During the final few weeks of my mother’s time on this earth, spent in hospital, with my father and eldest sister constantly at her bedside, I didn’t have the opportunity to speak to her, to ask the questions I wished to ask or to discuss matters with her that only she would understand.
Mum tried to tell me things but with Dad and my sister as an audience, I know I didn’t react to what she told me in the same way as I would have, if we were alone.
If I cried when I visited my mother, Dad asked me not to let Mum see how upset I was, as it may upset her to see me that way. I had wanted to cry over the impending loss of my mother; I didn’t want her to think I had become so hardened to her illness than I no longer felt emotion, but Dad was of the “old school”, believing Mum must be protected from adverse emotion in her delicate state.
I don’t blame my father for feeling that way. I know that he believed it was for the best.
I didn’t.
The relationship I had with my mother had been one of trust and open honesty for all of my life. Mum and I had raging arguments at times, due to our honesty with each other, but neither of us ever held a grudge. As soon as we were through with our argument, Mum would say, “Go and put the kettle on and make us a cup of tea”. A cup of tea made everything right, you know. Mum was an English lady, who knew within her heart and soul that a shared cup of tea would fix anything that ailed her world.
And it did.
For the two of us it did, anyway, although none of my sisters seemed to have the same capacity to get over a row with Mum in the same way as I did. I still believe the relationship that Mum and I shared was unique on so many levels.
My mother has been gone since 1993 and back then I had one child at school, one at pre-school and my baby who was only nine months old, a baby who my mother had said was “her baby”.
I dropped my two elder children off at school one morning and on the spur of the moment decided to call in and see Mum at the hospital in the morning, rather than waiting until the afternoon when I would be collecting the older two from school, as I had planned.
My baby and I walked into Mum’s hospital room and instead of seeing my father and sister at her side, I found my Mum alone, lying peacefully in bed in the coma she had been in for the last couple of days.
Without giving my actions a second thought, I walked over to my Mum’s bedside and began talking to her by telling her I was visiting her with my baby and that Dad and my sister hadn’t arrived yet. I chatted away to her for a while, in the same way that I would have spoken to her had she been conscious.
It would have been amazing to hear her voice again, but it knew that wouldn’t happen ever again. I stroked her smooth face and her silver hair. I looked at her hands, her strong, healing hands, trying with all my might to embed the image of my beautiful mother permanently within my mind’s eye.
Before I left the room I told her something that I had wanted to say to her when she was still conscious. I told my mother that I knew she would want to contact me from the other side and if she felt the need to contact me for any reason, to let me know and I would find a psychic, or tarot card reader, to help her get through to me.
Mum and I had often made visits to such people, with Mum telling me that she wished she had the same ability that they did. Mum said she wasn’t afraid of psychic phenomena, and I shared her beliefs. They came as naturally to me as breathing, most likely due mostly to my mother sharing her beliefs with me for my entire life.
Up until this particular day, before leaving the hospital, I had said to my Mum, “See you later Mum. I love you”, not having the strength to say goodbye. I hadn’t wanted to say the final goodbye to this precious person who meant the world to me.
This morning had been different though. Mum and I had spent time together, alone, time to communicate.
Time for me to realise that I had to let her go.
She rested so peacefully and I indulged my eyes for the last few moments, again memorising every minute detail about her.
I noticed a pulse beating slowly at the side of her neck. Ah, so she was still alive, I thought to myself, although her spirit seemed not to be with the body I looked at lying in the hospital bed.
Leaning over my mother I whispered to her, “Goodbye Mum. I love you”, and left the room.
Later in the day I found out that a nurse had watched me leave the room and went in to check on my mother.
She was gone.
Down in the hospital car park I strapped my baby into her car seat and turned on the ignition. On the radio that morning they were playing hit songs of 1975 and the song that came onto the radio was “All by Myself” by Eric Carmen, one of Mum’s favourite songs and one which she felt had been written just for her.
“All by myself,
Don’t wanna be, all by myself anymore.”
The years passed and I waited for some kind of sign from my mother, but there wasn’t one. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t, or couldn’t, get through to me. In life, we had talked constantly and I believed with every fibre of my being that Mum hadn’t left me, that she was beside me always.
So where was the sign to contact the psychic? I’d been waiting, and looking, and there was nothing!
This lack of contact began to play on my mind and I thought back over the last couple of years to anything that may have lead to a sign that I may have missed, but every incident that I recalled had gone nowhere; every question I had come up with had been answered, every problem I had, had been solved.
The contact had been right there in front of me, the whole time! Mum had been helping me through every day, without me realising it!
Perhaps grief had shut my senses down; I’m not sure what had happened to me. All I do know is that once I opened my heart and listened with my soul, she could speak to me.
The tarot cards and the psychics are not needed to bring my mother and me together. There is an invisible golden thread joining us together, which can never be broken. She will never leave me, nor I her. She knows she can release the thread more these days as I don’t rely on her as much as I used to, but she knows when I need her. And she is there.
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In My World 