I can’t believe I’m writing down that it’s TWENTY YEARS since my mother died. In all kinds of ways it seems surreal, improbable and deeply perplexing to try to process this apparent fact of chronology.
And yet, there it is. I have lately been rebuilding/restoring the old archives on this blog, dating back to December 7th 2000 (how naïve it all seemed back then), more than half of which are now back online, with much more to come… and there’s no doubting that these events happened a full two decades ago. The same day Alex Toth died; the birthday of both Vincent Price and Christopher Lee—what is it about May 27th?!
This is mom in August 1956, aged 13. She was a cool teen.
If you haven’t already, I hope you go and read the blog I wrote back on May 27th 2006 (and indeed my contribution in the comments thread). These posts say it all, with much more clarity and raw immediacy than I can hope to summon today. I was curiously impressed, looking back, at how articulate I was. I’m not sure I’d handle it as well today. I know I wasn’t, in fact, handling it well at all at that time (who does?)—but I was expressing myself extremely well.
I would like to use the second half of this post to… go deeper. But first, the positive stuff. I have a photo album page, fully restored and updated, dedicated to mom—which I will update over time, as I continue to scan more of the best old photos I have. You can view the page as it stands here:
I first posted this, at Paul G’s urging, on June 12th 2006. Original post for context.
Okay, now for the more personal and venty stuff. Skip this if you like.
I guess the big 20-year takeaway is that the last 20 years have not, overall, been very good for me. Nothing to do with mom’s passing per se—her illness and death were simply a starting point, in a way, of a less than great trajectory. The running theme has been classic Murphy’s Law—
“Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”
However… I am not here to bemoan my rotten luck.
So how do I feel about it all? I just don’t know. It’s that simple. It isn’t the loss—she went a bit too soon, no doubt, but loss is par for the course. Certainly, I don’t care for how it happened. Although she’d been in declining health for several years, it still felt weirdly ruthless & scripted when it did happen.
I’m not okay, regardless of her poor prognosis, at how the hospital, after causing her to get an infection (from a biopsy), then proceeded to make a very obvious and unquestionable call to “let her go”—this was euthanasia, plain and simple. Was it for the best? I don’t know. What I do know is that it was not their fucking call to make, and supposedly an illegal decision. I’m not okay that when she consulted her GP a full 12 months before she died, with fears that ultimately proved correct, he sent her home after telling her, “I think you’re just a little run-down.” I’m not okay that when I challenged him on this after she died, he said an earlier diagnosis wouldn’t have helped!! That, in particular, is an astonishing claim to make. I still have that letter. Why I didn’t use it to make a complaint against the useless, contemptible bastard is anyone’s guess. He deserved to lose his job, period.
I’m not okay, too, with how, when she was in hospital with pneumonia for two weeks, late in 2005 (six months before she died), this advanced and terminal condition was somehow NOT NOTICED. The level of sheer incompetence is off the scale.
Do you ever get over that? No, not exactly. At best, it ceases to piss you off quite as much. These wretched experiences are amongst those colouring my overall perception of our beloved NHS. Do I form an unfair impression as a result? It’s certainly a negative impression—“unfair” is a lot more questionable.
Oh, of course my mom was very, very sick and her time was going to be limited. I know that. But I do feel that she may have had a year or two more, if she had received a better standard of treatment all round. So of course I will always be upset & angry about it.
I guess, as this is my blog, I am entitled to vent a little.
Obviously, I just miss her. I miss her unwavering love and support—a very elusive thing to have in your life, really. I miss the idle chit-chat about everything under the sun. I miss her infallible belief in my abilities, even if I struggled mightily with self-belief (and still do). I miss her cutting appraisals of films & TV shows she didn’t much like. The works. She was a brilliant yet very flawed human being. She was my mom and I loved her, warts & all.
I even miss her weird put-downs. She liked a call me an “intellectual” as a kind of insult, for instance. And I wasn’t upset or offended. I just found it funny. Cherish those pet insults from your parents if you ever get them. One day you’ll be sorry to not hear them again.
I wish this wasn’t 20 years ago. I wish it was 20 years away. Or even 40. But that’s life. I hope you don’t mind what I wrote here, mom. I hope you understand how I feel. I’m sorry I fucked the last two decades up so badly. I’m trying to do better.
And thanks. ❤️