‘I threw away the flowers placed in my mother’s hands when she died . . . she would have hated them’

Next week will mark the first anniversary of my mother’s death. Before she died last year of pancreatic cancer at just 58 years old, I felt only a detached sense of sympathy when I read or heard sentences like those. After all, it is natural that parents die, and it is unnatural that adult children should be unable to accept that fact.

I had only really considered two kinds of parental death – one was that completely tragic scenario when a young parent dies, leaving desolate children or teens behind, marking them with an indelible pain they will carry always. The other was the kind we are more familiar with and accepting of. The death of an elderly person. They could be cherished or unkind, a much-loved elderly parent, or a belligerent and merely tolerated one. They reach that age when people murmur stuffily to one another at the funeral that they “had a good long life”. The death is no less a loss than any other, but loved ones can take small comfort in the knowledge that at least they hadn’t been taken by surprise, and cheated out of time.

We knew my mother was dying, but that knowledge was so cruel and unjust that the logical awareness that she would die only sunk three-quarters of the way inside me. When she did die – at an age representing the cusp of her freedom after years of raising my brother and I alone and in poverty – we felt shocked and cheated.

The call came in the night that she was gone already. When I got to the hospice, someone who didn’t know her at all had arranged flowers in her hands. I was surprised by how the flowers disgusted me. They were tacky, and they seemed to deny her personhood.

They were like a weapon against her humanity, seeming to suggest that she hadn’t been human, that now she felt peace. She wasn’t peaceful, she was just gone, and the person who in her wholeness was gone was imperfect.

She was maddeningly annoying, exceptionally tender, imposed unrelentingly high standards, had suffered abuse from her own mother and husband, and was capable of enough love to guide two children through a childhood of immense struggle into responsible adulthood. She was whole.

The flowers looked like a crappy attempt to spackle over her flaws, or deny them entirely. My mother would have hated them. I gently took them from her absent grasp and threw them in the bin.

Then I sat next to her and wailed in a way that she – in her quiet composure – would have excused in almost no situation. I thought about the night before, that she had woken up before 10 and called me, wondering where I was. I’d been back three times to check on her before that call – she’d been asleep. I assured her I’d be back in the morning, not realising she’d be gone when I got there.

I always knew how much I needed her. The loss was so excruciating because she was genuinely my friend. She didn’t pity me. She told me when she thought I was wrong. When I was young, she allowed me to make my own mistakes, and when I admitted fault and asked for help, she would help me. I was 27 when she died, and fully realised that I would never experience such unconditional support again in the whole course of my life.

I made a recipe of hers the other day, and forgot when to add a certain ingredient. I thought I’d just call and ask her when to add it and in that moment I was once again sleeping across the street from the hospice on a bitingly cold November night, the trilling of my phone under the pillow tearing me groggily from exhausted sleep.

The journalist Sali Hughes, in her column on grief for The Pool, captured the lingering pain of loss almost perfectly. When I got to meet her and we talked about her dad and my mother, she told me that I was always going to be just a bit sadder than I was before. You can feel great highs and lows within that spectrum, but the gauge itself has changed. You are changed.