My mum died last October. My daughter, Sylvie, who is six, seems to have made sense of this absence: that this is an ending and not the end. She lives through it gently. Her grief has a freedom and she is open to all the places her nana could be. Not quite a ghost, but a bird who has migrated to a warmer place, perched perfectly to see everything Sylvie does.
“Wherever I am she goes.”
There is trust here. Sylvie knows her nana won’t want to miss out on her life.
My mum died during Covid. She didn’t get Covid, she died of cancer. Stage 4, of the lung. After her diagnosis she lived for just over three years. She despised the idea of battling anything. She said she wasn’t at war. Her idea was to live alongside it. She even joked about giving the tumour a name. Even when it was partially blasted by radiochemo warfare; she humanised the thing as though she was encouraging it to work with her: to not spread.
It didn’t spread. It pushed. Leaning into the tubes she needed to swallow and then to breathe.
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Sylvie was there the day they found out. From diagnosis to death, she’d stayed close to my mum. I was away when Mum got her diagnosis. I’d booked two days in Paris. The first time I’d ever left Sylvie alone. I was going to drink bistro wine and wander the Marais. Mum told me I had to go because it was good for me; and because she already understood the cough that kept shaking her body wasn’t just an infection. She knew this could be the last trip I had to myself for some time — without Sylvie, and without treatment and hospitals. Without the permanence of cancer in our lives.
Her call with the news came in the afternoon. I was alone in a bar by Saint-Germain-des-Prés and it was raining, but her voice was breezy and her plans positive. She sounded clear about her next steps and told me not to come home. I heard Sylvie’s sweet and busy chatter in the background. She and my dad had waited for Mum in the coffee shop opposite the GP surgery. My mum changed the subject and told me they were sharing a plate of pistachio and vanilla macaroons. She told me not to worry and that there’d be more conversations.
She wanted to get back to Sylvie and the plate of macaroons. It was their shared pleasure: jelly, trifles and cakes. I’d tell them off, half-joking. They were chums and confidantes.
After the call I sat in the bar and ordered a red wine. I wept to waiters I didn’t know and they said medicine was magic.
Throughout various stages of treatment that followed, this kind of comfort became ordinary and familiar. Words like “stable” and “contained” staved away the inevitable for a little bit longer.
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It always felt we were living with a little bit longer. The partial remission extended her lifeline. A well-meaning doctor told us we might have months instead of weeks. We were thrilled because maybe we’d have Christmas. The clock wound back to weeks. Until days, and we didn’t know if waving goodbye through a window was the last glance. Hours became hysterical blessings.
A single mother, I’d raised Sylvie on my own from the age of one. My mum had helped me. She’d been crucial. She was the nursery and the creche and I was lucky to have her. She’d wait for me in the university canteen so I could run down and breastfeed between seminars. The Spanish students eating lunch and Mum, relieved that Sylvie was falling asleep in the middle of the student noise, drinking her cappuccino, a foot on the carry cot, rocking her to a longer nap.
Sylvie grew up with her skin, her smell — her sweet lullaby voice that could sing to her in French. When she could be bottle-fed my mum napped beside her, stroking pudding arms and legs. She’d been there from the very beginning: the heart and the home for Sylvie. She’d stood calm at her birth — the goddess of all her girls.
“Oh, Anna. She’s here,” she’d said, announcing Sylvie to the world. The life-giver to me — the protector — the calm to keep me still as I caught up with the birth and my own breath. I’d needed her then. When she held Sylvie she was holding me too.
Sylvie and my mum went everywhere together. We often visited my sister, Alice, in New York and they’d wander to the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition in Brooklyn, or eat Italian ice cream in Prospect Park. Mum took her to music classes in Shepherd’s Bush and, as their weekly ritual, Ladbroke Grove library and plantain lunches at the Tabernacle.
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Until Mum began to say it was getting too hard. When these trips became difficult. The buggy too clumsy; the library too hot. Mum always had to get her breath back. When it got worse I moved to Dorset to be closer to her. To care for her. We knew, even though we were hopeful, we were working with just a little longer.
The ending arrived with weight loss and pain. She slept on a mix of morphine, metformin, amoxicillin and the hot-water bottles I made to soothe some of the aches. Now I know how much she kept from us: how searing the agony must have been. I tended to her with my silly remedies. I offered CBD, turmeric, magnesium baths and apple cider, when the time to be preventive had passed. But still I kept doing it.
I’d hear her shuffle to the kitchen at 4am to make tea and I’d wake and join her. Knowing this would stop and I would miss hearing the click of the kettle from upstairs. The tea always weak because she couldn’t stand for long enough to let it steep. We’d chat by the lamp and I’d look away from the skeleton emerging. Sometimes I lost patience. I would wince at the deep cancer sounds from her throat. The grind of mucus congealing around the place she used to swallow. Annoyed she couldn’t speak without the interruption of this hacking, awful cough.
Sylvie had patience. She continued to love without fear. She had time. Reading beside her, arranging the flowers on her windowsill. Sometimes massaging cream on to my mum’s legs and feet. She was mostly bone and skin and Sylvie used the tips of her fingers to dab her shins with the lavender lotion. She’d visit my mum upstairs with small pots of raspberry jelly. They’d spoon the pink gloop under the duvet, alive and wild with refined sugar. It was a last pleasure.
When Mum was at the hospice, her final place, I cleaned and creamed her hair and body. My sister too. She kept vigil at the beside, devoted and exhausted. I did the afternoons. We took it in turns, greeting each other at the doorway in masks, nervous, tired — unable to do more than we were doing. We made each other tea from a machine when we swapped shifts, checking to see who’d brushed her teeth and if fresh trousers had been packed.
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“She had custard today.”
This was a small victory. She could hardly speak, so she used a notebook to write words and letters. Her spelling had left her too. We wanted her voice. To hear her tell us she was going to be OK.
She wore a nose feed. She looked permanently bent and strangely alarmed. The artificiality of liquid food moving through her and against a natural need to shut down. We had to decide when to take it out. Her shape so thin and long; angling her body from the sores on her back so she didn’t have to lie on them. She’d kept her lovely, dark hair and I washed it in a plastic, microwaved cap so she didn’t have to feel the weight and sting of water on her face and neck.
Even at the end she wanted to be kind to us. Her thin fingers touched ours when we slept beside her. She mouthed words of love to my sister. She reached for my dad.
We were her comfort, but we must have been a burden too. She was irritated by the wires and feeds always in her way. We didn’t really want her to go and she knew it. We didn’t mean to need her so much, but we did. I think sometimes she wanted to be alone. Too tired to see our desperate faces saying all we had to say. When we talked too low she was snappy with us for having secrets. She seemed stuck. Never asleep or awake.
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She deserved to die. This felt right and OK: we had used up that little bit longer. We removed the nose feed. Her body would know what to do.
She had the beauty of autumn outside her window. Cinnamon light and the satin of red leaves. My dad would often take her for a walk around the garden. Tender afternoons where he read Heaney and Marvell as she drifted into deepening sleeps.
“Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.”
We believed in the sun. We believed the warmth would smooth the sallow; would feed her skin. As if it might dance on her. Maybe the light would want to look at her first, before it took her away. Mum slipped into last days suddenly. Deep sleep became her death mask. It felt right to let Sylvie visit to say goodbye. She’d seen her in hospital, but this was different. I’d told Sylvie this might be the last time she saw her nana.
She wore a yellow jumpsuit and a crown of feathers she’d made herself. She’d dressed up. Dad had taken Mum to the garden again. Frail, and vanishing in blankets. We didn’t expect much from her.
But when Mum heard Sylvie’s voice her eyes opened. In instinct and impulse she leant forward, her arms reached out. Any pain that ran through her was denied. The last act of love. And Sylvie, unafraid, brave and moved by the same impulse to love her nana, walked to her: gentle, curious. She put a hand on Nana’s taut face, which had smoothed to pearl. The lines were leaving her. Sylvie climbed on to her lap and into her arms and they sat there, eyes closed, for long enough. Still and together; protective and careful. History and eternity in the funnelled light of their gold sun. My mum, taking it with her. Sylvie, keeping it close. No need or fear. No holding on for a little bit longer. This was their secret: they would last for ever.
Days later, Mum died. She was 74.
Grief is an unbearable and unbreakable thing. It hurts, as it should. This year without her has felt frightening. It is a blank map. I can’t use her illness to mark time. I struggle with decisions. I doubt things.
Sylvie seems more sure. She can find my mum. She sees her in dreams. At the edge of the sea and in the pink crease of a cloud. She cries when she needs. She talks when she feels. She draws pictures and makes jewellery they can both wear. They made a memory box. It is filled with letters, puppets, feathers and drawings. She remembers the way they ate jelly and trifle. She had six years of a love that was heaven on earth and she feels it still — their history and eternity.
I asked her how she felt when Nana hugged her. “I felt like she meant it.”
In the sureness of death there is the certainty of love. I look at my daughter and know it is possible to see my mum in every sun. Breathe her in every moon. Sylvie always finds her, so she can’t be far away.
I trust them both completely.
Boxer Handsome by Anna Whitwham is published by Vintage at £7.99