Daily Mail, 2006
I wore my Elvis socks the day my mother died. Made of black cotton with the name Elvis embroidered in silver thread across the ankles, I showed them to her when, waking on the morning of her death, she found me at her bedside. The sight of them made her smile through the pain. Elvis was a joke we’d shared for fifty years since she’d pretended to despair of me as a teenager.
It was a sunny May morning in Lymington, Hampshire, and as a nurse opened a window behind her she looked out and saw white apple blossom on a tree in the hospital garden. “It looks as if it’s going to be a nice day,” she said, as the morphine gave her some moments’ respite.
Actually, it was a terrible day. “Am I dying?” she asked me a couple of hours later. Hiding my tears, I told her I didn’t think so, that she’d been ill, but that the doctors had given her some Lazarus pills, so she would soon be better. That was my last joke, the last time I made her smile. Then I went to phone the priest.
I’d like to be able to write that it was a pain-free death. It wasn’t. But the presence of the priest gave a comfort I would never have thought possible. After lying speechless for long periods, a silence broken only by gasps of agony, suddenly my mother was making the responses as the priest gave her the last rites, reciting the Lord’s Prayer with him.
I don’t believe in God. I wish I did. I wanted to then. But she believed. And that faith made the pain and the departing so much more bearable.
Suddenly opening her eyes some time after the priest had left she saw me and called out, “John! John!”
John was the name of my father who was lost at sea in 1944. Did she think she’d already died and gone to heaven and was meeting him again? Was she disappointed when it was pointed out by Maureen, her wonderful carer, that it wasn’t John, just Ray? I don’t know.
My sister and niece arrived from Geneva to share her last hour. As our mother was slipping away the nurse suggested we both say something to her. My sister did, comforting her, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just held her hand, my mind numb. Then she was gone.
Later that night I wished I’d told her about the best day of my life, another May day, when I was seven and she’d taken us to a place called bluebell wood where she used to go as a girl. I’d never seen anywhere so beautiful. We picked armfull’s of bluebells that day and then sat, a little family of three, on the top of a hill, and had blackcurrant jam sandwiches, gazing out across the Lancashire plain to the faraway glimmer of the Irish Sea.
She was nearly 92 when she died, so I’d known the end would come fairly soon, but somehow I hadn’t expected it. She’d had so many bits and pieces of illnesses over the years, but she just seemed to go on and on, living alone, refusing to go into a home, struggling through everything as she and her entire generation had always struggled.
The dream life she’d anticipated in 1936, when she’d married and bought a brand new home with a big garden outside St Helens in Lancashire had been ended in 1944 with a telegram from the War Office. From that day she’d had two young children to bring up alone. There was never another man, never even a date.
Not many mums worked in those days, but after my father’s death she always did. In her early forties she opened a dress shop. She was very successful, but I, with the selfishness of youth, took it all for granted. Only after she’d died and I was going through her old papers, did I realise how brave and businesslike she’d been, how hard she’d worked to make everything possible for my sister and me.
I realised, too, her faith in me, when, discovering a school report she’d saved, I remembered that at 14 I’d got 6 per cent in arithmetic, 2 per cent in algebra and nothing at all in geometry. She must have been worried stiff, but she never showed it. Instead she encouraged me in subjects I was better at. I learned a lesson there. Don’t nag, encourage.
Her death changed me. I’d witnessed first hand the power of faith, and, though not reconverted I now find myself irritated by the modern sneer of fundamentalist atheists who mock believers of all faiths, particularly Christians.
I also learned that it’s possible to be more generous if you’re thrifty. In her later years she didn’t want for anything, but didn’t buy much either. She preferred to save her money so that she could give it away, either to her family, and you had to fight not to take it, or to the various children’s charities she supported.
Looking back I find I admire her now more than I realised when she was alive, when her obstinacy could irritate. Many people from her narrow background might have had some latent prejudice towards those of another complexion. But if she did once, she lost it. By the end she just didn’t see colour, admiring immigrants for their ambition to improve their lives and those of their children.
And I know this may sound trite, but I do think that her generation, men and women whose lives were forged by the adversity of two world wars and the Depression, were honed into grittier stuff than my own. My mother was just one of millions of ordinary people who took on what life threw at them and got on with making the best of it. Then they gave that best to us.
Christmas is a time for miracles, they tell us, and already, in this first Christmas without her, a small miracle seems to be happening to me. In my memory she’s already no longer the gasping, dying old lady I watched last May. Suddenly she’s young again, running after me up the road as she taught me to ride a bike, cycling with me to the farm to see the horses or go blackberrying, and laughing at me as I played Heartbreak Hotel again and again and again…
