I haven't felt this close to you in ages, mum. I listen to this song, and I'm back in our kitchen in the old house with you, you're doing the washing up in that crappy sink with the broken tap, doing a rush job dipping cutlery in then setting it out to dry because you really hated doing the pots, this CD playing on that portable silver CD player back in the day when you only listened to music for as long as the CD survived, and then you had to rebuy it. And I'm sat on the counter top, talking to you about who knows what, both looking outta the window at the cats messing around in the garden, you look really beautiful and elegant like you always did, not willing to leave the house without foundation, mascara and most importantly, lipstick, your hair a bit straw-like and the bane of your life from too many home colourings as you hated your natural brown hair colour and preferred it red, though when it was brown it was really silky and soft and red it was, well, strawlike and that pissed you off but you kept on colouring it anyway. Wearing jeans, and lilac slippers, and some kind of baggy top, doing the HURGH!s in the music to make me laugh and then putting a frozen pizza in the oven cos you hated cooking, lighting up a cigarette and rolling one for me as we sat and talked about anything. You got me so well, it hurts to think that I have one less person in the world that 'gets me'. I keep saying this on this blog, but I ache for you. I spent all day at work humming this song and singing it quietly to myself as it literally hurt to turn it off and start serving people, and every time I went to the loo I snuck a cheeky listen in the toilets. When I put this song on, and realised what it was, that I knew it inside out but just didn't know the title I knew within five minutes that I want it as my 'first dance' song the day I get married, I've had it on at every available opportunity from the minute I got up this morning at 5:50am. I do get obsessed with certain songs, a trait you passed down to me, and I've asked Gareth's gf to play it to him when he gets back from working away this week. He knew you longer than I did, a whole extra seven years, and I wanna know if this song inspires the same reaction in him as it does me. I can't stop crying for you, mum. I can't believe it's taken me this long to realise what I've lost. I can't reconcile the image I have of you in this mental image I have of you getting into the groove of Motown with the you that eventually died. I spoke to a friend yesterday about how I felt, she said she was surprised at how warm and welcoming you were to her when she was a total stranger coming with me to visit you in hospital, that time you got a whole room to yourself as you had thrown up and convinced them you had a stomach bug so you could get some peace and quiet from the elderly lady with dementia in the next bed who kept stealing your zimmerframe thinking it was hers, you spent enough years working in a carehome with people with alzheimers and understandably you were pretty sick of doing it by that point. Am I just upsetting myself pointlessly? Or am I getting out what needs to get out? Are my tears and my agony justified because of what I've lost? Am I wallowing? I don't know what you'd think. It kills me to think of you seeing me like this, it upsets me even more to think that you'd be upset at what you'd put us through that I'm glad you can't see this. Am I depressed? I know some people think so, I just can't see it. Yeah I feel miserable every day, yeah I've cried most nights recently, but I don't see how I could not, it's just taken me a while to get here, to the place most people can't help but arrive at within weeks. It's true that you often don't know what you've got until it's gone, and I don't think I saw the sacrifices you made for me until you left. My birthday is in two days, it just reminds me that you're not here, of the birthdays I had while you were sick and thought you didn't care enough to give me a card and then found unwritten 'happy birthday, daughter' cards in your bungalow after you died and we cleaned up, as though you'd got them and just never written them. Probably because you were too distracted by the stabbing pains in your feet, your inability to walk, the vomiting blood. I hurt too much, it's only when I'm alone I can really let go and cry, around other people I get too self conscious, and the hugging from bf when I'm in tears stops them quickly and tbh I don't ever want them to end. No one really knows how much it hurts other than the people who've been there, one of my closest, bestest friends had the 25th anniversary of his mum taking her own life the other day and it triggered so much crying, not for her because I didn't know her, or even for you, but for him and how he must have felt, how he must continue to feel, how it feels to lose a mum, the person you only get one of, you know? I feel like I'm never gonna get over this, I don't even want to, everyone kept telling me how well I was coping when you died and it's true, I did, but it's only because I didn't click what was going on emotionally. I knew what was happening but I had to think quickly and logically and I had to be there for my brother, I don't think either of us would have coped as well if I'd lost my shit. I have a photo of the three of us on my phone, you're in your coffin, face sliding sidewards a bit already from decomposition, he is all stony faced even though it's his idea and I'm smiling, I don't look at it much and it doesn't especially gut me, it just looks like normality, but I wish I'd taken photos in the hospital of you actually alive in the final few days to remember you, everyone told me to remember you healthy and well but that's fucking bullshit, you don't get to choose which bits you remember, they just flood back to you as and when and there isn't anything you can do about it. I love you, I know you loved me, the past tense makes me feel like the bottom is dropping out of my world, my first experience of a human dying that I actually cared about, and what a learning curve it has been.
I don't write this for anybody but me, and her, in my mind. I don't care how much I repeat myself, how emo I sound, how much I sound like I'm wallowing, what anyone else thinks of me. The person you read about here is a million miles away from the me you'd stop on the street to talk. That's kinda the point.
It is a cliche but I didn't just lose my mum, I lost one of my closest friends.
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