It was 4am on an Oxford night in summer. Smoking a cigarette, swigging a final alcopop, I staggered around the grounds of the big house on the hill that backed on to the psychiatric hospital. After leaving school and going on the dole I had left the rough end of Newcastle to come south as a full-time volunteer, working with people with mental health difficulties.
The air smelled of grass and trees. New Labour had just taken office. I was 19 and drunk in the dark and I felt invincible. I’d recently packed my bags again, said goodbye to work colleagues and was about to move to another placement in a new town, finally living and growing and escaping the alienation of my teenage years. And as I curled up for a final few hours in my first bed away from home, my mother was drowning in the fluid of her own lungs in a hospital at the top of the street where I’d grown up.
A knock at the door the next morning summoned me to the payphone, and my Dad told me my mam had died. “I’m coming home,” I said.
I’d known she had cancer. She’d waited until Christmas was over before telling us about the lump on her breast. She’d gone through the chemo. We’d laughed at the ridiculous NHS wig and she’d cried in bed when she couldn’t cook and clean and make the Sunday dinner. I’d visited her on the cancer ward with the older women with names like Dot and Elsie. I’d brought boiled sweets for dry mouths; wet wipes and fruit. But I’d still left home, watching my sick mother cry on the railway platform because I was young, and because no one believes their mother will ever die.
The day before she did, my dad phoned to say she had to go into hospital again. The cancer had spread. She’d been delirious, said she could see me in bed with her.
In wanting so much to carry on, I tried to move on too quickly. Part of me, ever since, has always been 19, frozen at a point of just becoming, consumed by a deep desire for belonging and uncertain of how to be this strange, clever, poor child who had just realised they weren’t quite straight and not quite a boy.
I didn’t go to see her body, thinking that I was beyond such rituals. Far from protecting me, this trapped a far more potent knot of magical thinking deep in my chest. For a long time I thought that she was somehow hidden inside me. I would look in the mirror and see her in the shape of my eyes, the set of my mouth. For a while I almost became her, cooking dinners and cleaning floors in tetchy irritability at being unappreciated, waiting up for housemates to come home safely from nights out.
I can’t remember the exact date of her death, no matter how hard I try. I’ve learned that this isn’t so uncommon with trauma, which locks things in your bones, not your brain. For years I’ve felt stuck, unable to move forward for the lack of knowing I had a safe place to go back to, not trusting I was allowed to be what I am. Sometimes, when I am under pressure, I feel smaller, more vulnerable, longing for the maternal hug that my adult self knows will never come.
My mother would say I made her feel stupid by asking her questions to which she didn’t know the answer. When she died she wasn’t much older than I am now, baffled by her own suffering and confused by her makeup-wearing, book-reading, precocious child. Like many working-class families, the link to the past in mine was matrilineal not patrilineal, all of the twinkling grandads and great uncles dead decades before. The answers to the questions I needed to ask died along with her. I’m heartbroken that my queer adult self will never meet my mam, and my 19-year-old self will never be reunited with her. The story we began together will never have an ending, just a messy full stop.
I stayed back home in Newcastle for three weeks before getting on the train south to the new job and new town. In having to carry on I trapped the loss inside me, a riddle without a solution. It’s only now, almost 20 years later, I really understand that you, my mother, are not coming back. I miss you and I’m letting you die again, properly and finally this time. At last, I’m learning to comfort the teenager who lost you in a moment over half a lifetime ago, trying to tell them, me, what you would have told them: “I love you whatever happens.”
