Hi! I’m Keris. I’m an author writing about writing and books and music and life, and the last song I played was Two of Us by Louis Tomlinson, because it’s about his mother’s death and, as someone said on Twitter when it came out, manages to hit on a seam of my grief that I hadn’t previously been able to access.
It’s 25 years today since my mum died.
She was 61. She had MS for, I don’t know, ten/twelve years maybe? And then she actually died of leukaemia. She was diagnosed in January, so it was fast. I was 28 when she died and now I’m 53, which just seems unbelievable. I’m coming up to her age. How can that be.
She also lost her mum young. As I’ve mentioned in my weekend posts, after Dad died we found a suitcase of Mum’s memorabilia including a diary. On 21 May 1962, she wrote:
During the last few weeks I'm constantly dreaming about Mum and just for that few seconds between being deeply asleep and fully awake, I think she's still here. Then comes the awful realisation that she's not and every time it happens it's as bad as when Mum died. Even now after almost 3 months I still find it unbelievable.
After her mum’s death, she went to work in Boston as a nanny.
And then, after she came home, she married my dad and they emigrated to Canada where, five years later, I was born. And then they came home. Less than two years later, my sister was born.
She loved reading. If I ever went to the library, she’d ask me to bring back six novels picked at random and frequently she’d put four aside to go back because she’d read them already. She was reading War and Peace when she was in (56-hour) labour with me (which is why I’m slow-reading it now).
One of my happiest memories is when I came back from London to surprise her. She looked up at me, like “Oh hi” and then did a double take.
She was cute and funny when she was drunk and once crossed a bar to dopily encourage a table of Dutch people to sing Tulips From Amsterdam, while they all stared at her, baffled.
Whenever we went on holiday, she would sit at the back of the plane in the smoking section (ridiculous) and partway through the flight, we’d walk up to visit her and she’d excitedly introduce us to her seat-mates, who she’d have told all about us.
She called me smidge, smidgeon, pigeon-smidgeon.
Mostly, she was my best friend and I miss her every day.
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Beautiful post.
How beautifully you write about her. A gorgeous tribute. ❤️