"MY MUM DIED"

“My mum died”

Three little words which say so much and yet say absolutely nothing at all to anyone who didn’t know her.

But, the morning after it happened, I found myself unable to sleep in those darkest hours just before the dawn breaks, and, as ever, I was drawn to the keyboard in order to try and make some sense of the incomprehensible, because I simply didn’t know what else to do.

I mean, there really is so much that needs to be done but I really didn’t know quite where to begin, but the list that was compiling itself in my mind was keeping me awake when I ought to have been grieving and getting used to the idea that the events which unfolded in front of my eyes in that hospital room yesterday evening actually occurred.

So here I sat.

As the sun rose on that first dawn of the rest of our lives, I’d already typed out what was probably the final chapter of the ongoing saga of her last illness which I’d been putting down in words to help me to make sense of it, and I was still wondering whether I should even have done that, if I’m being totally honest.

Is it too personal…? Too raw…? Too soon…?

I don’t know how “other people” cope with such events, I just know that this is how I’m choosing to cope with it, even though I’m really not sure that I should. But then, that’s the problem. Even though I’ve managed to reach the grand old age of forty-nine, I still don’t seem to know anything very much about anything, other than the slightly alarming fact that I’m going to have to get used to being an orphan at this stupidly late age.

Days like these, eh...? Days like these...

The world was already a very different place for me that day, but the world in general is also a very different world these days to what it once was. I decided to try and explain to the world what was going on and why I’d fallen so suddenly silent, so I posted a picture which I had hoped would self-explanatory onto Facebook, and I posted those three little words onto Twitter because I thought that I ought to.

But now I wonder…

Is that the “right” thing to do? Is there any “dignity” in doing such a thing? I mean, I always use written words to best explain how I’m feeling (“It’s cheaper than therapy!” the Beloved says) but there are times when it seems inappropriate or perhaps even slightly crass to do so.

I just don’t know any more.

I still need to process what her life and all of its experiences and hopes and dreams and disappointments and what they added up to actually meant, and how best to reflect upon them. I hope that she was happy, although I suspect for quite a lot of the time, certainly in recent years, she wasn’t, which seems to be a bit of a shame, especially, I suppose if you’d ever known her when she was that little princess so full of hope and potential to do the great things that life, inevitably, took away from her.

Few of the people who might read such things as I tend to pour out ever knew my mother, and not many of them even know me, but surely, for the unfeeling universe, the simplest explanation is usually the best and some kind of explanation of a sudden disappearance from the world is occasionally necessary, even if there’s no reason to embellish it with the kind of self-serving “look at me everyone!” nonsenses which you sometimes see on those websites.

It is, after all, just a simple statement of the very sad facts which are currently ripping my soul apart whenever I remember and have to think about them too much. How other people choose to read them, or put their own interpretations upon them should not, for the moment at least, be my concern.

The people who needed to know, and “shouldn’t find out that way” will already know, or else they most probably won’t be people who read my humble outpourings anyway, and I need to find my own way through this bewildering maze of difficulties and emotions in the best way I can and, perhaps, in the only way I know how to.

Whether it’s right or wrong to do so, I suppose, I’ll just have to let other people decide. Perhaps I am just a crass imbecile who doesn’t understand the subtleties of life but, you know, at the time of writing them, it was only just over twelve hours since my mum died, and wasn’t yet sure how or what to think about that, so pardon me if my methodology seems a little strange to you, but, well…

My mum died.