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."