My mother died nine years today.

She read a copy of a book called "Falling Angel" that she plucked from my bookshelf, read it for a while, drank half a cup of tea, put the book down, open on the floor, face up, without a bookmark (causing a terrible crease to the spine), and went to sleep.

She never got up.

I came back from work, on a Friday, at 5.50pm. My dad had come at 5.00pm, as he always did. He rose early, and, leaving her in bed, he got dressed, had his customary half-hour on the toilet, coughed loudly, spat into the sink, as all smokers do, dressed, got into his Green Audi, drove the twenty or so minutes to work, and didn't kiss my mother good morning. I never understood that myself.

When I got back from work, my mother was dead.

We spoke in the kitchen, for what seemed like an age. And yet, what was there to say? and how was there to say it? There was fact, and speculation, and nothing else.

After I spoke with my Dad, I had to go upstairs, to my bedroom, which was next to the room which had my dead mother in it. As I hit the top of the stairs, my brother's bedroom, the door open, the bed unmade, as he always left the bed unmade, because she would make it as he was too lazy to do so in the morning.

These days, I like to make the bed. An unmade bed always reminds me of dead people. Behind the bedroom door I passed on the way to my room, my dead mother. Thank God that door was shut. My dad said I could go and see her. And for a short while, I did. I went into the bedroom, I looked at my dead mother, and I have no idea what i did next. I remember standing against the glass door of the living room as officials took the body out of the house, draped in something dark that I didn't - couldn't - look at it. I stood against it because my dad didn't want to see her leave the house, yet couldn't help looking.

It wasn't unexpected, or expected. My mother had been ill for a very long time : as long as I could remember, and possibly longer, she had always been frail, physically fragile, yet deteminded of spirit. Either in spite - or because of - her physical ailments (namely a hole in her heart and ill-health caused by constantly smoking 240 fags a day, so much so peopole thought I was a smoker, the cheek of that!), she had developed a stubborn, dogged resistance to dying. But death only needs to win once. Life needs to win every time. And whilst you can win the battles, you can't win everyone.

When she died, it was more resigned, than shock. I knew it was going to happen - the question was not if, but when? It had been telegraphed. In heart attacks that I had witnessed, at 2am, coming back drunk from a Suede concert in Blackpool, I held her haqnd as she screamed I'M DYING. My brother was curled up in a ball. My dad on the toilet with diarhorrea. (Or however it is spelt). The first person I saw, walking up the road, as I opened the front door, was my GP, who lived down the road, and had been called out at 2am. I walked up the road, in the drizzle of the Midlands Autumn, as an ambulance crawled slowly up the road. Looking for something.

In my mind i half-thought, I bet it's Mum.

Sometimes you want to be wrong.

I haven't been to her grave : well. She hasn't got a grave, she has a line in a memorial book in a crematorium. To go would be an admission. That she hasn't merely gone into another room, but she really has left this frequency of existence (if you subscribe to the theory that energy is merely vibrating frequency, her frequency is one that is no longer visible to us).

I went once. But they closed the place at 4pm. I arrived about five to four. It took all my courage to go, and still not be able to get in, and I couldn't do it again.

It's been nine years. It feels like yesterday, and a lifetime ago. Seven houses, One marriage, four jobs, and too-many girlfriends later, here we are again. As they said in Hellboy", it is not how you start something that matters. It is how you finish it. It not how you live ; it is how you die.

"Poet or prophet,
foe or friend,
we are all the same
in the end"
(from "Two Suns In The Sunset,
by Pink Floyd).

And the cup of tea? It stayed on the bedside table until December. In the end, when the tea had developed green algae, I felt I had no choice, but dispose of it. Never liked tea anyway.

On a lighter note, here's an Interesting Interview over on Slashdot.


- posted by Mark @ 9:54 pm