Life

My mum brought in the New Year of 2022 in hospital. On the surface of it, not such an astounding revelation. Many people in Scotland bring in the New Year in hospital, except mum hadn’t been involved in a massive pub brawl or a rowdy domestic, despite her Glaswegian origins. She arrived early on the 31^st of December to little fanfare. She’d been admitted in a confused state, with – as we’d thought at the time – unrelated pain in her legs and feet. By the time I came to see her in the stroke ward, staff had already shuffled her through three different wards; not because the nature of her condition had altered or deteriorated – or because she’d actually had a stroke – but because sometimes that’s what they do in a hospital: a game of human Tetris to free up space.

Of the three other patients sharing mum’s room, she was the healthiest, albeit still quite weak and groggy. Thankfully, whatever medicine or attention she was getting seemed to be unscrambling her brain, at least in terms of the malady with which she’d presented. I remember feeling relieved that my mother wasn’t one of those other poor wretches, especially the little lady in the far corner with the short, hard shock of dirty grey hair, and a face permanently pulled into a scowl: an absolute dead-ringer for Mac’s mum from ‘It’s Only Sunny in Philadelphia’.

“She was calling the nurses f***ing ****s last night,” mum told me with both a conspiratorial smirk, and a little glint in her eye. I looked over at Mac’s mum, who was staring dead ahead – not at us, not at anything – with the sort of murderous intensity usually only found on the faces of mob bosses. Perhaps she was peering through a rent in the fabric of our dimension that was visible only to her. If she was, something in the multiverse was majorly fucking her off.

My visit with mum passed quickly, peppered with pot-holes of silence and occasional vrooms of banter. The normal conversational conventions don’t apply in a hospital. It feels like church. Or prison. Or a prison chapel. You don’t want to drag the healthy, regular world too far into the room for fear of making the ill person sad they aren’t experiencing it, but neither do you want to concentrate too much on the minutiae of life on the ward for fear of depressing them. So what the hell do you talk about? Crop rotation in 13^th century Europe? The career of Diana Ross? I wondered if our stilted conversation owed as much to our relationship never having evolved or expanded beyond our family markers – despite the ever-present love between us – as it did to situational social awkwardness. Beyond observation and analysis – the act of trying to decipher my mum as if she were a character in a book, or a test subject – had I ever really known her? Had she ever really known me?

As I was leaving, I made some quip to mum about her throwing a wild party the second I’d left the room, which prompted Mac’s mum in the corner to pipe up with: “Shut up! Just shut up, you arsehole!” I laughed out loud. Mum did too. A few days later mum was discharged, and we were content to put her recent health-related stutter-steps down as blips. But she didn’t get better. She got weaker. And sicker. She lost some motor control. She refused to get out of bed, and when she did she often fell. While in bed, she moaned and screamed in agony, claiming that the pain in her legs was unbearable. She was often lucid, but in her quieter moments she would say the most bizarre things. On one occasion, she calmly anticipated a visit from cousins who’d long since died. After a few short weeks, with the bulk of the medical professionals with whom we liaised offering neither constructive help nor sympathy, mum was back in hospital.

This time, the cast of characters was reduced to one. Mum’s new stage was a small oblong room, lit in that minimalist manner of all hospital rooms; an eerie luminescence pitched somewhere in intensity between a long-haul night-flight and a deserted underpass. The air smelled at once acrid and anti-septic. A cloying, chemical sweetness danced through the decay, trying to convince me that everything was normal. But it wasn’t normal. I couldn’t reconcile the image of the helpless old woman who was lying inert in the centre of the room with the big-hearted virago whose love and damage and kindness and cruelty and contradictions and laughter had shaped my core. She was a living ghost, her death a mere formality that was busy being negotiated through every aching and failing cell in her body. I knew the moment I looked at her that this would be our final act together, and that it would be short. I clasped her cold, frail fingers in mine, and stroked the papery skin below her knuckles with my thumb. Wherever she was in her mind, whatever feral and fractured part of it still remained, she reacted uneasily, almost with shock; as though she’d been immersed for too long in virtual reality, and was no longer capable of making a distinction between the real world and the virtual. The collapsing world in her head was the only thing left that seemed real to her.

I looked around again at the spartan room. There was nothing of mum’s essence; no reflection of the things that had made her a person. I wished there’d been a picture to hang, or a video to play, so the nurses could’ve seen her as a fully-fleshed, multi-faceted woman, and not simply looked upon her as a vet would a dying pet. Mum had been alive: larger-than-life, as the old cliché goes. Had the nursing staff and doctors been privileged to meet mum in her prime she would’ve charmed or enraged them, with no half-measures in-between. Mostly she charmed people: she couldn’t help it. She had an unslakeable need to be liked and needed, but it never manifested itself in a desperate or tragic way. On the contrary. She loved being in company, and the company loved being with her. When my teenage friends would call the house-phone to speak with me, she’d sometimes speak to them for half an hour or more first. At restaurants, she would engage in such protracted and animated conversations with complete strangers that she seemed to be angling towards adopting them into the family.

But there was no record of that here. Just bare walls, and the bleeps and bloops of the machines that were helping her to stay alive.

I tried to reach out for her floundering consciousness; to pull it onto whatever piece of still-functioning psychological flotsam I could find; to give her back some of her humanity. I grabbed the swinging robot arm with the television attached to it, and found a radio station that played hits from the 60s and 70s: the soundtrack to her heyday. I kept the volume low, but started to talk to her about the songs that were playing, asking her if she recognised them, if she liked the music. Mostly she babbled, or dozed. Except once, faintly but perceptibly, she whispered: “I like that music.” Her words came to me like a gift; like a light in the darkness; a foghorn in the mist.

I was being a dutiful and compassionate son, but – and these are the kinds of thoughts that torture me, with or without the proximity of death – was this actually a selfish impulse? Was I simply a scared little boy who wanted his mum back at all costs, not realising or caring that even a small jolt of awareness might bring her unimaginable fear and pain? Or was I desperate, believing from one too many Hollywood movies that to bring someone back from the brink of death all you need is the correct sequence of emotive words chanted spell-like over a dying person’s bedside?

I’ve only thought these things in retrospect. At the time I was too frozen in my soul – or whatever passes for it in a heathen like me – to analyse on any useful level exactly what I was doing or feeling. In any case her incredibly rare moments of lucidity, too fragmented to form any sort of encouraging pattern, were heart-wrenching for me, too. As a jolt of pain shot through her body, bolting her rigid, I clasped her hand, and told her in as reassuring a tone as I could conjure: “Mum, you’ll be okay. You’re in the hospital and they’re looking after you, and you’ll be out of here in no time.” Her lips curled into a half-sneer, and through the pain and adrenaline she angrily asserted: “I’m not going to survive this.” That was lucidity we both could’ve done without. Mum was trapped inside of herself, unable to get out, as the roof-beams and high-walls of consciousness retreated from and crashed upon her with ever-greater violence, and no-one, not me, not the doctors, not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, could ever put her back together again.

But the nurses can’t tell you that. Because miracles do happen, and people are litigious. Instead they tip their hand in less direct ways: by exempting you from the normal visiting process; by inviting you to sleep on the ward; by suggesting that now might be a good time for far-off relatives to return to the roost. It felt strange to be talking with the staff on the ward – all of whom were unfailingly kind and attentive – about mum almost in the third person, as though she were a new-born infant, or a thought experiment. Mum was the person we’d defer to in situations like these; the one who’d be doing the asking and the talking, and absorbing all of the pain, even though she was fragile – deeply, deeply fragile – beneath her seemingly armour-plated exterior.

We can all relate to that. Our psychological defences might not fool us (and if they do we become delusional), but they can fool other people long enough to become self-fulfilling false prophecies. Play the clown even when you’re sad, and people won’t accept you as anything other than their jester, even when you’re dying on the inside. Act tough when you’re not, and in the long run you’re probably going to be crushed under the weight of everyone else’s worries and fears, your faux-strength becoming the weaker world’s feeding ground. My older sister told me that after one of her visits to mum she stood outside the hospital and took out her phone, finding herself seconds away from phoning mum, at home, to tell her about the poor woman she’d just been in to visit. Virtual reality isn’t always the preserve of the dying. Sometimes our brains cling to what isn’t there, because the pain of the realisation of loss is too much to bear. My sister needed her mum, then more than ever, but, in a cruel twist of fate and circumstance, mum was the one person none of us could have.

So the nurses ‘told’ me mum was dying, but they couldn’t ‘tell’ me. I wanted to scream at them: “Just tell me she’s dying! Say the words so I can stop killing myself with hope!” I regret with every fibre of my being that I didn’t show mum the courtesy of a vigil; that I didn’t feel able to take time off work to witness every moment of her final days, so that I could have given her what comfort I could, and been there for my family: for my sake as much as theirs. Adrenalin began to course through my blood, pumping an endless torrent of piss from my bladder, turning my legs to electric jelly. My thoughts, when I was away from the hospital, were like animals thumping against steel walls in a sealed room, their claws frantically scraping and scrabbling against surfaces, unable to find purchase. Unable to escape. I veered between the animal and the robotic, seeking sense in repetition, but failing to find solace or release. Not from this. You can’t run from death.

Throughout mum’s last week I spent three to four hours every night with her after work; an hour before work, too. Sometimes she knew who I was, sometimes she cursed and chided me (and I hoped, in those moments, that she didn’t know who I was). Most of the time she was half-conscious or asleep, her body twitching like a dog running in its dreams. I sat in the chair next to her. I had a book, but it went largely unread. I couldn’t take my eyes off mum. A time would come, very soon, when I’d only be able to look at her in photographs and, as painful as it was, I couldn’t stop. When I was 21 I saw my paternal grandfather in hospital not long after he’d died, his eyes tightly closed beneath his bushy eyebrows, his head lolled back, mouth agape. It gave me nightmares for weeks. I knew this wasn’t the way I’d wish to remember mum, but she needed me, even if she didn’t realise it. She was still my mum – had been, and always would be. If strangers could look at her, and not just look at her, but prod her and poke her and clean shit from her body, then I could sit there in her presence and watch as she fitted or slept, ready with a gentle caress or some soothing words if she grew frightened or agitated.

One night mum told me, in hushed and broken fragments of sentences, that she had to get up to tidy the place. I said I’d do it. That calmed her. She asked me if I’d remembered my pyjamas. I smiled and said that I had. She looked at me kindly, her eyes heavy-lidded, one of them more open than the other, and wheezed: “Do you want me to give them to your mum?” I clasped her hand tightly in mine as tears coursed from my eyes. My mouth and speech belied the presence of those tears, because I couldn’t let her see me break down. I had to look strong. “You’re my mum, silly. Don’t you remember?” She gave me an appraising look, slightly suspicious, her eyes boring into me as if she was trying to work out if I was a liar or a madman. The same look she’d given me on an earlier night when I’d mentioned my sons, her grandsons. “I have to go outside for a minute, mum, but I’ll be right back, okay? I love you.”

I had to get outside. My legs felt like floating hunks of lead. The walls of the hospital corridors felt like they were closing in on me. I sat outside the hospital, on the ground, and smoked a cigarette, the tears falling in great convulsing heaves. It was real, it was all real, and I didn’t want it to be. I would’ve given anything to have walked back into that hospital room to find her sitting upright in bed, hammering the help-button, and asking me what the fuck she was doing in a hospital, and when could I take her home…

When I got back to the room she was still lying where I’d left her, and still stuck somewhere between wakefulness and dreams, fantasy and reality, life and death. A few moments later she looked agitated again. She was concentrating really deeply on something, but it seemed to be confusing and irritating her in equal measure.

“Hello?” she said.

I smiled. “Hello, mum.”

“Hello?” she said again, more insistently this time. “Hello?”

“I’m here, mum. Hello.”

By now she was livid. “Hello?! Hello!!”

I suddenly realised that the machine housing her fluids had started beeping in a way that wasn’t too dissimilar to the trill of a telephone. In her fugue of illness and confusion she must have thought that she’d picked up a ringing telephone from its cradle, and the damn thing wasn’t working properly. I laughed. It was a relief to be laughing after so many dark waves of pain and sadness. What stopped me laughing was the thought that I wouldn’t be able to laugh with mum about this later, once she was better, like we’d done with Mac’s mum on the stroke ward. Or as we’d done immediately after her two near-fatal heart attacks when I was an adolescent, and she was freshly fifty-ish.

I’d driven through to Glasgow to the hospital to which mum had been taken following her second, quick-succession heart attack to find her weak but conscious, surrounded by my uncle, aunty and cousins. They left after ten minutes or so, leaving just me and mum. All of a sudden her face contorted into a mask of pain, and I jumped from my seat to look for buttons to press, readying to shout myself hoarse for help from the nursing staff. Seconds later, I heard the rip from the loudest fart I think I’ve ever heard in my life.

“Jesus Christ, mum!” I laughed.

“I’ve been needing that all the time my brother was in.”

“You almost put me in the bed next to yours there!”

Mum’s ‘fart-attack’ passed into family legend, endlessly repeated along with her story about being approached by Bruce Johnson from the Beach Boys when she was 17 and wandering Glasgow city centre on her lunch break. He asked her on a date, and she turned him down, because she told him she really had to get back to work. Back to work! She’d joke in her later years that as both she and Bruce had become grandparents and now lived in California (he in the Sunshine State, she in the small ex-mining village with the humorous name in Central Scotland) maybe they had enough in common to give it another go.

I stroked mum’s hair. Those days of fond, shared remembrances were over. This was – quite literally – the last laugh. And it felt like a knife to the heart.

Elements of the last night I spent with mum (not the last time, but the last night) still haunt me. After a bout of extreme discomfort and agitation she told me that she needed the toilet. A poo-poo, she said, further reinforcing the image I was trying to resist of mum having reverted to a helpless baby. I fetched some of the nursing staff, and they busied to work, drawing the curtains and asking me to step into the small sitting-room across the corridor. As I sat there I could hear her calling my name, and not just calling it, but screaming it. If you’d heard such a gut-wrenching, plaintive howl on the street you’d assume that some poor woman was being assaulted. Mum had no idea what was happening to her; made no connection between asking for the toilet and the nurses’ arrival. Again and again she shouted my name, and all the while I sat in that tiny side-room, tears welling in my eyes, feeling pained and useless; possessed of the frantic urge to rush to her, but knowing it would be futile, not to mention a breach of her dignity. But the idea that she might die believing I’d ignored her pleas for help tortured me. She wasn’t in full touch with reality, but what if that was the one crystal-clear thought she carried with her as she passed over?

Even now, every once in a while, I hear her calling my name, and it takes me back there. I’ve since wondered if my feelings of guilt and helplessness have a more distant genesis in our dynamic; that her words haunt me as powerfully as they do – the last words I’m conscious of hearing her speak – not only because of the trauma of hearing my mum so scared and helpless, but also because of the times in my life where I could have helped her, but couldn’t. Or didn’t. Maybe my subconscious has connected and joined those dots, then electrified the motherboard.

When I left her that night she was peaceful. When I returned the next morning, she was as peaceful as she’d been since being admitted to hospital. She slept for the full hour I was there, but this time there were no murmurs or jolts. Nothing on her face betrayed the agony and confusion she’d endured over the past few months. Maybe they’d increased mum’s dose of pain killers. Maybe this was simply a stage someone slips through on their way to the end, when the body has given up even noticing its pain, and does its host the mercy of disconnecting them from all but dreams. I don’t know. Part of me wishes that I could draw a line under my memories right there; have that be the final scene of our movie. She was peaceful. That’s the platitude people trot out, isn’t it? At least she was peaceful. And it helps, certainly, to have one less serving of heart-ache in your recollections. Maybe in time, as memory recedes and pain dulls, the sight of mum sleeping gently as the cold sun streaks through her hospital room window will supplant the suffocating terror of sitting in that room hearing her cry out my name. I hope it does.

At work later that day my dad phoned and asked me to come to the family home straight away. My sister was already there when I arrived. It wasn’t good news. After running tests on mum the consultant had diagnosed her with bone cancer, though it had spread from elsewhere in her body. We were now looking at palliative care. One of mum’s cigarette packets was still lying on the kitchen table. Her walking-frame sat nearby. All around us were the big and little signs of the life mum had lived in that house for over thirty years. In the hospital room it had been the absence of mum’s personality that had stung the hardest. Now it was her presence. Every trace of her was simultaneously a reassurance and an assault. Cancer. The pain in her legs and feet. We couldn’t even begin to imagine the agony she had suffered, and all at once we rebuked ourselves for our part in prolonging it.

Mum always had a fondness for alcohol. Even now that she’s gone it’s hard for me to tackle the subject without resorting to euphemism, or dancing around it with imprecise language. She’d experienced a lot of trauma in her life, and that was a by-product of it. When mum started presenting as seriously ill in November of 2021, she vastly reduced and then halted her alcohol intake. She spent more and more time in bed, which we interpreted as a physical response to mild withdrawal followed by a psychological free-fall. When she started popping pain-killers like Tic Tacs to manage the severe pains she said were gnawing at her legs and feet, we interpreted this as her attempt to retreat inside of herself. Especially since the pain didn’t always seem to be provoked by external touch. Doctors and nurses examined her legs, and their consensus, reached in absence of any concrete conclusions, was that the symptoms were psychosomatic. Ergo, the pain was all in her head. And still she bawled and roared and screamed in agony. We were sympathetic, of course, and worried – worried beyond belief. My dad, never a person I’d have associated with nurturing and caring, became like Florence Nightingale, going above and beyond, despite his own advancing years and physical pain. He did everything for her.

But we were labouring under the belief that mum was suffering from depression, exacerbated by her weakened physical and psychological state. The longer she stayed in bed, we feared, the higher the chance her legs would atrophy, thus the higher the chance she’d mentally quit and stay in bed for the rest of her days, like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We saw it as our duty to motivate her. To help her. If only we could get her out of bed. Stop her from sinking inside of herself. Give her something to live for. 

Around that table with my dad and sister, as we considered the enormity of mum’s terminal diagnosis, a cloud of guilt settled over us. Why hadn’t we listened? Why hadn’t we been able to see past our confirmation biases? Why hadn’t we fully believed her? Why hadn’t we fought harder (and my dad and sister had fought pretty bloody hard for her)? Of course, the medical profession wasn’t exempt from blame or criticism. Why had it taken so long to give mum this crucial scan, the results from which we’d only just received? Why did a woman at the hospital reply, in response to my dad telling them that mum couldn’t come to an earlier scan by car because she was in too much pain, that ‘her 94-year-old mother manages to make it to appointments’? Why were mum’s doctor and some of the hospital clinicians so aloof and arrogant; so unwilling to explore certain avenues? Was it because of her age? When it comes to elder care, do bureaucracy and cost-benefit analyses trump the Hippocratic Oath? Was the NHS still under critical strain following the Covid debacle? All we knew for sure was that mum would never again sit at that same table with us, sharing food and shooting the shit.

I imagined that receiving absolute confirmation of mum’s irreversible decline would be a relief, that it would finally kill the futile hope each of us had been harbouring, but while it was better to know than not – to face the truth rather than hide from it – in reality the anguish didn’t diminish. It just changed shape.

Death

We had a meeting planned with a consultant the next morning to discuss the way forward, so none of us thought we were in any immediate danger of losing mum. Not within days, in any case. My sister was exhausted, so she agreed to watch my sons that night while I went to the hospital. We were all in my sons’ bedroom when my mobile rang, and an unknown number flashed up on the screen. Things seemed to happen in slow motion. Without saying the words out loud my sister and I both knew what that noise signified. I was barely conscious of answering. “You have to come to the hospital straight away.” I could hear the pain and compassion in the nurse’s voice. “Your mum has become very, very ill.” My sister and I also knew what those words signified. The hospital will rarely tell you that your loved one is dying, and almost never tell you that they’re already dead, but the truth is always right there between the lines.

My sister and I were frantic. Who would watch the kids? We phoned and texted various people, but they either didn’t answer or were out of town. ‘GO!’ my sister told me. ‘JUST GO, JAMIE, SOMEONE WILL BE HERE SOON AND ONE OF US NEEDS TO BE THERE WITH MUM.’ I bolted from the house and jumped in the car, gunning the ignition. But at the top of the street I threw the car into a turn and roared back to the house. I couldn’t leave my sister behind. We scooped the boys from their bed, still in their pyjamas, and bundled them into the car, dropping them with their maternal grandmother. Minutes later we were on the motorway, and firmly in grief’s grip. I drove like a madman along the dark motorway, my fear and sadness converted to rage. I thumped the steering wheel, time and again, chastising myself, venting fury at all those who’d made a difficult time much worse. My sister snapped me out of it, and we spent the rest of those long but hurtling minutes alternating between tears and silence.

Given that death is one of mankind’s few absolutes – along with taxes, apparently, so long as you aren’t Amazon or Gary Barlow – you’d think we’d be more prepared for its sting. But we aren’t, and we never will be. We anticipate death, but we can never know it, or what lies beyond it, despite the arrogant assurances of snake oil salesmen, and men in silly robes, since time immemorial. And it’s the not knowing that scares us the most. Which is why, although we make jokes about death, and most of our literature is in some way about it, we really don’t like to hold the idea of it in our heads for too long. Because to obsess about death is a form of madness, one that either pushes us towards paralysing neuroses, or beckons us moth-like towards extinction’s flame. This is why our species prays and fucks. Broadly speaking.

Sometimes, in our more sombre moments, we might find ourselves sketching out the painful shape of a loved one’s future bereavement in the surface of our fears and imaginations, but no simulation could ever hope to approximate the impact of the identity-swallowing, time-shredding, synapse-battering hurricane of real loss. It’s a clock that suddenly starts ticking; it’s a dark blanket, as heavy as a galaxy, that slowly suffocates us under its weight; it’s a swarm of silent hammer-blows to the heart and memory. If we’re lucky enough to live in a reasonably prosperous part of a reasonably prosperous country, and not some dank, war-torn hell-hole where death and nihilism is doled out on repeat prescription, then we can begin to fool ourselves that the ones we love, and we ourselves, will live forever. It didn’t come yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. Maybe it won’t come at all. That’s the lie we sell ourselves, so spectacularly that we’re able to live our ordinary, hum-drum little lives relatively untroubled by that singularly unfair, and irrevocable, clause in our existential contract.

When we reached the ward our dad was already there. Both he and my sister went into the little side-room, unable to process, for the moment, the enormity of what we’d arrived to witness. My sister wasn’t sure if she could cope with seeing mum. I stared, frozen, at the open door leading to where mum lay, that same soft, anti-septic light to which I’d grown accustomed filling the triangle of floor at the room’s edge. I walked in, and the resulting emotional detonation carried the force of a hand grenade exploding in my heart. My legs felt like they would buckle. I understood in that moment why grieving Arabic mothers ululate over the bodies of their sons and husbands, because that grief, the size and force of it, churns something primal in your soul; reaches into your chest and pulls out sounds of which you wouldn’t have thought yourself capable of making. I went to her, touched her face, ran my fingers through her hair, pulled her lifeless head towards mine, and wracked and cried and sobbed in a way that I hadn’t ever before, and haven’t since. “I’m sorry,” I told her, then again, and again, an endless torrent of sorrys tumbling from my mouth. “I’m so sorry, mum.”

And I was sorry. For everything. Sorry that I hadn’t been there at the end. Sorry that I hadn’t spent every waking moment with her as she’d fought for her life. Sorry for every bad thing I’d ever said or done to anyone. Sorry for letting my paternal grandmother die thinking I’d abandoned her. Sorry for the cancer. Sorry that she’d struggled with demons. That I couldn’t have understood her better. Sorry that she wouldn’t get any more time with her grand-kids. Sorry for every fuck up I ever brought to her door; for every time I leaned on her when she wasn’t strong enough to take it. Sorry for every time I caused her pain. Sorry for every time I’d raised my voice in anger against her, or wished her dead, or endlessly pored over her psychopathology like a detective looking to build a case. Sorry that our relationship hadn’t been better. Sorry – most of all – that we’d run out of time to put that right.

My dad came into the room, and he, too, broke down. When I was a boy I thought him brusque and unfeeling to the point of being a gargoyle. I understood as I got older that he’d cultivated a mask for himself, first to survive the rowdy horror of school in the rural back-wilds of Central Scotland, and then in order to climb the career ladder during a time when bosses could hurl heavy objects at you without fear of censure, and everyone was looking to knock you down to lift themselves up. He hid his feelings, denied their existence, because feelings meant weakness, and weakness meant failure. I’m sure his professional handshake was as firm as a climber’s grip, but whenever I shook his hand he seemed self-conscious about the intimacy of the contact, and often let his hand fall limp as though it were playing dead; biding its time before it could escape. But in that hospital room we had no need of masks. We embraced for a long time, something I don’t think we’ve ever done. Maybe a quick shoulder-push with some manly back-slapping from time to time. Never like this. I could feel his arms squeezing my back, neck and shoulders, and I squeezed back twice as hard, as the tears fell from us like rain.

My dad is my step-dad. He’s been in my life since I was 4. It’s been hard for me to switch to calling him dad, a process that’s been on-going for many years now, not because I don’t love him, because I absolutely do, or because I don’t think of him like a father, because, again, I absolutely do, but because it’s hard to undo years of programming: the years spent idealising my own father who’d abandoned me; the years spent resenting my step-dad for taking his place. His arrogance and general lack of affection never helped endear us to each other in the early years, but then neither did my mum’s propensity to divide and rule; her habit of discouraging closeness between us, but always calling on him as an attack-dog when the situation demanded.

Admittedly, forces both external and internal also put enormous pressure on my relationship with my dad. When I was five my biological father arrived to collect me for a weekend stay-over, but after an angry altercation with my mum and dad he roared off in his car, and I didn’t see him again until my grandfather’s funeral when I was 21. The story of our reunion, leading up to our eventual parting years later, is a long one, and not one from which I emerge smelling like roses. As a kid, though, I concede that I force-fed my mum and dad an enormous amount of shit sandwiches on account of the way my father had made me feel. It wasn’t until I got older, and especially when I became a parent myself, that I acknowledged how difficult it must have been for them to raise their respective children (my sister and I, my step-sister and step-brother) in the face of the turmoil both families had experienced as they’d first been broken apart, and then parts of them forged together. Not to mention the stress of raising children in tandem with all of the every-day pressures and struggles of life, work, money, and the challenges within their own relationship.

Somewhere along the line, then, across those many hard years – after many arguments, shouting matches and a handful of mild physical confrontations – I came to understand my dad, forgive him, appreciate him, and love him deeply.

I left dad alone with mum. Each of us deserved the chance to say goodbye in our own way. I went to the side-room to hug and cry with my big sister. I told her that no-one would think any less of her if she couldn’t face seeing mum, but that she shouldn’t be frightened, because mum looked peaceful – as if she’d just closed her eyes and fallen asleep. This time, that platitude about peacefulness really meant something. She went to say goodbye to mum, and I think she’ll always be glad that she did. I’m very proud of her, for a great many things, but especially that.

The funeral came and went, the days became weeks, the weeks months. The world moved on, but we didn’t. We found ourselves stuck in a strange new world we didn’t recognise; trapped in a TV drama that had just lost its main character. My dad said the hardest thing to bear was the loneliness. Not just that he’d lost the woman with whom he’d shared a turbulent but loving life, and who’d given meaning and purpose to his existence by bearing witness to its slow and delicate intricacies, but also because after the first few weeks people naturally drifted away. They stopped visiting and calling so much. And I guess he felt like he no longer had the permission to talk about mum, at least with the same intensity and for the same duration.

There’s an unspoken quota placed on grief by those who aren’t adjacent to it. Life hasn’t changed for them; the information about the loss is quickly absorbed into their new paradigm, minus the emotional bite, and the absence is absorbed and normalised. Life, as they say, goes on. But not for you. Life doesn’t go on, not so easily, and when it does it’s not, and never will be, the life you remembered. Some people are irreplaceable in your heart and memory, something that’s felt especially keenly in older people who have more life behind them than they have ahead. My dad still cries for mum. How could he not? Her absence is a black hole around which he helplessly orbits. The only thing keeping him from being subsumed is the recognition that it’s impossible to feel such depths of pain if we haven’t first felt such love. They fought like cat and dog sometimes, and went through their share of tragedies. But they loved each other. They really bloody loved each other. And that’s something to be held and cherished, for as long as humanly possible.

Mum and Allie didn’t speak for over a year. They reconciled when my sister returned to Scotland again in the spring of 2021 to rebuild her life, this time with a bravery and a confidence and a fortitude that made me indescribably proud. It’s not for me to tell my sister’s story, but she’s had a tough life, one riven with heart-ache and injustice and pain. My mental health struggles are as nothing compared to hers, which makes her Phoenix-like rise from the ashes – and her strength, that she never credits herself enough with having – all the more brave and commendable. The logistics for the move, the hoops to jump through, the emotional courage, dealing with stress and anxiety and depression and uncertainty: she came out fighting and faced it all by herself.

My sister took mum’s death especially hard. She, like me, had had a fiercely loving but maddeningly tempestuous and imperfect relationship with mum, but, unlike me, she had usually borne the brunt of mum’s wrath. Their relationship mellowed with time, but there were always flash-points and hand-grenades. That love, though, never faltered, even if sometimes my sister felt – as I often did – that in her quest for approval and acceptance she was chasing mist.

My sister said that the final almost-year she shared with mum, both before and after the advent of her illness, represented the closest and strongest their relationship had ever been. For the first time – away from teenage life, and external crises, and recriminations – they were able to enjoy a love unburdened from guilt and blame. Allie was proud of herself, and mum, finally, was endlessly proud in return. Allie was living in temporary accommodation, but had chosen a new permanent home close to mum. She wanted mum to see her settled, independent, and happy. Mum died before she could witness that, and while the universe’s timing was unspeakably cruel, Allie will remain forever grateful that she got the chance to experience, and feel, that re-established and boosted connection. To know that their love was, and always had been, unbreakable.

I cried when mum was dying. I cried when she died. But I didn’t cry at the funeral, and I didn’t cry – not properly – for a long, long time. Don’t misunderstand me. I was depressed, shattered, and exhausted. I missed her. I needed her. But there were no tears. In the first few months I thought something was seriously wrong with me. My mind kept being drawn to the protagonist of Camus’ The Stranger.

“Why am I not as broken as you guys?” I asked my sister.

“It hits us all differently, we all process it differently and at different times,” she said.

“But why was I more visibly upset and shattered by my last break-up than I am in the wake of my own mother’s death? That makes me a bad son.”

“Are you still shattered about the break-up now?”

“No.”

“When you break-up, it’s the what-ifs that kill you. Losing someone is final. You don’t just get over it. Especially when it’s family. It’s going to be with you for life.”

I think part of my initially muted reaction to mum’s death was explicable in terms of that finality: the futility of being upset about death. What would it change? Could my tears resurrect the dead? It seemed so self-indulgent. I don’t, however, believe that grief is a self-indulgence in others. I understand and respect grief. It’s appropriate. Typical. Normal. Necessary. Human. I envied its scale in my dad and sister.

The other part of my reaction, that’s intimately tied to the first, is probably down to emotional conditioning. I was raised as a people-pleaser, learning to tip-toe around a volatile woman whose feelings – both good and bad – were always the biggest and most important. I became used to internalising a sense of always being wrong. Of being ungrateful. Unimportant. Troublesome.

Emotionally, I push things down; pretend feelings don’t exist. I smile, over-compensate with cheer, crack jokes, revel in the comic absurdity of life. The feelings build and build, and before I know what’s happening they’ve burst out from my subconscious like ghoul hands from a grave. I used to flee, explode, or do daft and impulsive things to lessen the rising pressure. Time and analysis has helped me move closer to an equilibrium, as have various medicines and suppressants. These days I’m much better at restraining myself from outward action. The only problem here is that when things can’t go out, they go in. All of that energy with nowhere to go but my internal organs, leaving a burning fear and fury raging in my chest for hours, even days; robbing me of my appetite; turning me into a leg-jiggling mess with a pulsing, directionless brain starved of blood, and a stomach filled with bile.

In the weeks and months following mum’s death I could physically feel myself pushing away any painful memory of her life or death that popped up – always presented in agonisingly crystal-clear clarity in the cinema screen of my mind’s eye – almost as though I could picture my hands or feet thumping them down into my subconscious. I even, on many occasions, said, ‘No!’ out loud to myself as I did it. My writing may display clarity and emotional eloquence, but in any given moment, inside my head, a maelstrom is brewing, electricity is sparking, wheels are turning too fast for me to see, and as a result I’ve never quite fully mastered the knack of processing my feelings; of dealing with them and putting them into context.

I was good enough at it until 2020, but then the world imprisoned itself; my marriage broke down; I wasn’t seeing my kids every day; I started dating again before I’d had a proper chance to reckon with all that was swimming through my head, dragging heart-ache and calamity in my wake; and then mum got sick and died. In isolation, I probably could’ve taken most of these things in my stride, but the overlap, and their cumulative effect, has left me shaken and broken. Only now, and partly through this piece of writing, am I starting to recognise this, and trying to make sense of it all.

The remainder of my reaction, my lack of tears, was probably down to my complicated relationship with mum. I summed it up as best I could in her eulogy:

The woman most of you saw – the meeter and greeter, the helper, the grand-stander, the events co-ordinator, the woman around whom danced a life-time of funny and memorable moments – wasn’t always like that behind closed doors. She was formidable, in how she loved and in how she lived. She could be… feisty. Sometimes she was hard to love up-close, and I think a lot of that was because she didn’t always feel worthy of love, because of her trauma and pain, because of the mistakes she’d made. I wish I’d understood her sooner. I wish I could have fixed it for her. I wish I’d felt rather than just understood that life was so fragile and short. I wish I’d had more time. I wish I’d been a better son.

That passage is really just a more elaborate and eloquent version of the soliloquy of sorries I delivered at mum’s hospital bed. And a more truncated and sanitised version of the whole truth. I also said this:

When you’re growing up you see your parents first as gods, then as fallen angels, later still perhaps as jailers, dictators or war criminals. When you’re growing up your morality is selfish, binary, rigid. It’s easy to sit in judgement when you haven’t yet been let loose on the world to make your own mistakes. But it’s easier to understand and love your parents once you begin to realise your own capacity for hurting people, for screwing up, for saying and doing the wrong things. And especially once you discover the big secret at the very centre of being an adult: that none of us has a bloody clue what we’re doing. Not one of us is perfect. We’re all just doing our best with the hand we’ve been dealt. And when mum was at her best, which was often, there was no matching her. She was fierce, strong, brave, clever, cunning, and managed to love large and touch so many people’s lives, both in spite of and because of the pain she carried with her. And the world is a sadder, darker and infinitely duller place without her light shining in it.

Before and After

When I was a nipper, my mum used to call me Winky Smurf (a name I hope wasn’t a reference to my tiny child penis). She used to make her feet talk to me, and I’d talk right back to them. She made Christmases a happy time of abundance and twinkling lights. Every Friday night she’d let me stay up late to cuddle into her and watch Cheers. My friend would come round for sleep-overs and we’d put on comedy shows, which my mum would warmly and patiently indulge as our only audience member. Our family camping trips to France were replete with funny stories and little chunks of family legend, most of the funnier moments somehow featuring mum. She would sometimes take a supporting role in the terrible comedy videos my friends and I made as teenagers. On my first foreign holiday abroad with friends I contracted salmonella and ended up in hospital, and mum was frantic, at one point only a day away from jumping on a plane to be with me. When I was at University in Aberdeen, she came up with one of her friends and came out drinking with me and my mob. Mum wasn’t happy when I threw myself into stand-up comedy, but if she was ever in the audience and heard people talking, she’d storm up to them like a psycho and loudly berate them until they shut up. I wish she’d been in more of my audiences. I spoke to her on the phone constantly. Whenever I fucked up, or found myself on the brink of defeat, she always showed up at just the right moment to lend a hand or a shoulder. Often a bank card. She always, ultimately, had my back, standing up for me and digging me out of more holes than I’d care to admit.

When I became a father I thought she’d be an interfering menace, and while she showed early signs, she quickly shook herself out of it and became, along with my dad, an amazing grandparent. Not their first rodeo, in any case. Mum loved all four of her grandchildren passionately and endlessly, but I was privileged to witness the more affectionate, intimate bond she formed with my two boys by virtue of their ages. One of my last memories of my sons with their granny – whom they called ‘Granny Two Cats and a Flag’ to differentiate her from the other grannies – was the three of them curled up together in mum’s bed watching cartoons, a look of peace and happiness on each of their faces.

I’ll never know my mum (can we ever truly know anyone?), but I love her more than I could possibly convey in the confines of this admittedly tremendously long piece of writing. I also understand her and forgive her. As we all must forgive ourselves. Not one of us steps through this world without occasionally stepping on the people we love, or those who have done nothing to deserve our cruelty, approbation or neglect. Certainly, my life has not been without sin, and my behaviour and actions have adversely affected a great many people in my life, not least of which my family. My mum.

In defence of my actions, I could say, “Ah, yes, but a lot of fucked up things happened to me, and that made me really fucked up for a while”, and while that may be perfectly true, I’d then have to extend the same courtesy to my mum. Who wasn’t a superhero, or a god, but a human being just like me – a mere mammal – doing her best with the difficult hand she’d been dealt in life. And she did it in a time and in a place where society was neither as forgiving nor as understanding about mental health issues as it is now – and even now it’s not exactly a bastion of forgiveness and understanding. There was little to no support for people suffering with abuse, trauma, anxiety, depression, and addiction. For some context: in mum’s era, left-handedness was seen as an affliction to be corrected, with corporal punishment if necessary.

I’d then have to extend that same courtesy again to my grandparents, who came from a generation that almost witnessed the end of the world; who lived daily with the threat of widespread death, destruction and decimation. I’m not sure what mental health and welfare provisions existed back then, but I’m guessing that in a world in which you could be shot for refusing to run across a bullet-strewn patch of grass to your certain death, and ladies with mild depression were zapped in the head with strong currents of electricity… not much. If some of them experienced and passed on dysfunction, is it any wonder?

And where do I go from there? How far back do I go on this quest for blame and vengeance? Do I chew out some caveman relative of mine who cheated on his wife with a Neanderthal woman? At some point you have to say, ‘I am my own person. The past no longer has any claim on me, and I refuse to stay bathed in its excuses.’ That’s something mum never managed to do. Let go. Even as an old woman, she clung to the hate and injustices of the past, some of it stretching back to infant-hood. Even in hospital, when she was half-insensible, she still ranted and raged about the past. Hate is corrosive. It eats you from within, and it never stops. I refuse to carry any of it in my heart. Luckily for me, there’s none there.

I do carry regrets, though. I regret every day that I was rarely able to see past my own feelings of hurt, fear and injustice growing up. Sometimes you get stuck in a spiralling negative dynamic, and it takes a lot of work on both sides to pull back from it. Mum didn’t always have the stillness of mind to do that, so I should have stepped up. Instead of sending her further into her hard shell with accusations and recriminations I could have reached out to her with love and understanding. I could’ve been the bigger man; the better son. I can’t do anything to change that now. All I can do now is try my best to funnel those lessons into the future. Try harder to be a better man.

I’m helped in this by my girlfriend, Kate, who has been an unending, unflagging source of love and support throughout this very difficult year. Our relationship was still quite new when mum fell seriously ill, and I gave her an out on the grounds that I couldn’t expect anyone to navigate those waters with me so early in a relationship. She declined to take that out, and instead became my rock, my best friend, and my true love. We and our children have become a little family, words she used to describe us last week, which made me – and I apologise for the unabashedly retrograde banter – cry like a little bitch. Those tears continued, and morphed into tears for my mum, tears that didn’t seem like they’d ever stop. And for the first time since she died I talked to my mum. Out loud. It felt nice. I miss her every day.

Ever After

Epiphanies precipitated by tragedy rarely hold for long, often no longer than the billions of New Year-New Me resolutions we make annually as a species, but they leave their impressions; they join the rippling tide of knowledge and awareness that laps us to the grave, that slowly erodes the coarse rocks of our pain and anger to leave the fine sands of love, of beauty, of understanding. Of peace. And though the grains may resist our grasp and spill through our hands, still we feel them as they go; soft, fleeting, ephemeral. Like life itself. Life will always put rocks in our way. Sometimes they keep growing inside of us no matter how many times we massage them to sand. It takes a lifetime, and even then it never ends. The important thing is never to stop trying. To be better. To be kinder. To try. Always to try. That’s all any of us can do. And we hope, with all of our hearts, that whatever we leave at our feet will be softer to walk on for those that follow behind us.