Ten years ago, my mother's life ended in a hospital wing of a retirement home. Six days earlier, she had turned 75. When she left there was no fanfare. No announcements. The birds kept singing. The lights remained on. But she was gone. Her ashes scattered on the wind.
These dates in the calendar have created a liminal space for me to traverse, and over the past six days I have been trying to trace her lifeline from birthdate to death. I have imagined placing fragments of her life story on an altar in my mind, but in the knowing of her, I have become acutely aware of the absence of the things about her left unknown. As children we may think we know our parents, but do we really get to know them as a person?
This morning, I thought about her as I listened to an artist talking about the things we move toward, rather than away from. I'm glad to realise that the passage of ten years has moved me away from the pain, for her's was not a happy ending. I can still recall it all, but I have moved towards something gentler. I have grown to understand her in a way I was unable to in life, and I have experienced love taking on new depths and expanses beyond time and place.
There are things over these ten years that I wish she would have been here to see, and yet there are also things I have been given in the freedom her absence brought. I wonder at what she may have thought of this work I do. Here in the margins of women's lives, deep in the things that are not spoken of, I help women find comfort in their bodies again. I think she may have been embarrassed. I hope she would have been proud. Isn't it funny how even after all these years and the progression of our own eldering, we still dream of a mother's approval?
There are things over these ten years that I wish she would have been here to see, and yet there are also things I have been given in the freedom her absence brought.
In these ten years I too have changed. I have crossed the threshold to the woman's place beyond the bleeding. I have embraced the shedding of my fertile, yet fruitless, years. My body still containing pulse and heat, is truly a woman's body now and with its sags and lumps is a rich and varied landscape. She would have scorned this body perhaps. Or maybe she would have seen something of herself in it and relaxed at last. She and I both becoming women whose youth has passed.
I wish we could sit down and talk so I could know her more this way. Me a woman with my own well-worn landscape, talking to her to explore hers. I have a feeling we would have understood each other better now. I am sure we would have laughed at some of the absurdity of it all. After all, none of us are perfect. We all make mistakes and try to get through life as best we can. Some of us are angry, and the world (or those we love) will never be enough. Some of us are timid, or lame, or brave or compassionate. In the end though, most of us are all these things.
My mother would be eighty-five now if she had lived. I imagine her, and while the picture is not all pretty, in parts it is magnificent.
Recently, I arranged for a plot and a headstone in the cemetery close to here. A hole was dug in the ground and in it I laid my father's ashes, and memories of my mother too. I covered them both in cool damp earth and a daughter’s love, and patted the ground to make it level and nice. The headstone all black with its gold lettering, marks so much more than simply a spot. I like to sit there sometimes when I pass by while walking my dog. I know she would have loved the dog.
Ten years ago today, my mother's life ended in a hospital wing of a retirement home. There was no fanfare. No announcements. The birds kept singing. The lights remained on. Today, I will gather flowers from my garden and place them at her headstone and mark her life by saying, with a fanfare in my head, 'this woman, my mother lived, and now she is gone.’
Then I shall walk home through a landscape of remembering.
Jane Langdale. 13.12.1939 - 19.12.2014 R.I.P.