I am lying in bed, and I am trying to sleep. I can't. I am aware of some discomfort, but can't locate it. I lie there, still, with my body straight and my hands tucked behind the small of my back. I lie there for a long time. I listen to the sounds of the house, my husband, my daughter, sleeping. I stare at the dark. I start to feel pain. I realise, suddenly, that I am digging my nails into the palms of my hands. I don't know how long I have been doing it. I get up.

In the bathroom light I see I have drawn blood.

My mother had a favourite brooch. It is rose gold. It is a circle, with a five petaled flower and beautiful Victorian swirls inside it. I think she said that once there had been seed pearls in it too, but they fell out. I do not remember where she got it, but I know she would have told me, because I know I would have asked. She wore it all the time when I was little; I would sit on her knee, as she read a book and had a cup of coffee next to her, her idly stroking my hair and me, idly, circling the brooch with my finger.

One Mothers' Day, we went to a fete. Mum gave me three pounds to spend. I saw a small porcelain decorative plate, in a brass stand, with a poem about mothers on it. I bought it, and some biscuits shaped like hedgehogs that I did not know were biscuits. I kept them, for years, as ornaments. The poem on the plate was awful. Mum laughed, and I wasn't sure if that meant she liked it or she didn't. The next day, I saw it on her bedside table. It stayed on her bedside table for twenty nine more years.

In the drawer of her bedside table, these twenty nine year later, underneath the drawer full of tissues and medication, I found every mothers' day card, ever letter, ever postcard, every birthday card I had ever sent her. A lifetime of written love.  I took them away with me. I have them here, with her brooch, on the table. Letters, cards, photographs, a brooch, a tissue full of blood.


I had coveted that brooch. 'You'll get it when I die!' she would joke. I look at it and feel I have stolen it. I know what having it means. So I put it away, because I do not want it to be mine.

I hold her small wooden box in my hand. It still has buttons in it. If I squint my mind, I can pretend that I am five, and I am playing with the buttons, organizing them into rows of size and shade, with the sounds of the radio and Mum laughing behind me.

Happy Mothers' Day.

My first memory is of climbing, and falling, out of my cot. I remember the thump on the ground, the way my body hurt for the first time, and, most vividly, the look on my mother's face after she had raced up the stairs and come into the room. I remember her scooping me up - I would guess I was crying, but I don't remember that - and all was well. All was well.  It is like an imprint into clay, her making all things okay again.

How are you, people ask. I am fine, I say. I am fine, how are you? But sometimes I don't say that. Sometimes say I am not fine, and sometimes they ask why.

'My mother is dead.' I say. I am not fine because my mother is dead.

In the first days, I tried so hard to find somebody who could tell me where I could find her. I spent the days running across my old city, leaving my daughter looking confused with relatives whose rules were very different to my own, doing the jobs that needed to be done and telling anyone, everyone, that my mother was dead. 'My Mum has just died',  I would say, as I bought lip balm or ordered funeral wreaths or stood for too long looking at expensive black clothes. 'My Mum has just died.'

'I am sorry.' they would say, mostly. But nobody told me where she was. And nobody told me it wasn't true.

I sat on sofas in buildings I had passed but never thought about, looking through coffin catalogues. I chose stargazer lillies and hymns and readings and bidding prayers and readers and photos and wondered if the reason these choices were mine to make was because I sounded and walked and looked so like the woman all these things were for. 'She'd like this', I would say, and they would agree, even though I had no idea whether she would or not.

We buried her, in a cemetery in the countryside, overlooking fields, and it was cold. I was so pleased for her, that she was in her own country; I remember her telling a story of how when she lived overseas, she did not want to be buried under an unfamiliar sky. I wore her black leather gloves that I had found in her handbag. Her hands are bigger than mine. Her hands were bigger than mine.

I am not fine.

I wake up in the middle of the night. I feel like I have been hit in the stomach. I sit on the sofa in the dark. I hear her laughter, in my head, and I know what her hair smells like because I brushed it so often and I kissed her head so often and I think about this, the sounds and smells that have underpinned me and my life for all of my memory and I cannot understand how they are not here any longer.

People try and say lovely things. They tell she will come to me, they tell me she is in the song of the wood pigeon that wakes me up in the morning, that she is in my dreams, that she is communicating with me through animals and sounds and songs that come on the radio.  And I want to hit them over the head with a shovel, and I think how funny my Mum would find that, and I smile.



I read my stepfather's emails, of him keeping busy,  of the weather, with the gaps between words telling of the slow shattering of his heart. 'Who am I growing these carrots for?' he asks. 'The asparagus is doing so well, but there is nobody to say 'well done'.' Piles of vegetables are rotting by the back door, with nobody to cook for. 



I have dreams where I am trying to get to her. I am in an airport lounge, or on a train that is stuck, or she is trying to phone me and I can't reach the phone.  I keep thinking of things I need to ask her - when should my daughter start school? What seeds should I plant in my window box? Do you like this dress? I found this book, I shall send it to you, you would love it. I read a poem and it made me think of you, here it is, I shall email it to you. Just click on the link. The link is the writing in blue. Just click on it, with your mouse. I love you.



"Grandma had died." says my daughter. "I don't where she is, now, do you?"

I stand on the beach, holding her hand. It is a warm day. "No." I say. "I don't."

I am sitting in my mother's living room. There is a fire in the hearth. It crackles. I get up, and put another log on it.

I can hear the wheeze of my mother's oxygen machine. She sits in the chair she inherited from her mother. She sat in that chair, my Grandma, for fourteen years, after she had had her stroke. Every time I saw her she was in that chair, watching TV programmes she would never have watched had she been able to speak.

I sit opposite my Mum. She starts, looking for the words to tell me the thought she just had. She looks around the room, pursing her lips to begin a sentence. She gives up. She falls back to sleep.

I force myself to look at her face.

Time passes.

"You okay?" she suddenly asks.

"I'm fine," I say. The machine wheezes. "I love you."

She smiles, a sudden shock of teeth too large for her face, now. "I love you too." She closes her eyes again. "Don't worry about it."


The next day, I bring my daughter with me to the house. Mum has not managed to get downstairs this day. We go up to see her, and she is sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed, but wrapped in a towel to keep warm. The district nurse is coming round. Mum is scared.

"Are they going to put me in hospital?" she asks. She looks like my daughter does after a bad dream. My daughter looks in the full length mirror, making faces, dancing.

I say no. I say I promise. I say I won't let this happen.

She puts her arms out and I hold her. I kiss her head.



"Do you love your Mummy?" my daughter suddenly asks, moving away from the mirror.

"Yes," I say. "I love her the way you love me."

"Does she love you?" she asks.

"She loves me the way I love you." I say.

"And I love you." says Mum to my daughter.

"We all love each other!" says my daughter.

It feels nice for a moment.



My daughter moves towards the bedroom door.

"It's time to go, Grandma." she says.

"I know." says my Mum.



My daughter skips as we walk to the bus stop. "Can I have pizza for tea?" she asks. Yes, I say, because I can't thnk of the reasons why I should say no. "Do you want to dance with me?", she asks. We stand at the bus stop, where I used to wait for my school bus, and sing nursery rhymes and dance. A woman my mum's age smiles.


I will not let myself cry.