Aftermath …

Well, since we’ve talked about my lovely mum dieing, we may as well go on to talk about her funeral and the general aftermath. I wrote, possibly the longest eulogy on earth, except there was so much more I could put in and my brother wrote an equally lengthy one, my nephews and nieces said things, and my son read the lesson. The rain fell out of the sky like someone emptying a bucket over us but strangely, nobody really cared. Not even my poor uncle, who can’t walk without assistance but made it all the way up the church path because I forgot to get the wheelchair out of the church room! What a plank!

One of the important things about a funeral, I think, is that it should be a celebration. It’s like a send off where you laugh and tell stories about the person you loved. It’s how I was taught to do them and I find them enormously cathartic, done that way. So Mum was carried in to Lord of the Dance, because she’d always said she wanted that at her funeral but the priest pointed out that the words are a bit hard core. They are actually. So she got her wish without the hard core words. We tried to keep it short. And failed. We had a requiem mass because that’s what Mum wanted, she was always very disparaging about anyone having ‘a hymn sandwich’ as she and Dad called it. Mwahaharhgh, except she wasn’t because she wouldn’t have criticised anyone who’d decided to have one, she just didn’t want to do that for any of her rellies or have us do it for her. We found a whole bunch of lovely photos of her which I’ve uploaded to her memory wall because loads of people couldn’t come. We also got the service recorded. Originally we were going to try for a live stream but the signal round the church is even worse than it is round my parents’ house so it was loaded onto the web afterwards.

Slight hiccup when I went to the cupboard to borrow Mum’s dark blue coat only to discover that my brother had already taken all but a single puffa (which was even mankier than the one I’d brought with me) for the Ukranians. Luckily we found some kind of embroidered affair upstairs in Mum’s wardrobe. I put it back when I was done and now I’m slightly regretting it. I’ll definitely nick it next time I’m down. It absolutely threw it down with rain. My poor friend who came from Worcester took five hours to get home, and another friend who was about an hour up the road took two and a half hours to get home. Joy.

How does it feel now?

Kind of weird, if I’m honest. There’s still an absolute metric craptonne of admin, forms to fill in stuff to scan, copy and submit, and an absolute gargantuan raft of other shite. And I’m skint. As ever. And will be for some time because … probate. Obviously we’ve had to take anything worth nicking out of the house as well, and put it in storage and then we’ll have to bring it all back when we get a date for the probate valuation. Head desk. Oh well.

Apart from that though …? It’s hard to explain but, this last ten years as I’ve shared my frustrations at my complete inability to write books at a reasonable speed and my all general ineptitude with you lot, it’s been quite a struggle. A lot of the time, this blog was all I could write. The eyebombing helped of course. That was a bit of a win. But the thing about dementia is it’s sad. Even when the person is quite happy the way Mum was. I’ve been sad a lot of the time for the past eight or ten years and the five before that I was just exhausted.

We have a memory page for Mum with a link to give to the Dementia Society (Admiral Nurses) because they were incredibly kind to me when I rang their helpline which I did, in pieces, several times.

I love this picture of Mum.

My godmother and I were chatting today and she said she’d looked at the page, and the pictures of Mum and found it very distressing to see the last one, at Mum’s 90th birthday celebration because she felt, looking at the picture, that a lot of Mum had already gone. It’s probably true. At the end, Mum was like a tiny flame, a pilot light compared to the brightly burning, vibrant personality she had been. It was hard to watch her like that, although, since she wasn’t in distress, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

Mum was so energetic though. Back in 2015/6 when this all started, I would go and stay with my parents and I would help Mum around the house, being a spare; running to fetch things because I could move faster, cutting stuff up for her because her hands were too arthritic. I had a small child but I would still come home exhausted after a few days trying to keep up with my nearly 80 year old mother. I remember Mum’s annoyance when, aged 77, her doctor suggested that perhaps it was time to stop digging potatoes herself and that maybe she should ask someone else to do it. I also remember when she was embargoed from going to that part of the garden because her panic button wouldn’t reach there. I arrived one Wednesday and found her arranging flowers, including some flowers from a tree that was well into the verboten zone.

‘Have you been down to the fruit cage?’ I asked her.

‘No, no. Not at all,’ she said.

She laughed like a drain when I pointed out the blossom and told her I’d got her bang to rights.

Sorry, none of this is really how it feels is it?

In truth, I feel as if I have lived the last 15 years of my life in twilight. First with a small child although that was uplifting, even if it was exhausting, and then with my parents. One of the hardest aspects with Mum was that there was no ‘sane’ one. Whereas with Dad, I knew exactly what to do because Mum was his soul mate and his best friend. She knew him so well that she understood exactly what he would have wanted us to do, had he been mentally equipped to decide. Except that it does get more complicated than that because the person with dementia changes so instead of putting the others round them at the centre of the world, they centre on their own needs. And those needs change. Case in point Mum, who went from ‘the minute your father goes, I’ll downsize to a nice little bungalow and then we won’t have to worry about money because it’ll see me out.’ To, ‘the house MUST stay in the family at all costs.’

Go figure.

Also, I’m not quite sure what was worse, watching Dad’s suffering or watching the effect it had on Mum, so having a sane one to consult did have a downside. The good thing was that Mum had given me a perfect demonstration of how caring for someone was done, so it was straightforward enough to just do what she did for Dad, for her.

I miss her though, and I will for a while, but when I think of her, I see light in my mind’s eye. Kindly, gentle light. And peace. So that’s grand.

Rain soaked town … Long passage of doom. I dunno. Go figure.

I have her engagement ring. It means a huge amout to me because it meant so much to her, but also because she meant so much to Dad, so it’s kind of the love of both parents rolled into one. At the same time, it’s also a lovely thing, and I am delighted with it on an asthetic shiny-thing-appreciation level which actually makes me feel a bit guilty. (Now I can hear the voice of Dad in my head telling me there’s nothing wrong with thinking it’s a beautiful ring because he thought it was and so did Mum and that being able to appreciate the ring in both respects is nothing to be ashamed of. Nonetheless …) My ring size is N and a half. Mum always joked about having hands like shovels and massive knuckles. I never thought she did until I tried to wear her ring. It was U and a half! I could have worn it with gloves Lord Vernon style … on the outside. Mwahaharhgh. When I picked it up from the undertakers, I put one of those plastic things you can get on it to make it smaller. It was two weeks before I could bring myself to remove it so it could be altered. But I knew that if I didn’t get it altered soon, I’d gesticulate and it would ping off somewhere and I’d never see it again. So I went to one of the lovely jewellers in town. I got it back on Friday. I’m not sure I’ll be taking it off again for a while.

Sometimes, on sunny days, I imagine my parents’ drawing room. I see the way the sun shines through the windows casting bright slanted oblongs of light across the wooden floor. I hear the birds outside. I see the ashes of the most recent fire in the grate. It’s a lovely room. Sitting in there is like being hugged. No wonder that house has only had three owners since 1911. It’s a bit special. It feels kind. Perfect match for my parents really.

What next?

Nothing much for a while. We have the interment of both Mum and Dad’s ashes on 10th. Which reminds me, I must pop down there and rescue Dad from Mum’s desk. We’re going to drop him off at the undertaker’s for a quick holiday so they can pop him into his casket and Mum into hers. They’ll be interred at the school where Dad worked, next to several of their much loved friends.

On the writing front, there’s not much. That’s fine. I didn’t write a thing for three months after Dad died. And then it only built up very slowly. I’m not expecting anything much there, although I will welcome it when it does start up again. Which reminds me. The eyebombing book’s on its way. I’m launching it on 7th February and the campaign will be live for 15 days. Hopefully I’ll hit my target of five purchasers but if I don’t I’ll just have to chalk it up to experience. It’s good to try these things.

Other than that. It’s drifting in limbo until probate’s done. And as for my newfound freedom … that feels as if it’s not going to come true. We’ve inherited a house miles away from either of us and not enough money to keep it going, unoccupied, for more than a few months. Something’s bound to go wrong, it’ll burn down … or thinking about it WWIII will start. Yeh. That’s more likely. Just as my kickstarter goes live they’ll have some massive, hideous war and it’ll fail because we’ll have all fried (hey, guess what? I never catastrophise, not at all). But it does all feel a bit weird. Like I’ve crept under the radar of the fates. It can’t last. I’m going to get rumbled.

After some years where I’ve found it difficult not to feel that, if life is a gift, there were parts of mine that were definitely a dog turd in a paper bag, I’m standing on the brink of a new kind of existance where I might, possibly, have some time and mental energy. Part of me feels it’s one I don’t deserve, or at the least, that I’m not going to get away with it. A simple, straightforward life feels like one that isn’t possible, moreover like one that I’m not entitled to. A big part of me is waiting for something to come piling out of left field to make certain sure doesn’t happen. As if things aren’t allowed to go right for me. I suspect this is part of the process after anything that’s been a bit of a long schlepp. Or maybe it’s survivors’ guilt messing with my head.

Mwahahaargh! As you can see, I’m still the same gargantuan melmet I ever was. Melmet: someone who is such a plonker they are a melt and a helmet, ergo, a Melmet. This is one of my son’s words and I think it’s brilliant. I can also put it into my books as I’m sure Big Merv will be calling The Pan a ‘melmet’ and can even explain that it’s toolbit and melt, which means I can get away with it because even if helmet is a bit rude, toolbit isn’t. Mwahaharhgh!

So there we are. And now McOther has arrived with a glass of sherry and I must take a sip or two and then head off to collect McMini from his boyfriend’s house. So that’s me for this week.

In the meantime, if you are a friend of the family visiting and you want to visit Mum’s memory page, you can do that here:

Eyebomb! Thereofre I am.