Missing You

On Friday, 3rd June, we buried Mum’s ashes, as she requested, in Grasmere cemetery. It was a meagre gathering of folk in comparison to the packed church at her funeral, but the event was intentionally kept small and low-key. Those present who lay outside the immediate family were the few who could not make the original service. We huddled under umbrellas as the rain lashed down in truly Biblical fashion, the vertical stair-rods that only Lake District skies can produce. We placed the casket in the ground with a solitary pink rose on top that contrasted starkly with the greyness of the day. It’s impossible to comprehend that my mother and everything she meant to me had been reduced to a little heap of dust enclosed in a tiny wooden box.

Strangely, though, finally giving Mum a grave has made me feel that she is now limited to a particular place and is no longer all around us. This made it very difficult for me to leave Grasmere this morning to head back to London. A certain element of this was simply the fact that it was too nice a day after a weekend of rain to trudge back to the smoke. The sun was shining and the fell-tops were clear; at last these were hills to be climbed and views to be gasped at. Virgin Trains seldom offer the same inspiration. But much of my melancholy and desire to stay was that I want my mother, I ache for her, and have so much I want to tell her.

I was always so fortunate that I could always open my heart up to Mum, that I could tell her anything I needed to, and that our relationship was completely free and uninhibited. We weren’t emotional or lovey-dovey in this closeness, but in later years we never had disputes or disagreements beyond minor moments of irritation. At least I can be relieved that there are no unresolved issues between us and that we did not part on an argument. Mum’s brusque honesty and total lack of false pretences are traits that I admire above all others. And she loved to talk. I can’t even begin to imagine that she has now fallen silent for good. I can still hear her voice so clearly, rabbiting nineteen to the dozen about a myriad of different things, interrupting her partners in conversation whether or not they had paused for breath. I fear above all else that one day I may forget the sound of it.

It’s the little things that make me long for her; all the things I feel she’s missing out on and the things she needs to know. Does she know that she died on the same day as the Pope? That Barbara Vine, who fuelled Mum’s addiction to murder mysteries, has a new book out? That her favourite actor Tom Wilkinson, whose picture she carried round with her in her purse as opposed to any of her husband or children, is in A Good Woman, a new Oscar Wilde adapation? Will someone let her know what happens to Harry Potter, whose sixth instalment she was so eagerly awaiting?

For now, the big things, such as her never knowing her grandchildren, should there come to be any, remain too grim to contemplate. But I do wonder, does she miss us anything like as much as we miss her?

REBECCA