On my mother

The before and after of my life lies on the day my mother died.  This is always hard to explain, the sentimental misunderstand the nature of this feeling, the more pragmatic dismiss you as having a taste for melodrama. But anyone who has lost someone very close when young will immediately empathise, indeed a silent kinship runs amongst us.  Suddenly you are in new and uncharted territory, banished from the world you knew except as memory. In this territory hours and days will go by and each will mark the slow receding of that singular event from the world you inhabit.

It is twenty years since my mother died.  Just the other day I was astonished that she would have been 69 this year, by no means young but by no means an age in which death is inevitable.  In most ways my mother has faded from the life that surrounds me. There is hardly anything left of her in the places she inhabited, indeed it can be hard to say if anyone now remembers her very often apart from her children.  This is a natural outcome of the passing of time, every philosophy is at pains to tell you that oblivion stalks us from the moment we live. Still we hope for a little more and the now and then mention of my mother by people who knew her makes me happy, makes me feel she is still a little alive in this world.

Which is why I write this every year. To keep her a little alive. As the tiniest of flames but still there.

The photograph is of my mother in 1969, unusually in the fashions of the day.