I’ve been keeping reminding myself to remember on the 5th of September about the first anniversary of mum’s death. Just like I remembered on August the 19th that a) it was grandma’s birthday and b) it was my 10 year anniversary of arriving in London with but a pink backpack, a small wad of money and one very disappointing husband (not Kevin).
takapuna fleamarket, august 2007
And just by chance I happened to look through some old photographs and just by chance I opened some from a year ago. Which in turn reminded me again, today is the fifth. And today I’ll light a candle in my mind for mum, or something like that. As I walked home this evening after my last day at LBi I looked up the street and saw a funeral parlour and imagined what it would be like to die. And I remembered the passage from the book, The Silver Bird, by Joyce Petschek, I read out at mum’s funeral when I invoked Elspeth to help me to ‘project my voice’ as she would always direct me to do at drama practice.
And I was wondering what it was like for mum when she was dying, and whether it must have been just like going to sleep and into dream state and your soul is conscious of its journey but the conscious mind has gone to sleep; and where the two meet and where one fades out and is replaced by the other.
Lauren, Astrid, Hannah – the week before Astrid’s operation, July 2007
Sometimes I think to myself I’m glad mum died. And I am. I actually think I’m extremely fortunate she died. And it’s jolly difficult to explain why without writing paragraph upon paragraph of this is what happened then, and then this happened, and that person thought that. And without sounding, well, slightly awful or strange (but never mind about that, I’m sure I am both, sometimes).
Rufus and Astrid, July 2007
However… one of my life ambitions was to have a daughter, and to have a good relationship with my daughter. Something that didn’t happen with my mum and hers, and me and my mother. And now I’m free to do just that. And that’s why I’m glad. And that’s why I’m super glad to be having two daughters. When I think to myself how much stuff I have lived and done and seen in my thirty five years I think well mum lived for sixty four years. That’s a long time. That’s a long life. And maybe it would have been more noble if mum had stayed alive and we’d sorted it all out like one big marvellous family. But that’s obviously not the lesson for this lifetime.
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