Last Tuesday would have been mum’s 100^th birthday. I won’t pretend that it didn’t make me feel a little sad. Then Facebook sent me one of their memory photos which happened to be mum with great-granddaughter five years ago. Such a sweet photo, in the end I decide to ‘share’ it. Then F/B started sending other ‘memories’ and there was mum, smiling, looking very pleased with herself on other birthdays. She was thrilled she was going to be on the Internet, and thrilled she got so many ‘likes’! She always was a performer and liked to think of herself as a bit of a star.

Saturday would’ve been dad’s 101^st birthday. He died nearly 10 years ago: actually, it was the weekend of mum’s 90^th birthday when he collapsed and got taken into hospital. After that, it was a rapid downhill ride. In a way, it was good things moved so fast because he was incredibly unhappy and hated what was happening to him. He was also a handful, and not easy to care for. As mum had mobility problems at that time, it was down to me to deal with everything. I was living in London then. I didn’t know this area. I had no contacts down here, didn’t even know how to get to the hospital. Plus, the situation was hard for me to deal with psychologically.

My parents had always been a very solid unit. They were always wrapped up in themselves: us kids came second. So, it was a bit of a shock when, having been treated for years as if I wasn’t really competent at much (mainly because my working-class parents never really grasped the sort of stuff their educated daughter was good at) I was suddenly expected to take control and ‘sort everything out’. Except what was going on with dad was, at that point, quite out of the range of my experience. Since then, I’ve learnt quite a lot about aging, about dementia, about accessing social care and all the other stuff one needs to know.

Anyway, that was then, this is now. And the situation being as it is, I am actually relieved that mum is not here to celebrate her centenary – because we couldn’t have celebrated it with her. We couldn’t have gone into the Care Home, we couldn’t have given her a hug or even just held her hand. I have no doubt that the Care Home staff would’ve done their best to give her a party – but she wouldn’t have understood why we weren’t there. Or she would have understood and then forgot. She always complained I never visited her, even when I visited her regularly.

I can hear her now: I’ve been Abandoned! Abandoned! (as I said, she always was a bit of a drama queen). And although, as far as I know, the Care Home has remained free of the virus, I would’ve been worrying about her – when I needed to worry about myself.

It’s funny. I can distinctly remember walking along the seafront less than two years ago, feeling very cast down. Not wanting to live here any longer but knowing I couldn’t leave while mum was still alive. I told myself, face it, she could live another couple of years, she could easily live to be a hundred so, I asked myself, what am I going to do to make myself feel I’m not completely wasting my life? I’d started looking at on-line academic courses that I could study, so I could feel I’d gained something. Then, mum surprised us all by dying quite suddenly and peacefully.

But of course, I’m still living here – and likely to be here for the foreseeable future! And I’m still looking for projects that will make me feel I’m not completely wasting my time. But who could have foreseen that this global pandemic was coming? Well, ok, apparently it had been predicted by those that know about these things but still, it’s hard to take in just how much day-to-day life has changed; it’s quite surreal really what we’re coming to accept as normal.

The news about the vaccine does seem genuinely hopeful. And if that’s so, life will soon enter a new and as yet unknown phase. I hope that, when it does, I shall be able to leave my parents behind. I said in my last post that I’ve been analysing my relationship with my mother in a way I might not have done, had I not been stuck here alone surrounded by the life of my parents. I hope that eventually, I’ll be able to differentiate between the positive and negative emotional baggage I inherited. And leave the negative stuff behind.

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