On Grief

It is a funny thing, the grieving process.

Ever wonder why it's described as that? A Process?

Well. Maybe it IS something that you 'process' through, as it were, in respect of the fact that it has different stages that we have to pass through.

I'm at the stage now (four years, seven months and one day) after losing Mum, that I can go throughout probably most of a two or three day period without at some point having a twinge of the 'I wish I could tell Mum about X' or 'Mum would have loved to have seen/done/heard about Y'. Or just plain and simple missing her for no apparent reason, or thinking of her suddenly.

Thing is, when I am rudely jolted into remembering that I have no mother, it hits me like a slap round the face: my mother is dead.

I've just been over to the market place here, across from the office and up the hill a little way. I am such a magpie that things like handbags and jewellery captivate me and haul me in to peer at the glittering pretty things. And so it was that one poor man engaged me in conversation whilst I cogitated over what I might like to spend my (increasingly and alarmingly) dwindling funds upon.

He was doing so well until he chirped 'We've some lovely things for Mother's Day'. (Those of you who live outside the UK and may chance to read this should note that Mother's Day in the UK is celebrated on normally the last Sunday in March which this year is March 26th).

I find Mother's Day incredibly hard to deal with. I was almost hysterical the first year after she died when CtOR and I went to Asda to do our shopping in February and all the Mother's Day trappings were out. It physically hurt me. I always saw that day as being even more special than Christmas and birthdays because it was all about her in total - all about thanking her for being my Mum, and being quite simply the best Mum in the whole world ever. Mum was my best friend. She was the first person I thought of whenever good things or bad things happened, the one person I ran to when it all went wrong. The one person who really knew me and would never judge me. I absolutely loved her to pieces. I always will. She made me laugh like no-one else could. Or can. Roll out the clichés, because she was like a sister to me. I count myself lucky beyond words and rich beyond the dreams of avarice to have had such a fantastic mother, and find it heartbreaking and puzzling - baffling - that other people aren't as close to their mums as I was to mine.

I am ashamed to say that I smiled at the poor chap on the stall and chirruped blithely: 'I'm afraid that that isn't something I need to worry about any more, unfortunately'. Well. He felt dreadful, poor chap, and was desperately trying to apologise. I fled. I was on the edge of tears, and I don't want to be tipped over the edge. Not now, not when I have to go to work and put on the happy face for the clients and sit and listen to them without losing my temper.

By the time I was almost back at the office, it had occurred to me that I really had behaved rather rudely and shouldn't have said what I did. I was idly programming the microwave to finish heating my lunch when it dawned on me that today is March 8th. Which means yesterday was the 7th. Which means that it was not just 4 years and 7 months since Mum died yesterday. It was also 4 years since my Nan died, my mum's mother.

I was more upset about forgetting that than anything else. My relationship with my Nan was a complex thing. As a child, I adored my grandparents, though I was always my Grandad's little girl. He died when I was 7 and that broke my heart. It broke all our hearts. Nan spent the rest of her life wishing she was dead, too, and became increasingly difficult and reliant on Mum. Mum, in turn, was not a well woman in some ways. She was also overworked, an insomniac so always overtired, had two children in my brother and I who took her for granted even while loving her to bits, and a husband who spent months at a time not talking to her and could be - and was - extremely violent in every possible way. The added burden of being a round-the-clock carer to her own mother as well was simply too much for her, and so Mum died at 61, two and a half weeks short of her birthday.

Nan blamed herself. She was no longer a senile, cantankerous, demanding, nasty, sly old woman, but briefly alert, clear-minded and filled with the sort of self-realisation that I can only imagine was excoriating in its awfulness. She turned to me after the funeral, when we were going through some old photos together, and said to me 'I killed her. It's my fault'.

I told her that that was rubbish and she mustn't think that way. I'm not sure that I wholly meant it. Worse, I think she knew that.

Outside, the rain lashes down as it has for the last two days. It matches my mood and envervates me. I think I would really like to go home. I'm not sure where I mean by home. I think that ideally I would like to be standing in my mother's kitchen, me leaning against the sink while she leant against the worktop to the side of me and we just talked about everything and nothing and made each other laugh. Or maybe that means clowning around behind the counter in the shop and making the customers laugh almost as hard as we were.