Reading · Not Lamb Anymore

A family photo from the late 1970s of a 5 year old girl in pyjamas, sitting with her Mum and Dad who are both seated and smiling at the camera. Mother and daughter both have 1970s bowl cuts and father has a 1970s handlebar moustache. There is a Christmas tree behind the group. — Me, Mum and Dad, Christmas 1977 (I think)

In May last year, I wrote about losing a parent when it had been a long time coming and wasn’t a surprise. Dementia does that. But on the first anniversary of losing my dad, I’m writing to say I recently lost my mum… and it wasn’t necessarily a surprise (due to her age), but it came out of nowhere and was still a massive shock.

It wasn’t meant to happen like this. That’s what I can’t help thinking. I don’t want to go into the finer details about losing Mum, but we said our goodbyes to her in hospital on New Year’s Eve, and I was with her when she passed in the early hours of New Year’s Day.

And all I can say to that is — what a shitty way to start the year.

I’m numb. I’m angry. I’m still in shock. I’m horribly sad.

But she was 91 is another thought that keeps going round my head. Dad was 95. They had a very long and happy life together: together for 73 years, married for 68. But if Mum hadn’t fallen — as is so often the case with older people — before Christmas, she would probably be sitting in her lovely sun-filled kitchen1, watching the birds at her bird feeder and drinking a cup of tea today.

We’d probably be very sad that it had been one year since losing Dad. I’m sure there would have been tears. But with daffodils outside her window, the sun making more of an appearance and the evenings getting lighter, I’m certain it would have been a turning point, a date that we just had to battle past for her to look forward to a little bit of a future for her in her twilight years.

At the end of last year, she put in an offer on a new house, a bungalow less than two minutes’ drive from my house. A two-minute walk thanks to a footpath shortcut. Nearer to Keith and me, good for emergencies. Nearer to town and accessible with a (potential) mobility scooter for her, not as rural and cut off as her current home. It was to be a fresh start. She was excited.

It wasn’t to be.

Instead, her house is now up for sale. My siblings (and more of the family, everyone’s been great) and I have done the majority of the house clearing, prepping the house for going on the market. But it’s been a horrible job, because it brings such overwhelming sadness: you can’t keep everything but you want to, and you feel horribly guilty donating, recycling, etc., things that Mum loved.

Everything’s a process, whether it’s the logistics of finances, the house sale or the funeral, or the process of coming to terms with the fact that I won’t ever speak to her again. I won’t hear my phone ringing and see Mum mobile on the screen.

Admittedly, she would have taken an age to say something, spent several seconds saying Catherine? I can’t hear you, hold on… and fumbled around while I’m shouting, Put it on speaker, Mum…! only for me to tell her that she should end the call and I’d try calling her back on the landline.

I also won’t ever have to talk her through how to get her TV on the right channel. Or explain how to save her shopping basket in her online grocery shopping, only for me to say I’ll get in the car and be there in ten minutes, rather than her getting frustrated on the phone.

I won’t have to collect her prescriptions anymore. I won’t have to pick up a TV guide for her at Tesco when I’m already there doing a bit of shopping, though every time I go now I still, for a split second, think, Oh! I’ll get a TV guide for Mum...

The other day, I was staring out of the window while waiting for tea to brew and thought about a thing that had happened that day, and I briefly thought, Can’t wait to tell Mum that. It catches you off guard.

My sister asked me, Were we naive to think that she could go on for at least another year or two?

No, was my answer. If she hadn’t fallen and ended up in hospital, she’d still be with us now. We weren’t naive, we were just hopeful. Hopeful she’d have a couple of years to do things she wanted to do without the worry of staying in with Dad and his dementia 24/7 because he couldn’t be left home alone.

We wanted her to have a little freedom. Get out for a cup of tea and a cake at a nice cafe at a moment’s notice. Stay out for the afternoon and go to lunch with friends. Visit the garden centre. We even took her to the Van Gogh interactive exhibition in the autumn, and she loved it. After looking after my dad for so many years with all the frustrations and heartbreak that that brings, she deserved a bit of ‘me’ time.

As I already said… it wasn’t to be.

But to look on the bright side, we did as much as we could to make Mum’s life brighter and easier since losing Dad.

We entirely redecorated her bedroom. We decluttered the house. We did some kitchen updates, a half-makeover. We did get her out and about more often. And we know she loved and appreciated everything.

She just had a very hard time in herself after losing Dad: understandable after living with someone for 68 years. And now we’re having a hard time being without her; we didn’t get the time to adjust to being without her like we did with Dad. We didn’t expect it so soon.

Mum having afternoon tea on her 90th birthday

So this post — the one I didn’t want to have to write — explains my absence somewhat from anything online for the last few months. I haven’t updated my Instagram, my blog, or my Substack. I’ve not wanted to, and I’ve not felt like it anyway.

I’ve been continuing with my domestic cleaning job, where I have several regular clients who are all lovely. It gets me out of the house and keeps money coming in (god knows we’ve needed it).

I’ve continued to write my first novel; it’s taken me sooo much longer than I ever thought it would… that’s partly due to the steep learning curve I’m on with the logistics of writing a novel (who would have thought that planning the story rather than making it up as I went along would have saved me so much time down the line with editing?!), and partly because my parents were taking up so much of my time. I am not complaining about that — I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat — but I am now able to get into a routine and get everyday things done that I had to put off before, which strangely is making me feel better.

It’s a harsh irony that improving one part of your life can require a painfully sad, unwelcome event to occur. The thing that made you miserable creates other circumstances that make you happy.

Or maybe not happy… just less anxious.

Realistically, my novel (I’m self-publishing) should be out by the summer. (It’s a second chance, time-travel British romantic comedy, and I’ve bloody loved writing it.) If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, then you won’t miss when it’ll be available to preorder.

I’m honestly so excited about publishing it, but also absolutely terrified… I’ve lived and breathed these characters for almost two years now(!), so to think of them out there in the world and being exposed to the general public scares me.

It would be nice to end the year on a much more positive note than it started on.

That said…

Going forward, I’ve got to think positively. Of course Mum wouldn’t want us to be moping around and constantly being sad. But things just trigger you, and I can be absolutely fine one minute, and then I think of something… and I’m in full-on, blubbering floods of tears the next. It’s definitely the shock of losing her so soon [after Dad] and so quickly.

And just to top off our year… our dog Suki has a tumour. We thought it was a fatty lump or cyst on her ribcage, so did the vet, but then a couple of weeks ago it changed shape and size so the vet took a sample.

Turns out she has a tumour.

Thankfully, Suki is happy as Larry, loving life and full of energy. But whether the tumour is benign or aggressive, we won’t know unless she has an operation to remove it. However, she’s had kidney disease for about a year, and we’re managing that with a special renal diet, and that, by itself, is a problem — but it’s manageable.

Here’s the stinger: an operation would almost certainly trigger the kidneys, and they just wouldn’t cope. They’d shut down after a while. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s high risk. We had two options: have the operation and risk triggering kidney failure, or basically keep our fingers crossed that it’s benign and treat it with medication.

After a long discussion, we decided to go down the medication treatment route.

(And if you have any experience of anything similar, please can I politely ask that you don’t give me any details. And the same goes for any judgements on what you’d do in the same circumstances… it wouldn’t be helpful. There are a lot more details I’ve left out that helped us make a decision. Thank you ♡)

So on top of everything else, we’ve now got this to contend with. We’re not ignoring it — we couldn’t possibly, she’s on so many different medications we have alarms set for 8 am, 4 pm, 8 pm and 12 am to administer regular doses — but we realise that any time spent with her would be time wasted if we’re constantly crying and sad about what might or might not be. (And dogs respond to our emotions, so negative energy would rub off on her.) The anxiety has been parked in a little section of our brains in the ‘cross that bridge when we come to it’ bay.

Because I’ll be damned if I spend the rest of this year constantly worrying if I don’t have to. I can be sad, that’s fine. I can have moments of bursting into tears at things that trigger me; that’s also okay. But my anxiety is going to have to take a break for a bit — I’m telling that emotion to back the f*ck up.

And I hope I’ll come back to my little space on the internet with some good news for a change, and maybe it’ll be more regular. That’s the thing with life: you just never know what’s around the corner. One foot in front of the other is sometimes all you can manage.

Hope you’re okay and that life is treating you well. Thanks for reading ♡

I'm Now an Adult Orphan. Sometimes Life Sucks

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