Remembering Mum

My mother died two years ago today, at the age of 59, as a result of cancer. It was terribly unfair for Mum to die of cancer. She never smoked a cigarette. She didn’t drink. She was practically vegetarian. She loved — and I mean actually loved — boiled vegetables. She ran. She always nagged me about using suncream.

It was terribly unfair for Mum to die at all. She was extremely active, and she was extremely good — not just “good” in the sense that she would never want to hurt someone but in the sense that she would always notice if someone was hurting and always wanted to make them feel better.

But life isn’t fair. That’s a cliché but it’s also the truth. Last week I was sad to see that the professional wrestler Jamin “Jay Briscoe” Pugh had died at the young age of 38. Professional wrestlers often die at a young age, and you can often see it coming — as a result of injuries, and drugs, and alcohol. Here, though, a car just swerved into his lane and totalled his truck while he was taking his young daughters to cheerleading practice. By all accounts you couldn’t meet a nicer and more family-oriented man. Life isn’t fair.

Mum wouldn’t accept that as a conclusion, though. “Life isn’t fair” was her premise. She was always struggling to make it less true. She made friends with people who had no one else to speak to. She taught English to migrants with no money for lessons. She worked with charities that supported persecuted Christians across the world. She carried bread rolls everywhere to give to homeless people.

I think we both had quite a grim view of the world — but Mum saw that grimness more as a fire to be extinguished and I see it more as a condition to be managed. We had a lot of awkward debates about realism and idealism. I remember arguing, for example, that you can’t be a pacifist in a world with ISIS. I think I was right (I think she might have even said that I have a point). But I also know that if there was something practical that could have been accomplished on behalf of the Yazidis she would have done it before I had finished my breakfast.

She loved walking — especially up mountains. I didn’t understand it at all when I was kid. You walk up, and you walk down, and you are in exactly the same place where you began except tired and irritable.

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. As an adult I see how beauty colours everything — just a little, but it does. Mum wanted to share that beauty. So, I’m going to take another chance to promote the little book of her poems and poems that I published last year: Celebration Poems.

As Mum was dying, I scowled at life’s unfairness — on her behalf and on mine. Losing parents is a tragedy that all of us should hope to experience, in a sense, because the alternative is that they lose us. But losing your mum at 30, with no chance to see her, felt unfair. Then I found myself watching an episode of a series about the Yorkshire Ripper — where a man discussed leaving his home as an infant to look for his mum, who had vanished. Life isn’t fair.

But I didn’t have to latch onto extreme examples. The fact was that I had known an extraordinary person for three decades and not every child has the same good fortune. If you read the book, I hope that you can know her a little as well.

January 1991 

3 o’clock 

He’s crying again 

Not used to being alive yet. 

All quiet from the rest. 

We’ll be disturbing them, 

I’ll try the nursery. 

“We don’t want them if they’re crying.” 

They’re joking – I think. 

Reclaim him at 6. 

“Went straight to sleep – we sort them out.” 

Thanks. 

The girl in the next bed says she was up all night 

Her baby girl is quiet. 

The bed opposite has no cot. 

That looks like a social worker. 

Now the friendly midwife. 

“Are you going to adopt my baby?” 

Did she really say that? 

“Now you concentrate on getting those A-levels 

Show them what you can do 

You’ve a life to live.” 

In the afternoon her parents come. 

Stiffly they gather her up 

To take her home. 

Her mother sees Ben in his fish-tank cot 

I might have imagined the tear in her eye. 

I want to go home too, 

But the doctor has to check the baby. 

Another night

Can’t face the nursery. 

At 3 o’clock he falls asleep 

I can hear reporters’ voices 

And, in the background, explosions 

Live news coverage of Desert Storm