Goodness Grief

One year and ten months ago I got a phone call that changed not only my life, but me, forever. Two phone calls to be exact. One to say mum had had a huge cardiac arrest and it wasn’t looking good. Another twenty minutes or so later to say she was dead.

In that twenty minutes, I had a shower, headed out for drinks as scheduled and had a very firm talk with my mum’s spirit. I told it that, if it was indeed floating above her body and could see me, it better f-ing well get back into her body and hang on for a whole lot longer. In contrast, I learnt later and greatly admire, that my little brother who was by her side with dad, was telling her that it was OK and if she needed to go she could. We’ve always been quite different, he and I.

The first day, I drank through the grief. My husband and I bought a bottle of Moet and toasted everything that we could think of that had been utterly brilliant about my mum. We ran out of Moet and moved onto the spirits cupboard. She was a pretty fantastic lady.

The second day I had to do a 36 hour flight with a 14 month old and a hangover, so that, along with my fear of flying, provided a bit of a distraction.

And then I was home. Home for me had always been ‘to see mum’ so I expected it to be the most fecking awful thing in the world. But, you know what? It actually wasn’t. I have a brilliant family and wonderful friends and the month I spent back in the UK waiting for the funeral wasn’t anything like as terrible as I imagined it to be.

The sun shone the whole time and there were people I loved around 24/7. There were lots of pub lunches and walks in the country in between the tears and the practicalities of a funeral to organise. It was a weird month. A holiday-like period where none of us really knew what day it was and it didn’t really matter anyway. Don’t get me wrong, there were lows, plenty of them. There was anger and frustration and lots and lots of other shit things, but it wasn’t as hard as I’d imagined it could have been. And I learnt so much about her that I’d never known as we all shared memories and anecdotes at the many gatherings that filled that twilight zone time between her death and cremation.

For me, the real process of grieving began when I came back to Australia, to my normal life. When there was no mum on the other side of the screen as and when I needed a chat. No Nana to sing to Abe in his high chair while I washed up. No one to post all the letters and articles and cut out pictures of clothes or curtains or cushions I wanted making. And of course, as an ex-pat, no friends who’d even met mum more than once or twice to talk about her with.

While I adjusted mentally to the challenges of a life changed forever, I struggled physically too, suffering a miscarriage that lasted for weeks and weeks. I hadn’t known I was pregnant until I wasn’t; but it got me thinking about whether or not I wanted a sibling for Abe. While before, the answer was probably a pretty firm, ‘I’m good with one’, after losing mum and then miscarrying, something shifted.

I think the world of my brother. We’re close, in the way a brother and sister who live on the other side of the world and have pretty much zero common interests, are. As in, we don’t speak all that often, but no matter what, I know he’s there when I need him and vice versa. Plus, while I never tell him because, well, he’s my little brother... he’s actually grown up to be one of the most amazing human beings I know.

I don’t talk to him about mum much, but I find it incredibly reassuring that now she’s gone, there’s someone else out there that knew her just like I did. Not as Vickie, a friend, a sister, a business partner. But a mum. Someone else who was right there with me when she pulled us to play school on the sledge or showed us how to do handstands tucking her skirt into her knickers like a kid or sang along to all the top ten hits we’d so carefully recoded (from the radio to tape of course!) each week in the car.

In part, it was losing mum and realising what I was lucky enough to have in Mike that led me to have Bette. So, I like to think that some goodness came out of the grief.

I notice the palm trees again more too. I got complacent there for a while because they’re literally everywhere in Queensland, so they don’t scream ‘It’s hot and I’m on HOOOOLIDDAYS’ like they always used to for me. But they remind me again that life is good. That I’m lucky enough to live in a pretty sweet little slice of the world.

I take more risks. I finally published the book I wrote and launched the business I kept talking about.

I step back more and know in my heart as well as my head, that how many followers I have, how well dressed my kids are, how fancy my car is, how big my house is… none of them matter. That life is brief and precious and beautiful and it might not be the Pintrest perfect one I quite fancy but it’s just as valid.

But, goodness grief! Sometimes, like the days you’d just like to have a brew and tell your mum all about the horrors your child has put you through, if like me you no longer can, it’s also pretty fucking tough as well.

#Mum #Loss #Grief #Goodbye #Change