My beloved mum gave me a letter 25 years ago and told me: 'Read it when I'm gone'. What she'd written both broke and comforted me: MARIANNE JONES
This is my first Mother’s Day without a mother. The first year that I haven’t mulled over how big I could go with a bouquet just to see the thrill on my flower-loving mum’s face, followed by a telling off for spending too much money.
Last Mothering Sunday was my tiny, mighty mum’s last one and it was very different from our usual gastro pub, fizz and raucous family get-together. I went over the top as usual, ordering armfuls of her favourite daffodils and tulips, but this time I handed them to her in the nursing home we had reluctantly placed her in the year before. She received them without words or expression.
In the final stages of the dementia that would end her life two months later, Mum had lost the ability to speak and was unaware of what day it was, let alone its significance. Most heartbreakingly, she no longer recognised me, the cruellest knife twist of this pitiless disease.
While my sister and I steered her wheelchair into the home’s pretty courtyard garden so she could feel the spring sunshine on her face, my two grown-up sons stroked her hands and made one-way small talk with the shell of a nanna they adored. We cheered when she smiled in their direction, this tiny flicker providing some grains of comfort.
Marianne with her mother Maria, April 2022. This is Marianne's first Mother's Day without her
Spring was Mum’s favourite time of year. Like me, she loathed winter, and the cheery sight of crocuses and cherry blossom would have her heading for her garden (or mine), trowel in hand. It was the season in which she was born and in which she died last May, two weeks after her 83rd birthday, cards still on the windowsill, another bouquet I’d bought her wilting in the vase.
Ten months on and I am still processing being motherless. I am an orphan, which, as my brother said after Mum’s funeral, seems an odd word to describe three siblings in their 50s and 60s. But whatever your age, losing a mother you love more than anyone – apart from those you are a mother to – leaves you forever looking for a hand to hold (hilariously, her attempts to grab my hand while crossing the road never stopped, prompting me to once loudly protest, ‘But Mum, I’m 48!’).
Our bond was particularly tight because when I was eight she became both mother and father to me, my dad having left us for the barmaid in his local pub.
Mum swapped her homeland of Malta for not-so-sunny Merseyside in the late 1950s after meeting my dad in the Maltese capital Valletta, where he was a flame-haired sailor in the Royal Navy and she was a beautiful dark-eyed local. By the time the marriage ended, my sister and brother, almost a decade older, were forging their own paths in life. It was me and her against the world.
Things could have gone badly wrong as we had little money and even less support. But this 4ft 11in pocket rocket was made of steel. Having lost her own mother at the age of nine, and being the only girl among five children, Mum became domestically savvy at a young age. She was used to making every penny stretch until it begged for mercy. She held down a full-time factory job, yet would walk home every lunch time to our terraced council house to prepare dinner from scratch.
I’d get back from school to a steamy kitchen, pressure cooker at full throttle and think,
‘Oh no, stew again.’ I longed for Findus Crispy Pancakes, an exotic delicacy around our way in the 1970s, rather than fresh vegetables and pulses, but that wasn’t happening. Her ‘You’re not eating rubbish’ ended my plea.
I wanted a normal shop-bought school uniform, but Mum spent every night knitting jumpers and sewing skirts and pinafores that my teachers would marvel at, but which made me cringe because I felt different. ‘You look cared for,’ was Mum’s verdict, closing down yet another conversation.
Decades later, when I had my own two lads, she picked up her needles again to create Bob the Builder sweaters and skull and crossbones beanies, which they appreciated more than I ever did and are preserved in their memory boxes.
Unlike the ‘love you’ with which kids now casually end every conversation, Mum’s feelings back then were rarely verbalised but appeared in every dish and stitch. Years later she mellowed and on marrying my stepdad George in her 50s, she finally allowed herself to relax. With the arrival of her three grandchildren, she turned completely soft and they became the centre of her universe, all regularly and unselfconsciously stating their love for each other. She would drop everything, even poor old George, and get on the first train to London to help me with childcare. The truth is, I couldn’t have succeeded in my career without her constant help, for which she never wanted thanks. To this day I don’t know how she did it.
It was during a phone call from my sister, who lived near Mum and who cared for her beautifully in her later years, that I learned she didn’t have long left. I’m thankful that we were by her side for her last days.
Just after Mum died, I nervously opened a letter that, 25 years before, she had taped to a beautiful photograph of her as a child, making her first Holy Communion. It’s a picture I’ve always felt drawn to, and she embroidered a border around it, had it framed, and presented it to me for my 34th birthday, telling me, ‘Read the letter when I’m gone.’
Over the years my boys wondered if the note contained some dark family secret, but the words could not have been more Mum.
Written in Biro on scrap paper, they simply state the date of the picture (1947), the style of embroidery (Hardanger) and my birth date. But it was the words: ‘To my daughter Marianne, whom I love so very much’ that both broke and comforted me, because Mum didn’t express deep feelings easily.
Among her belongings I also discovered a scrapbook she had carefully curated with cuttings I’d written from my job as a journalist over the past three decades. Practical, unshowy, but proud.
We have already scattered some of Mum’s ashes into the waves of her favourite beach near her Maltese childhood home. But I still have some to place in my own garden, once I’ve decided which flowers she would prefer to rest with. I have a camellia, given to me by a friend after Mum’s death, called ‘Ave Maria’, after her name and favourite hymn. Or there is the cherry tree where some of George’s ashes were scattered after his death six years ago. But it is the hardy, happy daffodils that most remind me of her.
In the past few weeks, I have received emails from various stores and brands, asking me if I wanted notifications about Mother’s Day to be turned off. It is strange to think I will never again buy her a Mother’s Day card, splurge on a big bouquet or book us a lovely meal where she would pretend to only want one glass of champagne then drink three.
But it doesn’t upset me to be reminded of a day in which we get to celebrate the women who made us, and I will enjoy watching people fussing over their mums. Hopefully I will be on the receiving end of some of this attention and will definitely raise a glass or three of something fizzy in her honour, to say: thank you Mum, job done.
Anyone affected by dementia can find support and information at dementiauk.org
