My Mother’s Long, Painful and Unglamorous Passing… But Her Eyes—How the Closer the End Drew, the Dar…

Mother faded slowly, painfully, in a way that beauty never touched. It was only her eyesthose eyes. The closer the unavoidable drew near, the deeper black they became. On the very eve, they were velvet-dark, impenetrable, impossibly wise and all-seeing. Or perhaps it was just that the skin of her face grew ever paler by contrast.

One evening, right at summers end, I brought her back from the allotment, and as it was already late, I stayed the night in her flat. In the dead of night, as she made her way to the loo, she fell. Later, we learned shed broken her hipa sentence, really, for someone her age.

After that, things moved quicklya blurring, surreal sequence of events: ambulance come moaning through rain-soaked lanes, the cold blur of A&E, an operation, then ten strange days shelled in the hospitals otherworldly hours.

On the journey there, my mind drifted, with no rhyme or reason, to when I was three, when Id stayed with my old nursery-school minder, Mrs. Agnes Brown, as they buried my father. Dad crashed his battered old motorbike beneath a lorry on the tarmac of a midnight road. My mother was twenty-eight then; I was three. She didnt want me hurt by the truth, so she spirited me away for the funeral, telling me that father had gone away on business. She never married again. She was too fearful a new husband could never truly be my dad.

When she finally came home from hospital, I had to give up my job to look after herno way could we afford a nurse, not with the youngest boy trying to buy his first flat.

So I moved into my mothers tiny council flat, changing her nappies three to six times a day, washing and feeding her. She never complained, never expected pity. She just gave a little, childlike oof if I rolled her the wrong way, and whispered, Its alright, never mind, my boy all is well

I never realised till then how squeamish and weak I could be. At night, lying on the sofa next to her bed, Id quietly crynot just from pity for her, but, if Im honest, even more for myself.

There was no one to turn tomy sons buried in work and their own domestic worlds, and my wife well, my wife simply said, Shes your mum, not mine. To me, shes just another woman

Right then, I remembered, out of nowhere, bringing my girlfriend, Emily, home for the first time to meet my mother. Mum had been wonderfully welcoming that night, but as soon as I got back from walking Emily to the bus stop and looked my mothers way, she just shrugged, saying, I cant say why, but somethings not right. Still, thats for you to decide, son. Youre the one marrying her, not me.

Yet, for all of her life, my mother got on perfectly with my wife.

Now, as so many countless years ago, we were alone together again, just her and me; and when the evenings drew in and the lights went out, wed lie there long after in whispered conversation. Shed tell me about Gran and Granddad, of how the Germans stormed their village, and how she and her older sister would crouch behind the garden fence, peeping at the well-dressed foreigners blowing harmonicas and laughing as if the world itself were a private joke.

She told me of my father, whose memory had grown into a mere shadow in my mind. Large, bristly-chinned, and forever stinking of smoke, hed sweep me up with a chorus of My boy! My son! and pepper me with kisses every evening on his return from work.

As the days went by, Mum grew quieter; the night time talks ebbed away. I convinced myself it was my bland cooking. So I ordered meals from a nice place in town, hot and neatly boxed. When I asked if she liked the food, shed nod dimly and say, Youve become a proper chef, son, but barely touched a mouthful.

The last night she spent at home, for some reason she recalled when proper biros first appeared in Oxfordthe year I was in Year 3 and had only heard rumours of them. Lena Cartwrights father had somehow got hold of one, and I was utterly enchanted. That evening, I showed it to Mum, agog with delight. When she found out how Id come by it, she beat mehard, with her belt. Then she took me and the pen, and togetherMum, me and that precious penwe went to the Cartwrights to return it to its rightful home.

I barely recalled the moment, but Mum begged my forgiveness for hitting me that day, trying to explain how terrified shed been that I might end up a thief.

I stroked her cheek and, for reasons I still dont understand, blushed with shameeven though Id never taken anything since.

Toward morning, as her breathing thickened and the ambulance men crowded the flat, she surfaced from the murky waters of oblivion, gripped my hand and rasped, Oh Lord, how will you get on here without me? So young so daft

Mother never quite made it to her eighty-ninth birthday. The day after her death, I turned sixty-four.