I wrote this shortly after my mum died in 2007, and it was published in its complete format in the Guardian’s Family section later that year. I’m posting an edited version here because it deals with a side of bereavement that affected me at the time, and many people who read it said it reflected their own feelings. To my Scottish family mentioned here, time and your generosity has meant that I feel I do have a home in Scotland again.
“My mum came to visit me at my home in London for a week’s holiday and less than 12 hours after I’d picked her up from the airport, she was dead.
Before we’d had a chance to have a decent conversation about those important inconsequences of life – how was the rest of the family back in Scotland, what was the doctor saying about her stomach pain – I was doing CPR on her in my guest bedroom, desperately trying to keep her alive until the ambulance arrived.
At the hospital, they tried everything they could to save her, but none of it was any use and, just as dawn broke on a new day, they turned off her ventilator.
Over the course of the following days I struggled to work out what had happened. Emotions ran riot – guilt that this had happened on my watch; gratitude that at least I had been with her; worry – how on earth was I going to get her back to Scotland?; and deep, despairing, devastating sadness – my lovely mum, gone.
And then, a dawning realisation that as Mum had lived in a council property I would have just a few weeks to clear her house and hand back the keys. With that house would go my home in Scotland, my Scottish foothold. A new emotion, of feeling cast adrift washed over me.
I’ve lived in London for more than 20 years but I still consider Scotland and the house we’d lived in since I was 14, where my daughters had a bedroom specially covered with Barbie stickers, where my David Cassidy posters used to hang on the wall, my home. We’d moved in on the day Scotland beat Zaire in the 1974 World Cup. I always remember that the TV was the first thing out of the removal van and set up by my dad and uncles, ready for the match. I’ll never forget the look of horror on Mum’s face as they all suddenly stopped unpacking and congregated around the set, boxes and furniture dumped everywhere.
My relatives have been fantastic and have said ‘You must come and stay with us,’ and I know that I will do that, and we’ll build new traditions, but it won’t be quite the same.
Eight weeks after Mum died I travelled to the family home for the last time. The moment I turned the key in the back door lock – only tradesmen and the doctor used the front – I began to cry, because I knew that when I opened the door into the kitchen, the spot where mum would usually be standing, ready to greet me, would be empty.
From there it got steadily worse. As I waited for family to arrive to help I got on with the job of clearing out my bedroom. When I left home in my 20s, I took just what I needed at the time. Mum had long commandeered my wardrobes for her enormous clothes collection, but the drawers and cupboards were still full of my things. School books, jotters, science projects, birthday cards, letters from long-forgotten friends, rosary beads, chocolate boxes made into jewellery cases using instructions from Jackie magazine. And then, just when I thought I was coping with the task of sifting through all these memories, I found an enormous card with the numbers ‘21’ on the front. Inside was written a birthday message, just from my dad. I was stunned because Mum usually wrote the cards. As I traced the letters with my fingers I realised I hadn’t seen Dad’s long, lopping writing in the 20-odd years since he’d died. And that’s when I realised the size of this.
It wasn’t just about finding a good home for Mum’s extensive shoe collection, or deciding what to do with the radiogram she seldom played but still had pride of place in the living room. It wasn’t even about me clearing out teenage clutter that I should have tackled long ago. It was about the breaking up of a family, my family, a family that had existed in my home town for several decades, where my mum and dad had been born and grew up, met and married and had their children. Went to school. Visited their friends. Shopped in the Co-op. Drew their pension at the post office. And now none of us would be there, or the living have any reason to go there again. That was heartbreaking and plain hard.
Now I feel like one of those bits of seaweed that you see floating aimlessly just under the surface of the water when the tide is going out, rootless, swaying to and fro, this way and that. Maybe I should have seen this coming, bought my own place in Scotland, but like all life-changing, profoundly emotional events, you don’t really understand what it means until it happens.
I have some roots of course in London, with my husband and my children, but are we where we should be? I’m Scottish and Scotland to me is Mum’s house. But now that’s the scene for another family’s life. Do I feel cast adrift because I’ve lost my foothold in Scotland or because I’ve lost my mum? Perhaps time will tell.”
MY NICE THING FOR MARCH…so far…
A weekend trip with my Women’s Institute friends to Denman College in Oxfordshire, where we fused glass, worked willow, rang handbells, danced for fun, sang, walked, ate, chatted and laughed. There were 20 of us and we had such fun. What a wonderful weekend of friendship.
Selfish At Sixty 