Speaking my mind
A break from British norms around dying helped WH’s health editor process a profound loss more effectively than months of therapy. As the sun sets on the first full year without her mother, she shares what she’s learned
Sitting cross-legged on my living room floor, methodically making my way through jam-filled pancakes and playing Vampire Weekend’s debut album on a loop, I realised I’d developed acrutch of cascading my senses with the sensory comforts of mid-2009, where I was trying to live. It was the summer I finished school, when the future glittered in front of me – possible and expansive and boundless – and when nothing was wrong, not really.
In reality, it was deep winter 2022. I’d watched my beloved mum die months earlier – first slowly, then suddenly. Her diagnosis – ‘breast cancer, triple negative, already in the lymph nodes, maybe 18 months, I’m so sorry’ – came weeks before the world shut up shop in March 2020. The lockdown was spent at my childhood home in Yorkshire, followed by endless shuttling back and forth from London, all set to a score of oncologists’ polite, clinical mutterings and hospital-ward bleeps. It culminated in her death on asickly, sweaty summer morning and memories of her skin stretched tightly over her skeleton, as thin as the paper they use to make Bibles.
Now, my first Christmas without her was blinking at me. Surrounded by my aggressively curated regression, I accepted I had to confront the experience more directly than weekly therapy allowed. Confident I couldn’t do that while working a 40-hour week, I snared atwo-month sabbatical. I’d go first to Vietnam, then Indonesia, spending six nights at a silent retreat centre in the north of Bali halfway through.
I arrived on the island with a backpack, notepad and fear of impending caffeine withdrawal. By day, there was meditation, yoga, journalling and silently walking the rice fields. At night, we’d sit wordlessly around a firepit. To the tune of cicadas and the crackle of flames, Iwrote to her. I told her how sorry Iwas that she so desperately didn’t want to die, that she never found peace with it, that sometimes, raggedly tired, I snapped at her. I placed my missives to the beyond into the blaze and watched them curl, disintegrating to ash.
The gentle ritual in the cool, dark night felt more fitting than her funeral. There, I eulogised her life at our family’s church while the hot, humiliating sun thrashed down. Far away from our culture – where grief is permitted, but not too loudly, not too raw-ly, and you should probably stop talking about it a few months in because people don’t like hearing about the messy reality of dying thank you very much and hasn’t the weather been nice lately – I needled into the pain.
