The last time I hugged my mum was early on a July morning in 2019 as I put her in a taxi outside my house in Canterbury, Kent. I should have been driving her to Heathrow myself. I’d picked her up at 6am when she’d arrived from Australia, but I was feeling fractious after five weeks together in my cramped terrace house, the longest we’d spent under one roof in 20 years. And I knew she’d be back before long.
I blamed the baby, said she wasn’t in the mood for a four-hour round trip, and ordered a taxi instead.
The day was already warm and Mum was wearing a striped T-shirt. She cried as I hugged her, but after living overseas for 15 years I was used to that. She wondered when we’d see each other again or, more to the point, when she’d see my one-year-old daughter, her only grandchild. We talked tentatively about Christmas, but I was due at my in-laws that year so I said we’d wait and see.
Almost as soon as she got home she emailed to ask if she could book another five-week trip for November. Exhausted by work and the baby, I said it wasn’t a good time, but we’d arrange something soon. We tried for my daughter’s 2nd birthday the following May, but by then the pandemic was well and truly in the way. In the end she stopped rebooking flights and accepted the airline’s travel voucher.
My mum died on another July morning, almost two years to the day after the last time I saw her. I woke up to the message every expat fears – call home, urgent – and I knew. She’d been due to have surgery on a broken ankle, and I guessed she must have died on the operating table. My stomach churned as I dialled and heard my aunt’s voice, barely a whisper between our sobs. “She’s gone, Katie. She died.”
I’m just one of many Australians overseas who lost someone close during the pandemic and never got the chance to say goodbye in person. While I’m thrilled to see joyful reunions playing out at airports across the country this week, it’s also incredibly painful for those of us who will never have that moment.
Mum died suddenly and unexpectedly, not on the operating table after all but of a pulmonary embolism while waiting for surgery, 12 days after falling over while on holiday. She was only 68.
It happened so quickly that even if we were living in the same country I might not have been there in her final moments. But if the borders hadn’t been shut for two years she would have at least got more than one Christmas, one birthday and one airport reunion with the granddaughter she had waited so long for. And my daughter would have something more than just a face on a screen to remember her by.
I’m lucky I didn’t have to face the pain of knowing Mum was terminally ill when I couldn’t get home to her, like so many others did. Watching a loved one waste away through a screen – or worse, hearing they’ve died while you’re still biting your fingernails through quarantine – must have been hell on earth.
I was also lucky that, against the odds, I made it to her funeral. The day Mum died I tweeted about not being able to get home, and it was widely shared. Somebody tagged Australia’s high commissioner to the UK, George Brandis, and the next morning I woke up to a message from him offering to help on compassionate grounds. Within minutes, someone from his office had gotten in touch and the wheels began to turn. We forked out thousands for airfares and PCR tests, but we were on the plane to Sydney within three days. There were 13 people in economy, and when we got there we discovered Katie Hopkins was in the same hotel – both facts were infuriating.
After two weeks of quarantine with my three-year-old (exactly as fun as it sounds), I was home at last in Mum’s house. I’d thought if I could just lie on her bed, open her wardrobe and sink my face into her clothes, touch her fingerprints on her phone screen, I’d get the goodbye I needed.
I didn’t, of course. I felt nothing when I stepped into her house. Even when I went to see her the day before the funeral and held her hand at last, I felt empty. Her body was there in the casket – bruised and disappearing after waiting so long for me – but she was gone.
Still, that day in her house I gathered up the pieces that meant something. The striped T-shirt. A diary. Two of the rings she always wore, one a narrow band of tiny diamonds handed down from eldest daughter to eldest daughter for four generations, that I never take off.
It’s the lost moments I find hardest to reconcile. Saying no to that trip she so desperately wanted to make. Not driving her to the airport that day. Maybe if I had we would have talked about some of the things we needed to. She always liked to corner me into tricky conversations in the car. A classic mum move.
For all these reasons this week will be hard, despite how happy I am it’s finally here.
Yet today the wattle is blooming in the park across the road. They call it mimosa here, but it has the same army-green leaves and fluffy yellow flowers as the trees behind the house I grew up in. I breathe in its unmistakable scent and I’m eight again, twisting off a stringy branch to give Mum, which she puts in a little crystal vase on the windowsill. I have moments like this every day, and they give me hope that perhaps goodbyes don’t really matter. She is with me, no matter what happened or didn’t happen later. She is with me.
• Kate Guest is a UK-based Australian journalist
