Illustration: R Fresson/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Illustration: R Fresson/The Guardian Opinion Bereavement Losing a parent is a bewildering, lonely experience. Here are the things I wish I had known before Gaby Hinsliff There’ll be exhaustion, love tinged with occasional rage, even moments of black humour. But my mum would want me to tell you: don’t be afraid
My mother’s house looks exactly as she left it.
Two novels sit by the armchair, their pages neatly marked for book group. Pinned to the noticeboard is a shopping list in only slightly shaky writing, with “FRUIT!” in urgent capitals, and “make soup” underlined. The sole outward signs of something missing are her cats twining needily around me – loneliness having finally overcome their innate horror of visitors – and the one thing I can’t bear to look at, which is the empty hospital bed marooned bleakly in the sitting room. Delivered by social services when it was deemed she could no longer manage stairs, it is now stripped bare, awaiting collection. Another family will be needing it.
This is not my childhood home – my parents moved here only a few years ago – but it’s the one, I suppose, where childhood formally ended. Washing up at her kitchen sink a fortnight ago, looking out at the same scarlet fuchsia I remember blazing in the garden when my father died, it struck me for the first time that soon I would no longer be anyone’s daughter. What I didn’t know then was that the loss of both parents would feel less like the end of a relationship and more like its transition to a new stage, of finally being able to see them clearly as people in their own right.
I thought I’d nailed that years ago, but of course I was wrong. When news spread of her diagnosis – an aggressively fast-moving cancer, erupting from nowhere to overwhelm her in six weeks – my mother’s friends descended in hordes, bringing soup and cake and clove-scented sweet peas from their gardens. But they also brought stories I hadn’t heard before. Though my father was the outwardly gregarious one and my mother more self-effacing, evidently she was the one who watched and listened and caught what others missed. I already knew that for a while she’d channelled that into volunteering as a Samaritan – her way of dealing with the suicide of a close family friend – and training as a Relate counsellor. I was vaguely aware, too, that in retirement she’d founded local hillwalking groups, a social club for widows – and who knows what else. But stupidly, I hadn’t realised what the things we took for granted – “there goes Mum, on one of her missions again” – meant to others. She had been the author of small kindnesses remembered for decades.
double quotation mark Have a baby and the world falls over itself to offer advice. But losing a parent remains a private, bewildering, lonely affair
Why wait for a funeral, one of her friends argued, to say nice things? There was talk of a pre-party, a wake Mum could actually join in, abandoned when it became clear she was already too tired. But the urge to invent new rituals makes sense. With modern medicine rendering heart attacks and strokes more survivable, death increasingly announces itself to elderly people not suddenly overnight but slowly, and with plentiful warning. The creeping degenerative diseases of old age allow more time to say goodbye, or make amends if necessary. But they also force us all to look death squarely in the face, and that takes no little courage.
Fier…