death

tomorrow is the anniversary of my mum's death. she died in 2000 from an embolism. she had suffered with alzheimers for many years and by the time she died she was just a shell. this is a picture of her i took the last time i saw her alive.

this will be the first anniversary of mum's death that i have marked on the actual day. it is not that i have not thought of her since, but i did not know what date she had died on. i was the person who registered her death and organised her funeral but i had to send the death certificate somewhere and did not get it back. i have a kind of number-blindness that makes dates impossible to remember unless i write them down. both my husband and i thought mum had died at the very beginning of april so around then i get a feeling of sadness but not on any particular day. more to do with which flowers are out in the garden and which birds are singing.

it was only when i was talking to my friend about the anniversary of her own mum's death that i realised i did not know the date mum died. i could remember it was a thursday. i could remember the phone call in the middle of the night from the hospital and how my teeth chattered but i didn't cry very much. how the following day we drove up to swansea and it was not until we got there and my son remarked that no-one had overtaken us the whole way that i realised how fast i had been driving. how the hospital wanted to do an autopsy because it was a sudden death and how i told them i would get a court order if they dared to try to cut my mum's body. but not the date.

i decided i would apply for a copy of the death certificate. you can get an express service from the registrar of deaths and something told me i should do this even though it cost more. it is just as well i did as mum died on 16 march rather than in april. if i had been more careful with money i would have missed it.

i wanted to mark mum's death in a more concrete way rather than just a general feeling of sadness. my friend suggested lighting a candle. mum would have liked this idea. as luck would have it my son went on a school trip last week to a museum and made a little candle. so this year i will light his special candle. next year i will buy a candle and keep it for remembering mum.

i will get the hang of all this eventually.