A LETTER TO MY MOTHER THAT SHE WILL NEVER READ FULL

A LETTER TO MY MOTHER THAT SHE WILL NEVER READ FULL

There I was a full grow man, like a lost child howling for my mom. Once I got the cobwebs out of my head, I was hit with the reality of what had happened. I wish that I hadn't known that she was truly gone. They just curled up next to her and took a nap. I put her two little dogs on the bed with her. I just sat next to her bed getting in that last gaze. Because it was Christmas eve, it took a while. I was numb when they came to take her body away. She died with her eyes open, looking at me and holding my hand. I was with her when she took her last breath. Taking care of her, giving something back, was the greatest blessing of my life. I had to leave my career to do it, but my mom wanted to live out her last days in her own home. I had been my mom's caretaker for four years. Kiran, like you I lost my mom on Christmas eve. We maybe into another year mum, but you're no further away than you were last year or the year before that, because love, as I've come to realise, two years on, transcends space and time. The grief and the pain of loss from losing my mum has not disappeared, it's forever present, it's like a gentle rustle of leaves in the wind and other times it's a tornado. I have never been so reluctant to embrace a new year, I'm not comfortable with the way it's making my mother a part of history, making her as part of history as much as, say, Anne Boleyn.

Never before have I felt the world move on its axis so profoundly. New Years' eve felt especially traumatic, not only was it the day that she was buried, but it marked the movement of time. Home was a feeling that now lies dormant. The cushion that said 'Home', that sat so quietly and innocently on the sofa, has been picked at, its embroidery and letters so brutally unravelled. I now know that the death of a giant of a person, like my mother was to us, can undo the rest of our individual lives, look at the lives you undid, mum. Two years on I understand how the loss of one important life can unravel the lives of so many. But there are days when everything's muted and vanilla and I no longer can smell the roses. I now stop when I walk pass a rose bush, I smell the rose and I understand its purposeful life, its connection with pollen and bees. And in that moment when time stood still, I was given new eyes and senses things look and smell different than they did before. Its presence grew bigger and bigger until the fifth day it claimed my mother, it took her under its cloak of darkness and like a gigantic poisonous mushroom it has shaded my life.Д®veryone has a defining moment, the moment their life changed irrevocably. For a week it swam around the room creating shadows, it teased us and we prayed that it would leave.

I remember how it slipped from underneath the door and sat in the corner of the room like sumo wrestler, so palpable and apparent was its presence. I will never forget how death crept into my mother's hospital room a week before she died, just before she fell into a coma. I see death as a visible formidable force now. My life now reads like a poem a lament for my mother.Дeath had never felt so real to me as it did when she died, even though it had taken away loved relatives in the past.

The narration changes from gentle storytelling and guidance to unspeakable horror of losing her, the kind of horror you have when you're five years old and you lose your mother briefly in the supermarket and all your nightmares come true. I know her death will narrate the rest of my life. My mother's death has dictated my life for most of two years and now I can feel it has morphed into an almost gentle narration. I knew her death would change the future, but I never thought that it would also change the past. Otherwise innocuous memories have become painful, because they are memories of what was before, before it happened, before cancer happened, before death came knocking at our door. I say it has changed the past because memories of past events, before she died, have changed. Two years on I see my mother's untimely death as a defining moment in my life it has changed me, shaped me, taken away any innocence, swamped me, it has filled my mind, taken my heart hostage and changed the past.

A letter to my mother that she will never read