My mum died

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that I haven't posted anything on here for a couple of weeks. My mum died suddenly and unexpectedly on Thursday 21^st October. I didn't want to write about it, not for a while – but I didn't want to write about anything else either. So the last couple of weeks have been a succession of ideas where I thought “I must write that down,” followed by “but I don't want to write anything until I've written about mum dying.”

I had a phone call from my dad on the Thursday afternoon. I'd known my mum wasn't well – my sister said she'd been diagnosed with COPD, which was odd considering that she'd never smoked or worked in factories – and the last time I spoke to her she was obviously short of breath. I'd decided that I'd try to get to see her sometime soon, maybe before Christmas. My dad didn't say much, other than that the ambulance paramedics had done what they could, but her heart had stopped and she was dead. I phoned my sister and my brother, and made arrangements to travel up to Northamptonshire. I arrived too late that night to do anything much, so had to wait until the next day to go to the mortuary.

I went with my dad up to the hospital, but he didn't want to go into the little room where my mum's body was, so I went in alone. Before I went in, I had rehearsed some of the things I wanted to say to her. They were mostly apologies for one thing or another. I went in, and there was someone who looked like my mum, but was much too still. I started to talk to her, and realised that I didn't need to say sorry at all. She had loved me – I know that for certain – and I didn't need to apologise for not being the person I imagined she wanted me to be. I've not got everything right, and some things I've got wrong, and some things I've done kind of OK but they weren't really what anyone expected. But that didn't matter. She had loved me as I am, not as who she thought I could or should be. I'm sure I must have frustrated or disappointed her sometimes – what child doesn't – but when it came down to it, it didn't seem to be important. I discovered that what I wanted to say to her was “Thank you.” Thank you for that constant, quiet love. Thank you for being there. Thank you for being forever busy keeping things clean and getting the dinner ready and making tea and reminding me tactfully that my brother's birthday was next week, I hadn't forgotten had I? “Thank you,” I wanted to say, “thank you for just getting on and doing what you did best in the whole world, which was being my mum.”

The funeral was last Friday and I have to say that it was a good day. It sounds odd to say it and when I've said that to people in the last few days they've all said something like “Well, as good as these things can be” – but it was genuinely a special day to remember her. Of course I miss her, but the point is that I know that she's not dead, not in any final sense. On the contrary, as a Christian I believe that my mum is in some way now more truly alive, that she has left behind a world where there is sin and shame and pain and death, and is called to live in a world without any of those things, where she will be truly herself, created to live joyfully as an image of God. Of course I will be sad when there's no phone call from her on family birthdays, but how can I not also be happy when I know that she has no pain, that she is called to be with the God she served faithfully, that one day I will join her, caught up in a love that is higher and wider and deeper and stronger than anything we can know or imagine, stronger even than death itself.