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Since mum got sick I've got in the habit of calling her every day. I call to see how she is, how she is feeling, I call to re-establish that connection, and I call to coax and encourage as her health wanes, and sometimes her spirit. It has become a ritual, something that she looks forward to and expects. When for some reason I get caught up in things and my call is delayed I worry that mum will be concerned - she is that sort of person. It is now part of the pattern.
Of course it is the far greater pattern that sometime in the next 12 months will be torn asunder. Mum will go and everything associated with her will become memory, not living fact. It is hard to believe as I so often assert, yet deep inside me I feel there is a part of me attempting to come to terms with this every day.
Occasionally little flashes of this come to the surface. It's quite regular really, much more so than what I write here. They are complex feelings with many different elements, but there is one element I think more than any other that presses hardest upon me. It surprises me a little, and perhaps I am a little embarassed by it because it is not so much about mum as what she represents. In that way it is a lot more about me.
The insight returns to me weekly: when mum goes then a whole world goes with her. It's the world as I see it though, a very personal perspective mine alone; that the world contained within mum also departs us only makes the tragedy deeper: gone forever.
I have a multitude of memories connected in my mind by the people in them. It's hard not to look back and think in terms of 'eras', blocks of time often years long when my life moved within a distinct circle of people and activities. You recall the times and the happy memories, look back with fondness at the people you shared them with. It seems impossible that they could ever end - but they do.
In my life mum is the last remaining survivor other than myself and my sister from one such era. You don't realise it at the time, but later you understand how important to your life these eras - patterns of people and activities and conversations - really are. They sort of hold your life together, they give it shape, perhaps even purpose.
My mother naturally transcends every era of my life, but she belongs within them also. The particular era I think of though - my mother happily re-married to a man I loved also (and still miss), and the many adventures we had - seems the most central, or consistently present, of the last 20 years of my life. I am tinged with sadness every time I am touched by the knowledge than when mum goes all of that is the past dead and buried, never to be again. She is the last thread. I lose her, and I lose much more.
So it is with life. As I am always at pains to remind myself the wheel turns inexorably onwards. Everything passes, everything changes, things will come and then be passed by. Proust wrote a whole set of books on it. It is understandable to mourn the passing of things dear to you, and that is still to properly come for me. It's worth remembering though the transience of what we do and feel and experience, and life itself, and appreciate while we can what it and what it means to us. Once gone it will never come to us again.
