fit into hers, so I unlaced my trainers and she just about got these on. It was a hell of a job getting her to the doctors, her legs so swollen it was difficult to bend them, so getting into and out of the taxi took monumental effort. It was at this appointment that it was obvious she was gravely ill. There were inflammation markers in her blood. The 'c' word was mentioned and I wanted to cover her ears, protect her, for the doctor to tell me and not her. 

My mum died of suspected liver cancer 19 days later. She endured with no complaint and didn't ask for anything. In the final weeks of her life my sister and I took turns staying with her, so she wasn't alone in the house. Her health declining fast we did all we could. She didn't want medical help so it was only when things became desperate that we asked for assistance. I'm still processing the shock of her death, and that she died from cancer. She was tough. She did it her way. She lived for 81 and a half years, just like her own mother. 

In the run up to the first anniversary of her death I'm counting down and remembering the anxiety and fear of knowing she was dying. I've always had a sense of protecting mum, as children, she used my sister and I as a shied against our violent and unpredictable dad, sleeping in our shared room. It was an unusual, topsy-turvy relationship. 

I couldn't protect her from dying, but, alongside my sister, I could be present and ensure what happened around her was the best it could be, especially in her final days on morphine and semi-unconscious. I've felt untethered this year, not part of the world. My life has a different purpose. I can no longer protect my mum and I've lost the job I was born into. 

resting place

Furmage Family Plot

This Sunday, my sister and I went to our Mum's grave. We added another bag of compost to the heavy clay soil, planted spring bulbs and perennials and edged the grave with white stones. It was a beautiful, cool, bright autumn day. Before this work I cleansed the space using burning sage, ridding the grave of any residual bad energies. We had a dreadful experience with a member of the cemetery staff before burying Mum's ashes, and sadly, this tainted our goodbye, so cleansing the site was very important.

With soil under our nails we traveled to St Paul's Cathedral, for the Bart's Health NHS Trust & St Joseph's Hospice Annual Service of Remembrance. This service is held in memory of all who have died in Bart's hospitals in the previous year. People of all faiths are welcome to attend and the service included readings, music and poems from a variety of religions. We were invited to write the name of our loved one on a card and this was taken to the altar in a symbolic gesture. It was moving to see the baskets of cards and consider our collective grief.

Attendees were given a beautiful long stemmed white rose to take home, it was heartwarming to see these roses carried tenderly down the cathedral steps, onto the streets, the buses and tubes. It was an unforgettable experience, shared with strangers who walk a brave path with their grief. 

Mum would have been thrilled by the idea of a service in her honour at St Paul's.

ashes

Yesterday would have been mum's 82nd birthday. Yesterday we buried her ashes in the family plot. Doreen Edna Logan joins her mother and two of her sisters on the East Road in Islington and St Pancras cemetery. 

Mum kept a photo of her mother by her bed until the end of her life, this photo was placed in her coffin before cremation. They are reunited. 

My mothers ashes in her petal urn

telling

Telling someone your Mum has died is like being interviewed for the worst job ever...

How old was she?

Was it sudden?

She must have had you when she was older?

If I answer this barrage of meaningless questions, then I feel spent, vulnerable, cross. All someone needs to say is 'I'm sorry to hear that. How are you doing?'. Then I'd feel seen, heard and my heart would soften. 

I'm keeping myself away from people. I have nil energy for flakiness, clumsiness.

mum

My mum, Doreen Logan, died on the 2nd May. Her funeral, on the 18th May was a month ago today. Now I am paused, at times with no words to describe how I feel.

As a little girl I stitched this lavender bag for her using fabric scraps and ribbon. It still retained a trace of scent almost 40 years after its making. It was one of the items placed in her coffin.

ruby

In the summer of 1990 I worked in a nursing home for a couple of months before heading off to university. My father had died in the June and I left home for Derby in September. 

My father spent the last months of his life in hospital, dying on the morning of June 2nd. Watching him slowly fade, gaunt, with bedsores and towards the end his oxygen starved brain leading to confusion, I was a teenager with a larger than most experience of ageing, and a teenager in deep, profound distress. Working in a care home was a strange choice looking back, like prising my eyes open with matchsticks and forcing myself to gaze unblinking at suffering, failing bodies, death. Was I numb? Did I feel some duty? I do not know.

There was a woman in the home who was dreadfully confused, behaving as a toddler. If left on the toilet for too long she would smear herself, her thighs, walking stick with excrement. I remember being on my hands and knees washing her, verbally scolding her. In some part of her brain she knew she had done wrong and whimpered a little. In her room was a black and white photograph taken in the 1930's of a stylish, smiling young woman with beautifully waved dark hair, she had on pencil pleat shorts, gorgeous legs and was perched on the back of a motorbike. Young, at ease, carefree, loved, our reality and the image at odds, and I've never forgotten that moment. She was a girl just like me. 

Just once I went into Rudy's room, the curtains were drawn and in the dim light I could make out a naked figure on the bed, she lay on her back and was so thin, I recall my shock at seeing the outline of her spine through her stomach. The room smelt of urine, and Ruby was conscious, eyes open, uncomfortable, my memories are vague, that we turned her, bed sores being present in many... Outside, I felt a shiver of enjoyment from a staff member who regarded my reaction, probably assuming that was my first encounter with death, having no understanding of my own recent trauma.

Death was in that room, and I hope it came soon. Over the years I've thought about Ruby, never forgetting her name, never seeing her girl self photograph. I also think of the other woman, the one who's name escapes me, but her image does not, the young creature, radiant at the beginning of her womanhood. Its been almost 26 years since these experiences, their families do not know they are with me, that I sing for their bones. 

Around this time I remember sitting at a bus stop, an old woman glancing at me turned to her friend and said loud enough for me to hear, Young people today don't know their born,  depressed, newly bereaved, working in a care home I vowed never to be that unseeing woman. 

skinned rabbit

As I think about my dad departing this life I wonder upon his description of me on my entry into it...

My dad said I looked like a skinned rabbit when I was born - v e r y long, pink, reminding him of his boyhood past hunting for food. While my mother laboured, dad was in the pub. Mum has no memory of the time of mine or my sisters birth. She was cut, forceps were used, alone and quiet in her labour. 

Me the skinned rabbit
Him the hunter, with trap, with sling shot, with arrow?
Hope for a son
But a daughter, watchful, reflective, brave
LOOK AT THIS, LOOK AT YOU
As sensitive as him, him before

nicotine

My memories of the 1970s are stained with tobacco. The upper deck of buses were for smokers and I remember the fog and stink of smoke, of my travel sickness and puking into see-through plastic bags. At home dad smoked, in no doubt helping along my childhood bronchitis and later, asthma, which has left a weakness in my lungs today.

Dad stuck polystyrene tiles onto the living room ceiling, the only way to conceal the spidery cracks that polyfilla was no match for. These tiles soaked up nicotine, each month deepening in colour, giving the room a sepia and nostalgic feel. When I was old enough and with money from my Saturday job I would buy a tin of white paint and erase the last years worth of roll ups. In that unhomely home I tried my best, did the jobs my parents couldn't see or have the power to do anything about. I made do, mended and now I work to forgive. 

Later, aged 19 I watched dad's health decline and him spend the last three months of his life in hospital. The night before he died, oxygen deprived and confused, I gave him his last sip of water and fed him a grape, my final acts for dad. As I said goodbye I put my face close to his and he looked into my eyes and frowned, as if meeting an acquaintance he couldn't quite place. Walking to the train station that night I prayed he would die, please die. He obliged the following morning, alone. 

Sitting next to his body, my way of saying goodbye was to touch and take the measure of him in a way I couldn't while he breathed. I placed my thumb and forefinger around his thigh and felt the sheet below - he weighed 7 stone at death. Flattening my hands I patted his still warm chest and looked into his eyes which were beginning to discolour. Discovering that it is not possible to close the eyes of the dead I felt cheated by the films I'd seen where so easily, so obligingly the deceased close their eyes. His remained open, him absent, body empty. No faint rise and fall of the chest, so still. Unnerving.

My ritual complete, I turned my head at the sound of an anguished cry of 'Dad!' as my little sister rushed into the hospital ward. It was heartbreaking.