Bereavement

I don't really do serious on this blog. Frankly who wants to read about someone else's troubles. We all have enough of our own.

But my mum passed away midweek, so that's a biggy. Given she was due to be discharged from hospital (having had a fall at home) as she was medically stable, and I had spent Monday taking clothes etc to the residential home she was going to move to for 6 weeks, I wasn't expecting a call on my mobile just as I was starting to host a large meeting telling me she was seriously ill. I got a train up to Coventry as soon as I could, but she had passed away within an hour of them calling me, so I was too late.

They assured me she had suffered no pain. And that it was very sudden. She had been chirpy at breakfast and by 11 am was clearly dying. And they said she hadn't died on her own the nurse was with her throughout as she drifted in and out of consciousness. But that didn't make me feel better. Being there was my job.

I was I confess quite tearful. No surprise you might think, but I was surprised at how I took it. Not because I an some tough guy as I certainly am not, but because I like to think of myself as a very rational and unsentimental person. And rationally this was a good thing. Mum was 92, a good age even these days. Her passing was quick and painless. She was getting increasingly confused and for some time she didn't seem to me to have any significant quality of life. I didn't like the thought of her dementia getting ever worse. And while the staff at the home she was going to were great and I thought she would like them, I don't think she would have been so keen to be surrounded by the elderly. I don't think somehow she saw herself as old. So overall, I should have been relieved.

And it wasn't a sense of loss, which I might have felt years ago. I had lost the mother I had been brought up by about 3 years ago as her faculties had deteriorated. I was used to endlessly looped conversations in which I informed her that X or Y had died 20-30 years ago.

So what was it? I don't know. The sense of finality? Or maybe I can put it at no more than sentimentality. But I was fighting back the tears. However much I knew every other alternative might be worse.

The other thing that made me almost as tearful was the reaction of my colleagues. Not just messages of sorrow for my loss, but just such sincere notes, and offers to come and stay or whatever. I know they are all friends as well as colleagues, but quite how much so perhaps one does not realise until something like this happens.

I managed to stay overnight with some old friends nearby. Despite the fact that one of their parents was having a serious operation, they were soon to go on holiday and their oldest daughter was getting her GCSE results the next morning. But what was so perfect was that they didn't make any fuss, not unsympathetic you understand, but sympathy wasn't what I wanted. I just didn't want to be on my own. I wanted to be surrounded by a family, just being normal, by old friends and their two lovely daughters. Especially I guess  now I have no family whatsoever. Just me alone in the world.

And finally, what was mum like? Well the best. One would say that. But she loved me. Not like my dad, who loved only in the way one might love a prize poodle, to show off how good I was to his friends. But mum loved me unconditionally, for whatever I was and whatever I did. When I was growing up, whatever was done was done for my sake not hers. Is there anything more one can ask for? I don't think so.

And I am crying again now.