I Forgot My Mother’s Birthday

 

Last month I forgot my mother’s birthday. I was writing on my computer, glanced down at the bottom right corner of the screen, and saw the date. It was my mother’s birthday, or it would have been.

My mother died twenty-three years ago.

At first, after her death, I used the date of her birthday as a time to remember her. Using the date of her death for this was too much, too morbid and too negative. Her birthday was in January, in the cold winter after Christmas, and was always celebrated quietly. When she was alive, I would arrange to post a card and present to her, in time for it. After her death, I would take time, on what would have been her birthday, to remember something about her. I would remember some story or anecdote about her, good or bad. It was my way of remembering her, of keeping her memory alive.

My mother had been ill for a long time with cancer and I had told myself I was prepared, I knew what was happening. Shortly after her diagnosis, she’d had surgery and radiotherapy for it. I wasn’t able to see her, at that time, and didn’t physically see her until two months afterwards. When I did visit my parents I was shocked at how tired and worn she looked. She was sat in the house’s conservatory, reading a magazine, when I arrived, and she looked so old and frail, sitting there in that armchair. Everyone had told me how well she had done since her surgery, how well she had recovered and how she had returned to health, but looking at her, that day, I knew she was ill, I could see it. I kept quiet though, everyone, including her, were being so positive, and how could I rob them of that? I kept it to myself, but I knew my mother was dying.

She declined slowly over the following six years, her health failing her, as my father failed to cope looking after her. I lived two hundred and fifty miles away from them, and I was the only healthcare professional in my family, so my role fell to providing advice at the end of the telephone. I told myself to prepare, to be ready for when she would die. To prepare myself for my family’s reactions, to be the strong one because I had seen this coming.

She died in a hospice, were she was comfortable and well cared for. I had seen her two days before and said goodbye to her, it was clear then to everyone she was dying. I received a call, from my brother, that Tuesday morning, that she had died. She had died in one of the few moments when no one was sitting next to her bed, in a quiet moment when she was left alone. I was prepared for this news, I wasn’t shocked, I was expecting this. I called my partner and told him.

The next day, I was due in work and I was prepared. I had accepted the fact my mother was dying, her death was just the final part of that. So I went into work. I spent the first hour or so of my shift just wandering around the ward, but I wasn’t connected to why I was there. Mid-morning, I went into the ward’s office, where my manager was. She looked up at me and in surprise asked me what was wrong.

“My mother died yesterday,” I replied.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she said.

"I don't know," I said and burst into tears.

She sent me home, telling me not to come back to work until after the funeral. She was right.

Grief is a strange and messy thing. I thought I was prepared for it but I wasn’t, how could I be because I didn’t know where it would take me. I didn’t cry at her funeral, sat there in the front pew next to my partner, but I did cry when I was set off by stupid, little things. The sight of her favourite flowers in a shop, the memory of her suddenly leaping into my mind, the sound of a piece of music that she had loved. The strange, physical things that made me remember her.

I had thought I was prepared because intellectually I knew the course of grief, I had studied it, I knew the theory and evidence behind the stages of grieving. But I didn’t know them emotionally, I hadn’t lived them.

Losing a parent is never easy, I found it especially hard because I was only in my early-thirties. I was at the age when people were beginning to expect their parents to retire as they entered “old age”. But my parents were in their early forties when I was born. When I entered my thirties, my parents were entering the end of their lives. I felt cut off from my peers, they couldn’t relate to what was happening to me, their parents were alive and well, were I was living through this too soon in my life. Fortunately, my partner knew exactly what I was facing, he’d lost his mother when he was sixteen. He knew about feeling too young for what was happening.

But as time passed, that grief faded, as all emotions do. Marking what would have been her birthday became less and less urgent, and at some point I forgot to do it.

I can’t remember when I did last mark my mother’s birthday, I stopped doing it so long ago, but I didn’t forget my mother. She had been such a large and dominating part of my life for so long. She had shown me and taught me so many different things, most of which she never meant to. She had been a woman of very strong opinions, opinions that were not to be questioned, and faced with this I had learnt how to argue. My mother, unwittingly, had taught me to argue, because if I wanted to do what I wanted, as a child and adolescent, then I had to win my arguments. The first time I won an argument against her I was fourteen, and it was a glorious moment. I had learnt how to use logic to defeat a steadfast opinion. It is a skill I have used many, many times since.

Watching my mother, as a child, learning why she held her opinions, showed me how to watch and understand other people, a skill I am so grateful to have because it aids me so much as a writer.

So many things still remind me of her, and I have a partner who I can share these with, even if it’s just a short memory, and he does the same about his mother. We keep those women alive in our memories.

That day, as I looked at the date on my computer’s screen, it occurred to me that if she was still alive, it would have been so easy to buy her a birthday present. I could have gone onto Amazon, found the gift I wanted, bought it, and had them gift wrap it and deliver it straight to her. So much more easy. But my mother died before e-commerce became such an easy part of our lives. So much has changed in our world in the relatively short time since her death, would she even recognise our world? Would she even like our world?

When I realised what the date was, I texted my partner and told him.

He replied, “Blimey, how old would she have been?”

“94,” I texted back.

 

Drew

When Words Are Not Enough

“Life is so cruel,” it was all I could think of to say to my nephew Stuart, who was on the other end of the phone.

I was sat on the Brompton Road, the traffic rushing passed me with far too much haste, slight drizzle beginning to fall. I had missed Stuart’s message on Facebook, the day before, I’m not great with social media, so I was returning his call. Stuart wanted me to hear it from someone who knew me, a friendly voice.

Dave, my only brother, had died, suddenly, two days ago.

But he was healthy, strong, looking forward to the future, looking to finally retire, making plans. It wasn’t fair.

I was stunned, as if someone had kicked me in the side of the head. This wasn’t real. But my eyes glazed over with tears.

Still sitting there, I called Martin, my husband. I told him what had happened, and as I did it slowly began to feel real, slowly my mind was processing the shock.

My tube journey home felt unreal, like I was stuck in a vivid dream. People were behaving as they normally do. Laughing, talking, reading their phones, ignoring the others around them, and pushing onto the tube so they could get the last seat. I wanted to shout at them, “It’s not fair! None of this is right!” But I didn’t. I just sat there, staring at a stupid poster advertising Tinder.

When I arrived home to an empty house, I locked the front door behind me and screamed in frustration, my voice bouncing around the empty room.

Dave is thirteen years older than me. That might not sound much to an adult, many people have partners thirteen years older or younger than them, but to a child it is an impossibly large gap. Dave left home, to go to university, at eighteen, when I was only five. He didn’t return to living at home, even after he finished his degree, instead embarking off on his own life. He was more like a young uncle to me, than a brother. We simply didn’t have the chance to be close.

What also didn’t help us was that my parents saw Dave as the perfect son and, all through my childhood and adolescence, they compared me unfavourably to him. In my parents’ eyes, I could never be as good a son as Dave. It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t even know they were doing it, but it didn’t stop me being resentful. It was only as an adult I discovered that my parents compared all three of their children to each other and always unfavourably.

Also, as adults, we lived so far apart. He had settled in Lancashire, I live in London, and I don’t drive. I simply thought we were never meant to be close.

Our mother’s death and then our father’s brought us together but only temporarily, our lives soon parted us again. It was another tragedy that finally brought us together.

Linda, Dave’s wife of over forty years, died at the height of the Covid lockdown. She didn’t die from Covid, but that wasn’t important, when she died Dave was isolated by the lockdown. He rang me, in a terrible state, to tell me what was happening. I kept ringing him over the following days, reaching out to him. Then, that afternoon, he texted me, Linda had died. I was in the middle of our busy District Nurse office. I went to the next office, which was empty, its staff redeployed, and rang him back. He was in a terrible state, on his own at the hospital. I wanted to just reach out down the phone and comfort him but I couldn’t, I only had words. So I told him how sorry I was.

I wasn’t able to attend Linda’s funeral, only a handful of people were allowed to be there. I knew why I couldn’t be there but I still felt I was letting him down. We talked a lot over the phone a lot over the following days, and weeks, and then months.

Dave travelled down to London as soon as the lockdown lifted. He was being inducted into the Fellowship of Engineers. We were able to have dinner with him the evening before. He travelled down on his own and spent the afternoon walking around Covent Garden. He revisited the places where he and Linda had visited so often before, together, but that day he was presented with what he’d lost. He was almost swamped with grief. As a nurse, I’ve looked after many people at the end of their lives. I have seen so many relatives drowning in grief. Every time, I wanted to press a syringe to their skin and draw out all of their grief and pain and sadness, freeing them from it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do the same for my own brother, but I so wanted to. I told him if was normal what he was feeling and I told him I was sorry.

That evening the three of us talked, talked easily and openly. Dave and Martin talked as equals, both as professionals, but from different specialities. Before Martin joined us, Dave and I talked as brothers. We had so many different things in common.

When Dave rang me and told me he had met a new partner, all I felt was relief. He wasn’t on his own anymore. Not for a moment did I think he was trying to replace Linda, he had loved her for such a long time, but now he had found companionship.

Martin and I met Margaret, Dave’s new partner, on a bright spring Sunday, on London’s South Bank. Both Martin and I were struck by how happy they were together, and it was such a pleasure to see. I could file away that memory of that winter night, the memory of Dave so lost, and not worry about it again.

Dave travelled down a lot to see Margaret and was able to see me too, and I looked forward to those visits. Suddenly I found we had so much in common. He knew my parents as well as I did and saw the things that I saw, that I didn’t know if I could have told anyone else. I didn’t have to explain my parents to him, I didn’t have to make excuses or justify what happened, because he already knew them. We could talk about all those things without explanation. When I published my first book, he championed it and that meant so much to me. He’d read it and enjoyed it, he even recognised the inspiration behind some of its stories.

As a child I longed to have an older brother. Someone who knew me, was on the same wavelength as me, someone who knew the same things as me. As a middle-aged man, I suddenly found I had the brother I had always wanted. Dave and I were finally getting to know each other. I looked forward to talking with him and seeing him, especially seeing him. His visits to London helped me get through last year, which was a difficult year for me. He was happy again and he was making plans for the future. Martin and I were planning on coming and seeing him this summer, but suddenly it was all taken away.

I have lost my brother suddenly and without any warning. I cannot find any meaning or purpose in what has happened. How can something positive come from all this? All I can think is, “Life is so cruel.”

Dave Payne 1953 to 2023

 

(Thank you to my niece Rachel, who first posted the picture of Dave I used here. It so perfectly captures him)

Five Days and More Days on Top

 

I was twelve years old when my grandmother died. My father woke me up, early that morning, and told me, “Your Gran has gone to Heaven.”

I was confused, no one had told me she was that ill, they certainly hadn’t told me she was dying. I thought that her decreasing health and physical ability was because of her great age, she had seemed so impossibly old to me back then. It was much later that I’d find out what had happened to her.

She was the only grandparent I knew. My father’s parents had died before I was born and so had my mother’s father. My gran, my mother’s mother, was the only grandparent I had. Other children at school had both sets of grandparents and would talk about them endlessly. I just had Gran, a woman who seemed so much older than the grandparents of those other kids at school. She was an old, small, white-haired woman, like a character out of children’s literature.

When I was nine, Gran came to live with us for a while. With hindsight I realise she wasn’t well, but no one told me at the time. She would sit in the armchair next to the fire in our sitting room and tell me stories of her life. Stories of her growing up in Scotland, her time “in service” in London, running a household in wartime Kendal, Cumbria. She was full of stories and I loved listening to them.

During that time, she was admitted to one of Liverpool’s hospitals. We visited her one Sunday afternoon to find that she had been moved off the main ward and was now in a side room. She told us that the ward’s sister had moved her into there when it became empty. At the time it just seemed like a nice gesture; now I know differently. As a senior staff nurse, working on a busy hospital ward, I’d move a very ill or terminally ill patient into a side room to give them some quiet and privacy.

From our home she moved into a newly built bungalow, near to my Uncle Lance and Aunty Sheila, her youngest son and his wife, in the suburbs of Derby. We would drive over there every Saturday to visit her. The bungalow was small, made from cream-colored concrete and perched on the side of a shallow hill. Being a new build, the garden was untended and raw. It was divided into two by a stone-paved path that cut through its middle. On either side of it were two strips of open soil, which were made up of large clumps of red/brown clay, many of them as large rocks. I wasn’t allowed onto this clay soil because it would stain anything that touched it bright red. Our dog, Candy, a little terrier with a love of new and different smells, wouldn’t venture onto this clay garden either, yet normally she’d spend as much time as possible sniffing out the smells on a new patch of ground. My gran had loved gardening, she and my mother would spend afternoon after afternoon tending to our garden. While she lived at that bungalow, the garden was left untended, just two open strips of clay where even weeds didn’t seem to want to grow.

It was in this bungalow that she died.

I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral, my mother believed funerals were no place for children, so I was left at home in the care of a neighbour. This, along with not being told she was ill, made accepting my gran’s death so difficult for me. It wasn’t as if she was dead, never to be seen again, she just wasn’t there, missing from my life. It wasn’t until I was into my teens that I was able to make the connection that she was actually dead. For my mother, though, the loss of her own mother was something that she found so difficult to accept, it was so hard on her. She spent weeks and weeks off work after Gran’s funeral. I would often find her, alone in the house, silently crying to herself. I now realise her grief had become depression, but back then I was not a perceptive child.

It was only as an adult, after I had trained as a nurse, that I began to find out what had happened with my gran; it was only then that my mother told me what she had found out after Gran’s death. My grandmother had stomach cancer. When she had been admitted to hospital in Liverpool, it had been for “exploratory surgery.” This was long before CT and MIR scans, and cancer tumours do not show up well on x-rays, so people would have surgery as a way of diagnosing where and how big/advanced their tumour was. When my Gran had had her exploratory surgery, they had found that the cancer was extremely advanced and had spread to other organs in her abdomen, meaning there was nothing that could be done; certainly surgery was useless, so they simply sewed her back up again.

I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how ill she was, no one knew. My gran wasn’t told that her cancer was as advanced as it was; she certainly wasn’t told it was terminal. The decision was made by her doctors that she wouldn’t be able to cope with the knowledge that she was dying and therefore she wasn’t told. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen now, no doctor will take that God-like decision, but it still happened in my lifetime. It also meant that neither my gran nor her family had any chance to prepare for her death.

When my mother was told that her cancer was terminal, thirty years after my gran’s death, she decided not to tell anyone else. But she was able to make that decision for herself and she took it for very personal but still practical reasons. It was also a very different time. I was an adult and a trained and experienced nurse. I had been quietly watching my mother’s health decline and I had been preparing myself. I also had Martin in my life, my partner, whom I could talk to about this and he knew what I was going through. Then I found out her cancer was terminal, though by accident. My mother was prescribed new medication, a hormonal treatment, and I recognised it as a medication used in palliative care, designed to shrink a tumour to reduce the symptoms from it, but it didn’t treat or remove the tumour. It was then that I knew she hadn’t told anyone her cancer was terminal. I was in a difficult position but I was an adult and had someone I could talk to. And when she was in the hospice, at the end of her life, I had the chance to say goodbye to her and we both knew it was goodbye.

I work as a district nurse now and I look after people, in their own homes, who are at the end of their lives. I don’t have the input that palliative care nurses have; my role is very much providing the nursing care people need at the very end of their lives. This has given me an insight into how a death can and does affect the loved ones and family of someone dying.

My own experience, personal and professional, has shown me what a large and life-changing event a loved one’s death can be. But I am also a writer and my computer-like mind stores all this away to be used in my writing. Death is such a life-changing event that I cannot but write about it. But I want to write about people’s personal experience of it. I don’t want to write sensationalist or sentimental prose about the death of a loved one, I want to write about the real progress and events of it all and the way these deaths affect people.

That all said, I have just published a story, Five Days, about a child losing his mother to cancer. This child, a boy called Byron, isn’t told that his mother has cancer and that she is dying from it. It is her decision and she doesn’t let anyone else tell him what is happening. She is trying to protect him, but her actions leave Byron confused and isolated, he feels excluded from what is happening.

Though not directly based on my own experience, I did tap into my experience as a child when I was writing this; I also used my experiences as a nurse too, especially when I was told not to tell a patient’s child that their parent was dying. I wanted to explore a child’s-eye view of terminal illness. It wasn’t an easy story to write, but so often I like to challenge myself with what I write, I want to explore difficult subjects from the point of view of characters being affected by them.

This wasn’t the easiest story to write, I had to keep returning to the fact that the story is seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy without the insights that an adult character could bring to this story, but I did find it a rewarding thing to write. I had written about something important to me.

I am very grateful to my writers’ group, Newham Writers’ Workshop, who gave me such helpful feedback on each chapter of this story. Writing can be such an isolated practice, and so often I don’t know if a piece of writing works or not, but getting feedback from my writers’ group has been invaluable and I have learnt so much from it.

In her will, my gran left me her rocking chair. It was an item of furniture that I had loved sitting in as a child, the sheer originality of it attracting me; all the chairs in my parents’ home stayed solidly in place, none of them rocked. As a child I would always head straight towards that chair. When I moved into the first real home of my own, my own flat, I finally had space for it and it sat in my sitting room for years. It now sits in our bedroom, in a corner almost made for it.

Happy reading,

Drew