I’m awake again in the middle of the night. It doesn’t happen every night, and I certainly don’t struggle to get to sleep, but passing 2.30am or 4.30am proves difficult at least a few times a week these days. I read the news, I check the weather forecast, I try to refrain from social media as I have a clumsy tendency to accidentally play a video with sound, even though I mute everything. Sometimes, like today, I just get up. Barnacles had started trying to open the bedroom door anyway, so I thought I’ll just feed the cats and let them out, make a cup of ginger and turmeric tea with honey, light the fire, maybe watch some SVU on Netflix.

Yet, I find myself here. Writing stuff.

For those that don’t know, my Mum passed away just before Christmas. It was both a surprise and yet not surprising, given she’d lost 10 stone in weight and seemingly had a constant infection needing antibiotics over the preceding months. She just wasn’t strong enough to fight off a respiratory infection in the end. I’m thankful to have seen her just a couple of weeks before, and that I spoke to her the day before. You wish you knew what was coming so you could spend just that little bit longer on the phone. Last time I spoke to my Dad was from a phone box in Times Square in New York, and I think the last thing he said to me was I’ll put your Mum on, in true Dad fashion.

I feel like I started to grieve for Mum almost a year ago. She started to decline just after last Christmas and after mobility loss, some cognitive impairment, frequent hospitalisations, and having to leave her home as residential care became the only option, it was a lot. I went from being able to speak to her for an hour every day to maybe speaking to her every week. she couldn’t manage the computer any more, couldn’t understand how to work the mobile and you needed a perfect storm of it to be charged, switched on, and near enough to her, which rarely happened. Plus even when I could speak to her, the background noise would be so loud, and her, (even though she always denied it) rather deaf, communication wasn’t always easy. I increased the frequency of my UK trips to try and compensate a little, but some days she would be fast asleep for the duration of my visit, or I’d be in side rooms while Mum was with care staff. Of course it wasn’t the same, how could it be.

The sale of Mums home, and where I lived until my mid twenties was particularly painful. I stayed there for a week, when Mum had gone into the care home, but before it had gone on the market and it was, I don’t really know how to describe it. Just sad and wrenching and hideous. I didn’t have to stay there, but I needed to. To try and make peace with it, and say goodbye to my safe place, my port in a storm. I slept in my old bed and cleared out the cupboards in my old bedroom. School reports, meticulously saved, unused birthday presents, wrapped and tucked away, unused as if keeping them for a rainy day. The view from the bedroom window, over the garden I played in and the ghosts of bonfires I poked with sticks and stared into with my Dad. It seems so silly to grieve the loss of bricks and mortar, but I do. The sale went through in the last couple of months and now there’s a skip in the drive and lights on in my old bedroom and I want to tell them all to get out because it isn’t theirs. But of course, it is.

Now I find myself wearing that sadly familiar heavy concrete overcoat of melancholy from the back of the wardrobe, but the acute nature of this particular grief is tempered slightly by it having started so many months ago, and by the relief that goes with knowing that someone you love is no longer in pain. And of course 82 years is, as they say “a good innings”. Whatever the fuck that means.

So, on through the in-between time we go. The worst possible bit, the bit between the knowing and the public goodbye. I simultaneously want to fast forward two weeks and don’t want these 2 week to pass. I know every mile travelled on that plane will increase the weight of it all, just like it did flying back from Florida for my Dad. I’m dreading it.

My lovely husband, I should add, has all of this, and me, and his own stuff going on, and has taken the early morning dog walks so I can sleep, cooked tea when I’ve spent the day in my Pjs again, and just been there. My insta family have also been delightful. So many of them understand in ways that others don’t.

Don’t worry about me. I’m OK. I mean I will be. I think if you’re skipping about grinning like a chimp at times like this then you’re probably a borderline psycho.

I ordered a grown up ladies handbag, which was delivered this week. It occurred to me at Pops funeral that I don’t own a handbag that doesn’t have ears, or is shaped like a toadstool. My most sensible bag is a leather tiny Doc Martens bag that barely fits my phone. So with this new grown up ladies bag came a little postcard which read. “A wounded deer leaps the highest”. I shall keep this in mind, but we’re just tentatively hopping for now, the leaping we will save for sunnier days than these.

TTFN x