My mother once said that she was like a dog with a bone - put her on a track and she would run as long as she could see the path, and even better if she had a short, iterative goal.  She drove like that on the highway.  Actually, she would never have used the word 'iterative'.  She was kind of lazy that way.  She would be the first to admit it, laughing. 

The weekend of her death anniversary is also Mother's Day.  A bad coincidence, and one that will endure.  Almost like dying on a child's birthday, or an accident at Christmas.  It is scarring in a way that doesn't let you forget the scar, on a regular basis.  The nerve!

How selfish am I?  Mother's Day should be for my children to celebrate but instead I am always going to be a grieving child.  Watching her slow decline into dementia and the many ways I tried to fight and deny it doesn't help. I remember being angry a lot, feeling that she simply wasn't trying hard enough, that she was being lazy, particularly in the early stages when I thought I knew better.  I had no idea what was coming.  

Now that I have seen her death, and my father's death, I think I know just a little more than I did before.  I know it will surprise me.  Of all the people I know who have died, there's no repetition, no lack of endless variation and capacity for invention in death.  Suicide, drug overdose, stroke, heart attack, car crash, cancer, stabbing... all terrifyingly different.  Young, old, ready or not - here it comes at you and it will always be surprising and alone. I wonder if mum knew? It was just a little fading away every day.  A final word from a daughter and then she was gone into the night. 

These are my Mother's Day thoughts.  Guilt that I could have done more, horror at the decay and loss of control, sorrow for her suffering, gratitude for the family I have who quietly supported both of us, outrage at the system which left in a cold metal mortuary drawer for two weeks with her pacemaker pulsing away.  Bitterness and shame at the tiny pathetic unremembered funeral at the start of the Covid lockdown. 

I would kind of like to close the whole chapter, and remember her differently.  But every year, Mother's Day arrives to keep all of this firmly front and centre, overpowering and overwhelming me with its dirty smell of failure and hopelessness.  Her last cup of tea appears in a picture I took on impulse, in the kitchen the day before she died. Our tea was in our mugs, and her tea was in a saucer with a teaspoon.  I recall thinking that I would just share a bit of my tea rather than use a whole teabag.  I feel disgusted at that miserliness.  How did it help?  Maybe I learnt something.