The Presence of Absence

On where we might find those we have lost

Following the death of my mother, I want to write about the presence of absence, about how a person might stay with us even though they have passed, like indentations left in the sand by the power of the sea.

When I knew her days were numbered, I began to notice my mum more and more as I went about my day.

‘Granny did this with me when I was your age,’ I said as my three-year-old granddaughter and I secretly shared a cube of jelly snipped with scissors from a wobbling orange slab. I got a flashback to a 1960s kitchen and conspiratous smiles shared along with the advice to add a little less water so the jelly would still set.

 As Luna and I made jelly, the little one standing on a chair to reach the worktop, the scent of sweet peas was heady from the jam jar of blooms picked earlier. I was aware that I was talking to her a lot about the Great Granny she had never met, the distance and the small, cluttered bungalow she shared with my father preventing them from having a family holiday by the sea. ‘Granny loves sweet peas,’ I said, as we pushed our noses into the petals and sniffed, her little nose wrinkling and a smile spreading across her face which still bore a nasty scar where she’d fallen off her bike and had an argument with the road on a previous visit.

A day later, at the sewing machine, hemming a skirt for my daughter, Luna’s mum, I’d stilled, had a feeling that made me pause and brought a lump to my throat. As I wound black thread of thread on top of beige on the only bobbin spare, it hit me that Mum did this, and I would continue to find her presence in different ways every day both before her death and after.

At that point, Mum was in a nursing home on the south coast and I was travelling by train up and down the country, from Northumberland to Sussex, duties split between grandchildren and elderly parents, treating myself to a first-class ticket for several reasons: I could get a single seat big enough for my ‘splendid bottom’ as my other granddaughter, Daisy calls it, and travel relatively alone, with space to turn and face the window and not have to sit next to or talk to anyone when the tears started to roll or I just needed to be quiet and alone with my thoughts. I would get fed with dinner and plied with gin, cups of tea, packets of biscuits and bags of crisps. I would feel looked after at a time when I was doing so much looking after of other people at both ends of the age spectrum. But why do we feel the need to justify treating ourselves, of topping up our giving tanks?

On the penultimate visit before Mum passed, I found Mum in some sort of semi-conscious state, ‘asleep’ and unaware of who was in the room or what was happening to her. A kindly Romanian nurse who called her ‘Darlink’, did get a flutter of the eyes when she shouted in mum’s ear.  I tried doing the same, faking the accent, but nothing. Not a glimmer. The nurses were kind but told me Mum was eating and drinking very little and I read into that that she did not have long. I sat with her and although she was asleep, she opened her mouth like a little bird in a nest and I fed her, giving sips of thickened water from a plastic medicine spoon, offering her a small amount of pureed food, but it looked and smelt disgusting and she wrinkled up her nose and clamped her teeth together. She was not going to eat anything. I didn’t blame her, and I didn’t push it.

Just a few weeks ago, on the ward in the hospital where she’d been admitted with delirium, I fed her rhubarb and rice pudding from a jam jar, the rhubarb picked from her garden. It slipped down easily, ‘Lovely’ she said from her hospital bed, and she smiled as I spoke about how she so often dished up rhubarb and rice pudding on a Sunday, dividing up the skin between us. As I type I can see and hear her scraping the brown stuck-on bits from the side of the same fluted-edged, shallow Pyrex dish that I have in my kitchen cupboard.

Mum didn’t wake up at all over the three days I sat with her so I said goodbye to her, kissed her forehead and left in tears, fully expecting that to be it, packed my case and got back on the train tracks up the east coast for the north. However, sitting in the first-class lounge at King’s Cross, with my complimentary raspberry and white chocolate shortbread biscuits and a mug of tea, grateful for a quiet corner in which to hide, the message came through that Mum was awake again. I asked if she knew I had been there. ‘No’ came the reply, and she was sorry she had missed me. I replied, ‘She better bloody well wake up next time’ and got a croaky voice message ‘I bloody well will wake up…’ which had me scuttling for the ladies’ loo in which to sob.

I had heard her voice.

Was I being selfish? Wanting another and then another chance to be close to my mum after a lifetime of an oft-difficult relationship? Was I urging her on, feeding her from a plastic spoon because I needed her, because I needed to her voice?

Ten days later I was back, and mum was indeed awake, propped up by pillows and although not fully understanding what was going on, did manage to hold and talk about the drawing of a house and bridge with two children drawn on it that her great-grandchildren had sent. However, the next day she took a turn for the worse and was struggling to breathe. It was time for her to go.

I opened the window to let in a breeze, pulled back the net curtains so we could see the copper beech waving and put on one of her favourite CD’s by The Buona Vista Social Club. A lover of poetry who has a bookshelf of poems by Keats and John Betjeman and one signed by Benjamin Zephaniah ‘To Viv, who loves poems’ and read a poem to her, part of the Prophet by Kahlil Gibram.

The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibram

For what is it to die?

But to stand naked in the wind

and to melt into the sun.

And what is it to cease breathing?

But to free the breath from its restless tides,

That it may rise and expand and seek God, unencumbered.

Only when you drink from the river of silence

Shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountain top,

Then you shall begin to climb.

And the earth shall claim your limbs.

Then you shall truly dance.

I said goodbye and stroked her head and told her I was there, that it was time to go and then read the poem again. Over the next half hour, her breathing slowed, got more irregular, and stopped. My mum was gone. What was left was not her and the rapid change from being my mum to being a corpse was something that will stay with me for a very long time.

But where had she gone? For someone who has ‘grey faith’ as Kit de Waal so wonderfully described this state of not quite being brave enough to say you don’t believe in God, or not knowing if you do believe in God, where do our loved ones go when they die and how do we know they are still with us when we desperately want them to be?

In the days after her death, I found I could not bear to be in crowds, indoors or even talking with friends, kind enough to visit and check in on me. I had to be outside, preferably in the garden or walking down the lane and by myself. I called to her, talked to her and in those days following her death, I wanted to believe I felt something. I was sure I felt a presence as the leaves fluttered on the trees, and as the wind blew through the grasses along the lane. I asked her what the name of one wildflower I couldn’t identify down the lane was, and it was as if she were there, whispering in my ear. I spent hours sitting listening to the water bubbling in the burn and it seemed to take on a new quality, as I whispered, ‘Are you there, Mum, are you there? Or has she just slipped away and is gone, as Deborah Levy writes in The Cost of Living as she remembers her own mother’s death?

               ‘I somehow thought she would die and still be alive. I would like to think she is somewhere in that distant sound that resembles the sea in which she taught me to swim, but she is not there. She has gone, slipped away, disappeared.’

               Deborah Levy. The Cost of Living

Two days after Mum died and now back home in Northumberland, I had a strong urge to be by the sea. My son suggested we walk as a family along the beach to remember Granny and collect shells, as she had done with them. The wind was fierce and the rain relentless, but we wrapped ourselves in waterproofs and walked along the wild Northumbrian coast at Warkworth, bending to pick up shells and stones. ‘Look at this’, my son said, holding out a black pebble. It was a fossil with white markings in the shape of an angel, or so I thought at the time. Was this a sign from my mum? My son wisely said, ‘It is whatever you believe it to be, Mum’.

I would like to believe my mum sent that stone and is in the wind, and in the leaves that spin and sound like water on the poplar tree, and in the grasses that I run my hand through as I walk down the lane.

As we drove home from the beach, I asked my kids for their memories of Granny. My daughter said she loved how they wrote letters to each other and would miss these. My son said he loved how she had all their childhood drawings on the kitchen wall, the colours of felt tips fading on browning paper. My other son said, walking on the beach, collecting shells and remembering when they had carried back a bucket of seawater from the beach so Granny could show him how salt was left when it evaporated.

All of these memories, the jelly, the bobbin, rhubarb and rice pudding and gathering shells gave me an idea and I cast a net around the wider family and friends asking them for their thoughts about Mum and crafted this poem. I did think about calling it ‘The Presence of Absence’ but instead, gave it the title, Rhubarb and Rice Pudding and read it at her funeral last week.

Rhubarb and Rice Pudding

Rhubarb and rice pudding

A cube of jelly pinched

Handwritten letters, sent by post

Grandchildrens’ drawings on the kitchen wall.

Holidays by the sea,

Slotties on the pier

Collecting shells along the seashore

A bucket of water carried back from the beach.

Flowers in the garden, pots by the door

Plants in the greenhouse,

Two sisters who love roses

Neighbour’s dogs, keep off!

Watching birds from the window

A concrete penguin on the lawn

A bird book on my windowsill

99p from a charity shop, sent with love

Mixing rules in Rummikub

Losing badly at Monopoly,

Colonel Mustard is in the library

Which lemon curd is homemade?

A scooter ride, a red jumper,

A torch up her back

Table tennis in Zurich

Greek holidays in the sun.

Carry on camping,

A canvas tent, a wooden cot,

Fancy dress and campfire songs

Vesta Curry, Instant Whip and Cadbury’s Smash.

Church flowers, banners galore,

Cut glass, paper, paints and brushes

Typewriter, Tippex.

Secret lists in shorthand.

A tiny tree for Christmas decorated in a pot,

Snowman on the table filled with gifts.

Smoothing out the wrapping paper

Cutting cards for tags.

A whoop and a squeal if something rude or risqué is said,

But no matter where we were

You could picture us.

So, we’ll raise our glasses to you, Viv

‘but just a small one’.

Maybe I’ll use the poem and tell you more about mum, as each line is a story in itself…..but for now, I hope you can meet her here and get an idea of what my mum, who went by the name of Vivien, Viv to her friends, was all about.