by Emily Dean
We were sitting in her flat some months later, having tea with one of Rach’s old friends and looking through old photos, when we got a call to say that Aunty Lyn had died from a brain haemorrhage.
‘I feel guilty, Em,’ Mum said sadly. ‘She kept calling. But I didn’t want her to see me like this.’
Lynsey had stayed in touch after the Holly Village days, turning up at birthdays in a cloud of scent, sharing tales of her latest romantic exploits and reaching out with kindness when Rach died. But Mum’s chosen role of adoring courtier perhaps required levels of energy she simply didn’t have anymore.
We went to her funeral with Jane and her mum, Mandy. It was attended by various faces from archive editions of Top of the Pops, some white-haired with walking sticks, some defying old age with leather trousers and hair dye. After the service we wandered over with fellow guests to pay our respects at the grave, where her casket lay. It was at that point I realised that I was still something of a rookie when it came to navigating wheelchairs. The wheels got stuck in mud by the six-foot open drop, threatening to throw Mum straight on to the lily-covered casket below.
‘I can’t move it out!’ I hissed to Jane.
‘Oh fuck! Let me try,’ Jane hissed back.
Jane valiantly wrestled the wheelchair away from the kind of scene that wins ‘funniest sitcom moments EVER!’ compilations, while mourners looked over with slight confusion. With a final jerk, Jane managed to free Mum from the dark comic denouement that beckoned.
‘Well, that would have been quite the tribute,’ my mum said as we all giggled about our narrow brush with dark disaster during the car ride back to her flat.
‘I loved laughing with Jane and Mandy about the wheelchair,’ she said, when we got back home. ‘I wish everyone would be more like that with me. I need laughter, not gloomy sympathy.’
We reminisced about Lynsey’s best bits. I recalled a phrase she used a lot. ‘Life’s too short and so am I.’ I told Mum that it was a good epitaph. If Lynsey hadn’t nabbed it already, I was stealing it for mine.
My mum smiled. ‘You bastard. I wanted that.’
‘I can’t believe your mum’s going through this so soon after you’ve lost Rach,’ friends told me. I felt almost embarrassed that they had to bear this fresh burden. I worried that I was burning through my credit with them. I’d turned into a talisman for bad luck. The raven darkening a family picnic. The skull in the Renaissance painting reminding you of mortality. But in some ways bad news had become the new normal, the forest fire that continued to rage after the rain, intent on destroying everything in its wake. I treated it with acceptance throughout the day, absorbing the admiration people threw my way (‘You’re so brave!’), relieved to be seen as capable and in control. It was only at night that I was hit with the sense of being the last woman standing, the one who forgot to call a cab in time, loitering alone in the street as the others headed off. When I was having one of my ‘kitchen floor’ parties – they were back – as usual, I allowed the calls to go straight to voicemail. I wanted to make my anguish palatable, to have a ‘good’ grief, be a healthy mourner, someone impressively stoical in the face of upheavals.
I hadn’t expected the next phase of loss – the ‘manic bursts of carpe diem’ stage, when I was driven to impulsive surges of abandon. But I could kind of work out what was going on – I was getting busy living instead of dying. Sue seemed to think it was totally to be expected, which reassured me. And besides, it was much more fun.
I started saying yes to everything. A twenty-four-hour trip to Barcelona for a fashion party in honour of Kate Moss? I’d be there! A taxi straight from Heathrow to the opening of a pop-up restaurant in a disused petrol station? Why not?
‘Disused petrol station – it’s almost as good as that invite to “drinks in an abandoned Bulgarian swimming baths,”’ I said to the handsome young TV and movie idol sat next to me.
We spent the rest of the evening laughing over our Peruvian ceviche and paprika octopus, swapping stories about the absurdities of the fashion industry and eccentric actors. He was the sort of man whose face regularly graced magazine covers and who got romantically linked with hot young things, so his presence at the event invoked an unspoken social contract of sharing. No one was allowed to hog the golden karaoke mike all night.
I made gestures to liberate him as dinner ended, but he grabbed a bottle of wine and said, ‘I fancy a smoke, shall we move this outside?’
I was aware of suspicious glances from other guests as I greedily overstayed my allotted time with the golden karaoke mike. Perhaps they were wondering why he had decided to grant a forty-something woman an impromptu one-on-one. I wasn’t entirely sure myself. But I realised that I didn’t care. This new phase, the ‘fuck it, the worst already happened’ one, had gifted me a strange defiance. I felt like a superhero who was slowly adjusting to their secret power – boldness.
I was enjoying chatting away to this stranger, who didn’t know my ‘poor Em’ backstory. It was also tearing down some of the received wisdom about ageing that I’d never questioned, which women of my generation were fed as truths. That you become invisible and stripped of power without your youthful beauty. That in a room like this, filled with glowing twenty-five-year-olds, you had no currency. The actor didn’t interrogate me about why I didn’t have children. He didn’t even ask how old I was. He didn’t seem to have a cougar kink. His untarnished acceptance of me, purely as he found me, was almost weird. Turns out disused petrol stations could be handy for epiphanies.
He seized my phone to exchange numbers and over the next few weeks we swapped friendly texts as he extended hopelessly impractical invitations, which pinged up at odd hours. ‘Come to NYC!’ ‘Just landed in LA – when am I seeing you for a messy night out?’ ‘Come to Soho house – NOW!’
I didn’t take him up on any of the offers to join his crew of pals on their bar crawls. Mainly because I didn’t have assistants on call to facilitate travel arrangements at an hour’s notice. But his perception of me – as an entertaining new gang member who could dash to New York on the strength of a text – had shifted something. It allowed me to see myself as a colourful peacock rather than the raven. As someone who might inspire a drunken welcome instead of worried glances. And not as a woman running out of time – just a person, lucky to still have time.
I threw my new fuck-it persona back into socialising and dating. I didn’t wait shyly for invites or agonise over potential rejection. I had the newly acquired confidence of an Olympic athlete, parading his medal on a post-victory boys’ night out.
I met a man in his twenties. I had to fight the old me rising up to whisper, what will people say about the age gap? For once I tried to trust my feelings rather than my fears. He was kind and caring and, best of all, utterly hilarious.
‘Isn’t it odd when he doesn’t get any of your references?’ someone asked. Indicating that a thorough knowledge of Minder episodes was the best basis for a fulfilling relationship. It was a view that was not only irrelevant – turned out he was obsessed by Minder – it was also inaccurate. I discovered that interesting people tend not to dismiss things purely on the grounds that they haven’t personally lived through them.
I’d forgotten what it was like to laugh like this, the uncontrolled kind that gets less frequent in middle age. The sort of helpless laughter that Rach and I enjoyed together. He filled a hotel suite with thoughtful gifts and flowers for my birthday, a brief escape from my world of hospice corridors and complicated medical procedures. He bought me a toy Bagpuss after I told him about Rach’s habit of quoting the show’s catchphrase, ‘But Emily still loved him’, to tease me over a crush. It made me smile and then unleashed something more raw, a small kitchen-floor party, which I hadn’t exposed to anyone before. He comforted me until it passed but I worried about how overwhelming all this must be for him. My problems of death and loss and illness had been thrust onto the first third of his life’s story, hurtling him into the final chapters.
Things eventually came to an end after a few honest, soul-searching discussions. We simply realised that we were at different points on our respective journeys. We said our goodbyes and agreed to give each other space for the next few months, so that we could heal. ‘I’m still wearing the trainers he bought me. That’s a good sign that I don’t harbour any bad feeling,’ I told a fashion colleague. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It helps that they’re Gucci.’
I didn’t stay single for long. Manic-carpe-diem people don’t. A man invited me out to dinner. He was erudite and charming. A glass of champagne was waiting for me when I arrived at the smart Knightsbridge restaurant. We enjoyed that early-days bubble of courtship, climbing those first rungs on the ladder of a joint narrative, living the things that become part of your tapestry. That time when we handed over our Valentine’s gifts and discovered we had bought each other the same book. The anecdote he shared with friends about coming to me for fashion advice and getting the damning response, ‘Short-sleeved shirt? Bit “coach driver”.’
Things moved fast. Two months into our relationship he suggested we go on holiday to the Maldives. My mum’s health was deteriorating and I discussed with her and her doctors whether I could realistically consider a week-long break.
She now relied mainly on an electronic tablet to write down her thoughts. ‘PLEASE GO DARLING!’ she wrote frantically. ‘OR I WILL BE UPSET. Room for my wheelchair in the villa?’
He brought a warm, dependable decisiveness to my life, visiting the hospice with me, leaving energy bars in my bag to make sure I ate. I felt protected when he supported me over an upsetting email I got not long after we returned from holiday.
A friend of my mother’s felt that I had made the wrong decisions over Mum’s medical care, and questioned my attitude. She mentioned a message I had sent my mum where I’d said, ‘Hope you’re feeling okay.’ She quoted this. ‘Okay? On no account imagine she is “okay”.’ She told me I wasn’t giving my mother enough ‘TLC’. ‘Over to you, darling!’ she signed off.
I imagined the conversations everyone must be having. ‘Rachael would have been kinder. Made better decisions. Emily left her mother in a hospice to go to the Maldives. Can you believe it? What a selfish bitch.’
I went to see Sue.
‘I visit Mum all the time,’ I said. ‘I talk to her carers, I have meetings with the hospice doctors, I take her to the toilet. Why isn’t it enough?’
‘Why do you automatically assume guilt, Emily?’ asked Sue.
‘Because I’ve always felt I’m bad. It doesn’t matter how much I try to change.’
‘You have changed. Since you lost Rachael you are starting to shape your own identity outside of your family history. People can find change unsettling.’
‘It’s just so hard not having Rach here. She always got it.’
‘Maybe it’s because Rachael’s not here that this is happening. You need three people to continue triangulating – not two. Perhaps your mother’s friend is now fulfilling that third role between the two of you.’
I thought about what she had said, about the way things always were – the female triangle we formed, which Sue told me often resulted in people acting out roles. Victim, persecutor and rescuer. I realised that I had become used to the role of persecutor. And after a while it was easier to accept it rather than push against it. My blooper reel got rolled out to people alongside Rach’s highlights and I lived up to being the person presented in the edit. That was the only character my mother’s friend knew, the person she sent that email to.
For the first time ever I chose to resist the triangle. I didn’t reply to the email. My friend Polly called it the equivalent of a WhatsApp notification announcing ‘this person has left the group’. The email wasn’t mentioned again and the drama subsided of its own accord – you had to fan the blaze for it to spread. I was sitting in the cab on the way to the hospice a few days later when the song ‘When You Say Nothing At All’ came on Magic FM. I decided that Ronan Keating was actually the true father of modern-day psychology.
27 February 2015
My mum was on large doses of pain relief with a ventilator to help her breathe. I was sitting by her bedside in the hospice lifting moist sponges to her lips, just as I had for Rach.
I flicked through her notebook while she slept, the one she sometimes used to write things down for me and the doctors. ‘More drugs!!’ was scrawled in black felt-tip across several pages. ‘Can they help hurry things UP???? There are ways, darling …’
It wasn’t the only time she had talked to me about wanting to die. ‘Can they not bump me off!’ she had managed to half croak, half laugh last week.
‘That’s a huge step just to get a mini-break in Switzerland, Mum,’ I replied. She smiled.
I agreed to sign a ‘do not resuscitate’ declaration for her. I also told her that I understood if she had made her peace with going, and that I would be okay. ‘Thank you, my darling,’ she said. ‘I think I’m ready.’
It was getting late. John, Mum’s boyfriend, arrived and sat quietly in the corner of the room. He arrived at exactly the same time every day. If he was early he sat outside, checking his watch. My boyfriend had been touched by it yesterday, when we spotted him. ‘Some people need routine to make sense of the world,’ he said. ‘If he says 5.00pm it has to be 5.00pm.’ I understood why he needed to do that. Especially now.
I watched my mother breathing.
She opened her eyes and pointed to her bag on the plastic hospice chair.
I delved into it. ‘Diary?’
She shook her head. She tapped her collarbone repeatedly.
‘Necklace?’ She made a cheery thumbs up, the kind of cheesy photocall gesture that didn’t sit comfortably with an end of days request. Which was why it couldn’t be more her. I pulled out her gold St Christopher’s from the inside pocket. ‘Let me put it on you,’ I said, loosening the clasp.
She pushed the necklace back into my hand.
I stroked the tiny gold pendant with its raised relief of the saint with a staff, that she had worn for as long as I could remember. It was for protection throughout life’s journey.
‘Thank you, Mum,’ I said, fastening it around my neck. ‘I’ve always had my eye on this!’
She smiled and took my hand, before disappearing into sleep.
28 February 2015
The nurse greeted me the next morning with the gentle tone I’d come to recognise. ‘I think your mum’s on her way.’
But I was already an expert on what someone’s final moments looked like – the altered tone of her skin, the drained colour, the odd sense of absence were all familiar. My boyfriend held my hand by her bed as we watched her slip away.
I realised that over the previous few months I had entered a peaceful place with my mum. The sharp edges between us had softened; the baggage of the past felt lightened. It had been helped by me throwing myself into a life with someone who wasn’t connected to my family identity. But also, perhaps, when you knew someone wasn’t going to be around for much longer that forced you to focus on your relationship now. Not the past.
My boyfriend discreetly left me to say my private goodbyes.
I told Mum that I loved her.
I knew what the deal was now. The death certificates, the caskets, the hymns, the phone calls, the unexpected pockets of sadness. Sorting through her bag and finding her glasses wrapped in a piece of suede fabric. An old folded piece of paper fell out of her lilac diary. ‘Dear mummy,’ it read, ‘thank you for the pram. Katy wanted a pram so it is good. You are very generos!!! Love Rach XXXXX’.
12 March 2015
Bryce, the priest we had for Rach’s funeral, conducted the service. He opened with the bold choice of ‘I did tell Emily that we must stop meeting like this,’ which landed slightly awkwardly among the mourners. They seemed unsure whether it was appropriate to snigger at the double loss today represented. But to me it felt like a suitably irreverent way to send her off and I filed it away
with the other anecdotes in our family archive, of which I was now sole custodian.
My dad was at the service with his girlfriend, who now preferred to be called simply his ‘friend’. I wondered whether today would allow a thaw in relations between us. But I didn’t find out. They left straight after the service and didn’t come to the wake.
‘His girlfriend said she was taking him home because he was very upset,’ explained a family friend.
‘We’re all upset. That’s kind of the deal at a funeral,’ I said archly.
I chose not to access the hurt I felt inside that he didn’t stay to talk to me.
I hadn’t been especially welcoming, introducing him briefly to my boyfriend with a strained hello. Even my mum’s relationship with him had tailed off when her health declined and she lacked the energies to focus on his life admin. His presence in our lives had been entirely maintained by her, I realised. So now he had simply disconnected from our world.
He didn’t feature much in my eulogy today, an omission I justified by deciding that it would be unfair to her old boyfriend John, who had remained in her life, waiting dutifully in the wings for his calls.
‘Quotes from Socrates aren’t that useful when you need help with a blocked toilet,’ Rach used to say, comparing our father’s role in her life to John’s. I paid tribute in my speech to John’s loyalty and enduring love. It was only some time afterwards that I considered this was a pointed slight to my father. My very own Mark Antony moment, fulsomely praising one individual in order to condemn another. The hurt bubbling underneath managing to find the surface, however much you bury it.
Chapter Eleven
I focused on building a life with my boyfriend, meeting his family, involving him in my friendship group, enjoying how much he made Mimi and Bertie laugh. We talked about the dog we might get one day. Our relationship was like a slice of tavern-based light relief in a corpse-strewn Shakespearean tragedy.