A - Z Challenge - L: Love

I've a feeling that this blog post might be a short one, but it's one of the biggest I've ever tried to write. I could have called it 'Loss' or 'Lost' or 'Lonely' or 'Lament', or any number of words beginning with L that signify the sad, broken feeling that permeates life at the moment. Ha. Maybe I should just have called it 'Life'. 

The last few years have been hideous for our family. On top of the strains and stresses of a global pandemic which knocked everyone for six and the disaster that is Brexit that ruined the family business, we have had other serious stuff that's not my story to tell, my job only to try and help others through. All this is ongoing. Then, on 16 April, Easter Saturday, my Mum (90) fell in her bathroom and hit her head on the floor. 

We thought she was getting better to start with - she was remarkably alert despite the trauma and the blood loss, and the doctors and nurses checking her over and dressing her wounds were optimistic that she would be back on her feet in a few days. To cut a long, painful, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute story very short, she never did get back on her feet. 

My Mum died on 21 May 2022 at 10.25pm. Oh, God, I miss her. 

I was there at the end. We had time to sit around her bed and play her favourite music and hold her hand and tell her how much she was loved and what a wonderful Mum she'd been. I hope she could hear us. 

I hope she knew who we were, because latterly there were times when she didn't know us at all. My heart broke over and over as she slipped further from us into confusion and I did everything I could to comfort and reassure her, but I wish it had been more. It was exhausting and devastating and although I know that I was not capable of anything else, I am tortured by the idea that she was anxious and I was not there, and I am haunted at the memory of every moment of panic when she did not recognise her surroundings. 

But I was there all that day, all evening and at the very end, when her breathing slowed, and then there was a long, long pause. I leaned my forehead on her shoulder and wept. She took one more deep breath, sighed, and she was gone. Just like that.

I thought in my youth that when I finally lost my Mum I would be self sufficient with a family of my own and I wouldn't feel the devastation I contemplated when I was a kid. I thought that having taken care of her for twelve years since my Dad died and having felt the strain of being a full time carer in recent years, that there might even have been an element of relief. I thought that because by the end we knew that she wasn't going to get better, I might have been a bit prepared for the day when she left me. 

On all counts, I was wrong. 

Yes, she was 91 years old, yes, she was frail and struggling and the subdural haemorrhage that was the final straw could not be treated. Yes, I'm in late middle age myself and my husband is the best of all of them and my two daughters are the lights of my life. But, oh, Lord God, I want my Mum. 

I thought I'd tell you about her. Maybe share some stories about walking on the beach together, about sharing Sherbet Fountains, about laughing when her ice cream melted everywhere on holiday last year. About our shared inability to go for a coffee at a garden centre cafe without coming home with rockery plants. About her delight in her grandchildren, her pride in her family. About how badly she missed my Dad after his death in 2005. 

I don't think I can do it. 

She was my Mum. My biggest ally; nobody is ever as completely on your side as your mum, are they? If the whole world was against me, she would still be in my corner. Even in her last months I would go in and flop down on her sofa and tell her the things that were bothering me. She would listen, she would sympathise , she would give me a hug. 

I remember one time; I didn't even need to say anything. Mum was drying dishes at her kitchen sink and I came into the room. She took one look at my face and put her arms around me. As I hugged her back she felt so small, so slight, so fragile. I kissed the top of her head and helped her to her chair before she got tired or lost her balance. I put the kettle on. 

I go in there now and she's not there. Her chair is empty. I've sorted out some of her clothes and given them to charity shops, and I've cleaned out cupboards and put them to new uses but there are some things that I can't tidy away. Her favourite cardigan still hangs in the wardrobe because I can't let go of it. Her glasses are still on her chest of drawers by the mirror. The book she was reading still has her bookmark in it.

And I can't tidy away the love that I still have for my Mum that now has nowhere to go. I've looked after her for the last few years but she looked after me for my whole life. I sometimes think that I was more of a worry to her as an adult than I ever was as a teenager. Every day I think of things I want to tell her. I see things that I know would make her laugh, bits of gossip about people I see at the shops. I looked through a photo album I'd never seen before and I need to ask her who some of these people are. 

Who else knows what to say when I ask, 'Have a grape'? (the answer is 'I don't want a grape, either!', and then we both laugh - it's a long story). 

Nobody holds up the other end of our shared jokes any more. 

Watching all the pomp and ceremony regarding the death of Queen Elizabeth these last couple of weeks has been like scratching off a scab on a wound that is still painful. Mum was an ardent Royal supporter. She would have been so sad that the Queen was dead and also fascinated at the splendour of the funeral and loving the glimpses of the Royal Family. We would have watched it together with a packet of biscuits and lots of cups of coffee. It would have been another shared experience. 

Mum's funeral was not much like the Queen's, as you can imagine. We all had Covid at the time, so hardly anyone came, even though the funeral directors were very skilful in keeping the poorly people away from the healthy ones. It was over in half an hour without any need for gun carriages or orbs or sceptres. On the night they came to take Mum's body away I took off her wedding ring, grown loose as she became more and more frail, and I slid it on the ring finger of my right hand where it's stayed ever since. Her ashes have been scattered in the same place as my Dad's. We planted roses. 'Peace' and 'Remembrance'.

She's gone, and it really hurts. I don't know what death is, really. I know what Jesus told us about it, and I hang onto the things that I believe to be true. I hope that on that night in May when she left here she found my Dad waiting for her. I hope that maybe she was part of the reception committee for the Queen when she arrived a few months later. I hope that she's okay. 

I hope she knows how much I loved her. 

The passage of time, girls and boys...

I'm here and I want to talk to you but I don't really know what to say. I'm tired and I've been impatient with the kids, and there's a pile of things that I should do this evening but I'm sitting here staring at the computer and I can't be bothered. I'm so tired. I should go to bed. I will go to bed. As soon as I can find the energy to get up.

Bryan went to his Uncle's funeral today. I've just seen part of a programme on TV where an elderly man strokes his wife's hand as the doctors tell him that there's nothing they can do. This afternoon I was reading an anecdote from Tony Campolo where a couple love each other so much that they both want the other to die first. I've been thinking about death quite a bit recently. My little piece of peace the other morning was in a graveyard. 

I'm not a morbid person. Yes, I worry about death, but more about the people I love who don't know you, Lord; I worry about their death. Mine, I suppose I worry that it might hurt. That it might be lingering, painful, undignified. Or that I might be a burden to those that love me. But I don't worry about dying, because then I'll see you. I'll get to be with you because I am your child. I will sit at your feet for eternity and sing to you and I won't sing out of tune and I won't have to read music or try to remember the words. 

I've been thinking about death more in terms of the fragility of life, I think. How short it is. How it's all we have and we value it above everything and yet in your terms it's over in an instant. 'Just the cover and the title page,' CS Lewis described our earthly life. The rest of the Story takes place after that. 

I want to make sure that I live my life before I die. I don't mean swim with dolphins or see the Taj Mahal or whatever, I mean I don't waste it. I don't want to waste my life living only for weekends, or waiting until the children grow up and become less frustrating. So many days of my life I find myself thinking, ''It'll be easier when...' or 'I'll be happy when...' and that day never comes. 

I'll be OK when this hurdle is over. When that essay is handed in. When I get my exams. When I get married. When this injury heals. When I get pregnant. When the children are self sufficient and I have more time. When Bryan gets home. When this, when that. 

The day never comes. Or when it does, there's another 'When...'.  How do I live in the present more? I often wish that my life had a 'rewind' button, or a 'fast forward button. Occasionally a 'pause'. Even once or twice a 'stop/eject' but rarely do I seem to want to press 'play'. I'm either worrying about the future or longing for the past, or hanging onto a moment. My autocue seems faulty. 

My headmaster at school used to stand on the stage at assembly and exhort us not to let the years slip between our fingers, 'The passage of time, girls and boys...' he would say, and we'd mimic him as we walked to the next class. 'The passage of time!'  I know what he meant, now. Those days were thirty years ago. Thirty!  He's now retired, his two deputy heads are dead. Sometimes it hits me that if the last thirty years have gone in a flash, so will the next thirty, or sixty. 

This is cheerful isn't it? 

I can't live my life any faster, or any slower. I can't make it pause just because I want longer to process something or I've temporarily had enough and need a break. I can't do anything very much because I am not in control. I am sitting on a conveyor belt just being carried along at a pre-ordained pace and all I can do is make sure that I don't waste the ride. It'll stop before I know it. 

I just find that hard, Lord. I am full of worries. I want my children to grow up and I want them to stay just as they are because they are perfect in all their imperfections. I want to learn and yet I am so bad at listening. I want to know you but quite often my eyes are looking down, not up.  

That poor man on the telly is losing the wife that he loves. He has tears in his eyes. She is unconscious. His face is lined and blemished and his eyebrows are bushy and his brow furrowed. His eyes are pale and full of tears. His mouth is trembling. I wonder if he said what he wanted to say before she had her stroke. I wonder if he took it for granted that she knew he loved her. Maybe she did. Maybe they both wanted to be the survivor just so that the other would not have to bear the grief. 

I don't know what I'm trying to say. I so often don't. As I lie in bed tonight it will probably occur to me, but right now I feel for that man and it seems important to tell people that I love that I love them. I want my loved ones to know you because there will be a day when it's too late. I want to live each day as you want me to live it because I don't know what you have down for me - whether my final breath will be this very night or in another fifty years, or somewhere in between. I don't know that, so I need to make sure that... that... I don't know. 

Today all day I've felt uneasy. There's been more bad news today and, worryingly, an absence of any news about a friend of mine who is seriously ill. I'd hoped to hear that her surgery went well and she was stable. No news is just no news, though, I guess. 

I'm tired. Things look worse when I'm tired, don't they. The sun'll come out tomorrow, as the song goes. Lord, help me to wake up tomorrow with a sense of purpose and a new energy to face the next thing in this never ending heap of rubbish that I'm wading through. Help me to hand over the worries to you and not hoard them as if they were treasure. Help me not to be weighed down by all the things but to care about people without stumbling beneath the burden of it all. 

Lord Jesus, be with Bryan's family as they grieve his Uncle. Heal those who are ill and suffering now. Give surgeons skill. Those who need divine help to get their life on track, may they find the help they need in you, the Lord of Compassion, the Healer, the Comforter. May the people I love who haven't found you yet please, please open their eyes. 

Please be with Katy and I as we go for yet another dressing change tomorrow. Be with Bryan as he goes back to London when he'd rather be with us. Be with Elizabeth as she wobbles her first wobbly tooth and worries so much about when/how/if it'll fall out. Lord she is so like me in the way she frets about things. That's not a legacy I want for her.

Show me what you want me to do, Lord. Show me the next step. Give me an appreciation of time and your plan for my life. I don't want to waste it. Help me to ride my little conveyor belt with confidence instead of desperately running to stand still and missing so much. 

A Good Night's Sleep wouldn't go amiss either. 

There's always someone having a worse day than me

I want to tell you something, God.

I was walking down the road the other day and I had my iPod so my music was in my ears, and I was walking along in time to the music, and singing (in my head, I'm not yet that disinhibited) and it was sunny, and I was having a Good Day, and I think I was even smiling.

I was thinking how life is good, and this song makes me happy, and full of the joy of living and being in your family. 

All good.

Then I came to our church, and just at the kerb were a series of funeral cars, and the hearse was there with the pallbearers lifting a coffin onto their shoulders. The vicar was there in his robes leading the mourners up the path into church and people were crying and leaning into each other.  Everyone was in black. Couples were holding hands, clutching tissues and grief was visible on their faces.

I stopped abruptly about fifty yards away. I needed to walk past, but weaving through the throng wasn't on.  I glanced across the road as it crossed my mind to walk on the other pavement for a way but the road was busy and people had stopped on the opposite side out of respect as well. I yanked out my earphones and turned off the music and stood still and watched. It only took a couple of minutes for the crowd to move off into church.

The coffin top was full of flowers; pink and purple and white and lime green foliage. Gerberas and lilies and carnations and roses.  Someone had chosen them with care. They were lovely. I don't suppose the beauty of the flowers made anyone feel any better. I don't suppose it mattered to anyone in their party that it was a bright sunny day and spring seemed to be prematurely in the air. It was very sad.

I carried on where I was going but I didn't put the music back on. The moment had gone.

Life and death, hey.

Funeral processions always remind me that someone is always having a worse day than I'm having.

I'm so used to having that thought about funerals that I had it as I watched the cars pull up in front of our house on the day of my Dad's funeral. 'Someone's having a worse day than me.' Hot on the heels of that thought was another which said, 'Not today they're not.'  I guess that somewhere in the world someone was indeed having a worse day, being tortured or burying their child instead of their Daddy, but you couldn't have said that to me on that day. It wouldn't have been a good idea to suggest it.

And there were those people, so sad because they were saying goodbye to someone they loved. I felt tears behind my eyes just standing a distance away and witnessing it.

I don't know what I'm trying to say, here, Lord. In the midst of life, we are in death, is that it? All I know is that I was thrown into confusion in an instant. Brought up short. Like on a film where there's boisterous music and then something happens and the music stops with an abrupt Zzzzzppp noise. (I know you know what I mean. If you're omnipresent you've certainly seen at least one film where that happens). Anyway.

How fragile are we, Lord?

A friend of mine miscarried this week. Another friend and former colleague is sitting in intensive care right now as I type, not knowing if her Mum will get better after a heart attack. I know of some people precious to me who are nursing a seriously ill friend of theirs who is surely dying. Some family friends called in tonight on their way back down south after attending the funeral of a lifelong friend of theirs.

We're all affected by it, aren't we?  I've cried for my friend whose tiny tiny baby died. I'm worried for my friend that her Mum might die. I'm sad for the people who are watching someone they love inch closer to death. I sympathise with those who said farewell to a friend this afternoon. I had a tear in my eye as I saw the grief of the strangers outside church the other day.

John Donne said:

 'No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.' (Meditation XVII) 

The ripples spread further than we think.


I don't know who that funeral was for, Father, but in death, that person touched me.


How fragile is life, Lord. How short, and how delicate. We look at butterflies and marvel that they only live for such a short time, and we pity them, because we can't see beyond our threescore years and ten, (and another couple of decades, hopefully...) but we are like that to you, aren't we? This life is over in a blink and the longer and more wonderful part is yet to come. I guess we shouldn't lose sight of that.

It's a fine line between enjoying the here and now because you want us to enjoy all the gifts you have for us, and not realising that the here and now will be back there and back then before we even notice that it's gone.

I don't know what else to say. It was a powerful moment that changed my day. Not as much as those of the folks at the funeral, of course.  I went on to where I was going and I still had a Good Day, but there was something profound about that moment when I went from happyhappyhappy, walking along feeling that my life was painted in bright colours, with happy sounds and lots of exclamation marks, and then...whoosh...to a silent, stalled standstill and achingly sad for a group of people that I didn't know.

Thankyou for the happiness I felt as I walked down the road the other sunny morning, for the sun and the music and whatever it was in me that was singing away.  Thankyou for the love that those people at the funeral had for the person they were missing. Thankyou that you care about us whether we are euphoric or at rock bottom, and all the shades in between.

Thankyou that you have promised us something wonderful when we die, Lord, and that the knowledge of that actually changes things in this life, now, today and tomorrow.