When my mother died, I was so relieved I never grieved

On the surface, the above sounds downright nasty. Didn’t I like my mother?

Why would I feel relief at her passing away?

As anyone who has lost their nearest and dearest to the steady onslaught of dementia will know, it is a vicious disease. It can be ferociously rapid when overtaking a person and their personality, or just a slow, horrible decline.

When it finally dawned on me that my mother was seriously losing her mind to dementia in 2010, after a number of years with ailing mental health, I had no idea what a long journey of the soul me and my dad were entering, each in our different way. My mother, on the other hand, was of course oblivious to the mists swirling in her mind, making her think I was her favourite cousin (after said cousin passed away), or a perfect stranger. As the years passed, the times when she knew who I was when I visited became fewer and further between.

With the exception of a few months in the early 1990s and again in 2010, when mum’s dementia set in, I have lived abroad since my late teens, visiting my native Sweden a few times a year. Mum used to always look forward to these visits with great fervour, and despite dementia this didn’t really change.  Living in care, she would, at least initially, be able to recognise me when talking on the phone and when I told her of an upcoming visit, she’d be happy as Larry at the thought of seeing me.

I cannot begin to explain how it tortured me, when I would arrive only to realise she didn’t know who I was when I was there in person. I would spend a whole week in Sweden, visiting her as often as I could, only to find that she didn’t know I was her daughter. Then, back home in London we’d talk on the phone, she would know who I was and ask me, “When? When are you visiting? When are you coming to see me? I can’t wait to see you!”.

The thought that she was there, forever waiting for me, with the two of us never quite able to “reach each other”, often brought on a sadness I have never felt before or since.

That said, mum’s life was hardly sad to her and after years of negativity and depression, dementia often made her come across as far happier than she’d been before. All her troubles were gone and she was like a small child again with no responsibilities and very fleeting worries. She didn’t mind not knowing who I was, she just enjoyed my company regardless. But she wasn’t the woman I used to know and I often missed the connection we had before illness put a stop to it. As though sensing something wasn’t quite right, even though she liked the care home, she would try to follow me when I was leaving. So many times I had to leave her there behind closed gates (the “patients” weren’t allowed out alone, of course), making up lies and explanations as to why she couldn’t come with me. I think those images will always be etched in my mind – my mother standing there, alone, confused and me walking away as firmly and quickly as I could. Running from her, running from that feeling of loss, confusion, and helplessness.

My mother was ill for over six years before she passed away. The last few weeks of her life, she was bedridden after a difficult hip operation. I sat by her bedside, fearing, not that she would die, but that she would have to live on. Long years of nothingness, with her unable to do the few things that still brought joy to her life. When she passed away, five days before her 90^th birthday, the relief was immense. So immense, in fact, that I organised the funeral, stayed around to help dad for a while, did all the banking, admin and aftermath of death, hardly shedding a tear. ‘I’ve done my grieving,’ I thought, ‘for years I’ve done my grieving and now I can let go.’ And I did. Or so I thought.

I really, truly felt that I had “done my time”, but grief is a “funny” thing. What I didn’t understand back then, was that I had essentially been grieving for the woman who was ill, but not for the woman who is dead.

Dementia took over mum’s person and seeing that process over the years, was a constant source of pain to those watching it. When mum died, in many ways I felt as though I’d lost her years ago, even though she was still alive back then.

Only now, several years after her passing, am I starting to be able to shift the focus from her illness and the person she became, to the person she was before dementia; the person who knew me and loved me and was always there for me, despite all my crazy stunts and sometimes extremely ill-conceived choices.

Grief isn’t necessarily something one “lets go of”, as was my foolhardy hope when mum died. It morphs, it meanders, it finds a different expression when it needs to be expressed. It becomes part of you and there are unexpected moments of sadness that crop up, out of the blue, just like that. You make room for grief when you can, you ask it to kindly leave you alone, if it’s too inconvenient a time.

As I hold my very first published work of fiction in my hands, I remember telling mum, who loved reading everything from poetry to prose and was a good writer in her own way, about my travel writing - features and guidebooks that I was rather proud of at the time. She smiled and replied, “so when are you going to become a real writer?”

Well mum, it looks like maybe I am becoming “ a real writer” at long last.