Crocuses Through The Snow

It’s funny how some things can change you so much but then in other ways not at all. Four years ago my mother died of a brain tumour. She was 56. I was 19. Before that my family and I had an uphill six month struggle, trying to look after her, ourselves and each other.
I won’t imagine us to be something we weren’t before the diagnosis. We weren’t your average 2.4 children family. My mum was a feminist, my Dad a cross dresser struggling to find where he belonged in this world. My sister and I were completely different from one another and squabbled constantly and my Grandma, a devout Christian, confused by the odd family she had ended up with. But despite our differences to all the other families around us, I have never encountered one that loved each other so much.
And then an evil entered our lives, in the form of a tumour growing slowly inside my Mum’s head. And it really did threaten to tear us apart. But despite our lives changing completely we kept the love and optimism we had had all those happy years in us. So in that respect who we really were never changed.
I am often teased for being overtly optimistic; shouting ‘this is the best thing that has ever happened to me!’ when confronted by a free food sample in shops. I don’t blame people for this; I know that optimism is often a trait confused with naivety. But I’m not naïve; I’ve seen that the world isn’t fair, that it is full of trauma. I just believe the best way of dealing with this trauma is by seeing its silver lining.
When my Mum was in her final few days of life I used to go see her in the hospice and treat myself to a J20 at only 80 pence- that and the free internet was my silver lining to my own situation.
I don’t want you to get me wrong here, the bargainous price of juice didn’t make me forget everything that was going on around me but thinking of something positive in all the doom and gloom did make a small difference to how I felt.
I also believe my Mum’s optimism helped her in a bigger way; when she was diagnosed we were told she would live for three days, in the end she lived for six months and throughout this she managed to stay upbeat and kept writing the book she was so passionate about. Would she have lived as long if she and everyone else had curled up in a ball of self pity? I don’t think so.
I hope I am not making this sound easy, like I am sneering at those going through a similar situation to mine and not managing to stay upbeat. Looking on the bright side of life knackered me everyday and I often fell into huge pits of depression or looked for happiness in the wrong places.
During my mother’s illness there were visitors and nurses in and out of the house 24 hours a day. Everyday they would see me, curled up on the couch watching endless re runs of Sex and The City. Going through the motions I would get up and offer them some soup from the huge pot we always had on the stove. I would hear them say; ‘oh it’s amazing how happy she is’ or ‘at least she’s at home’ and I’d smile weakly and let the words wash over me. I got no comfort from them. Hearing the same things over and over made my chest tighten until I felt my lungs might explode. It baffled me how my sister and my Grandma could talk about her illness all day and all night with these strangers, strangers who were always seeing me cry. In the comforting words of others I could see no hope, it made me cross to see them putting a cheery spin on our situation; hypocrite that I am. I think I felt this way as they didn’t see what I saw; they couldn’t feel what I felt. Every night they didn’t take their shift watching her sleep and they didn’t place their head on her chest listening to her heart beat- terrified to pull away in case it stopped. They couldn’t hear the bizarre ramblings she used to go on, how she would yell hateful words at my father because the tumour was telling her he was doing something wrong.
His whole face turned into a monster’s face during that time, warped and distorted from tiredness and loss. I’d lie in bed and hear him bang his fist against the wall, his jaw crack, crack, cracking.
And I’d often turn up for my night shift, at 3 am, with the warmth of tequila wrapped around me, and I’d watch her sleep through hazy eyes thinking of the boy I was infatuated with at the time.
That’s one of the main things they don’t tell you about grief. Is that your life carries on, I was in my last year of being a teenager; I was wrapped up in everything my friends were.
When she was diagnosed I’d just returned from the most amazing six months travelling and was working in a pub full of gorgeous guys, months away from beginning my course at the University of Sheffield. Looking back on that time it is impossible to differentiate between what I was doing because I was young and what I was doing because I was going through intense grief. Did I get wasted every night as a defence mechanism? Did I fall in love with my childhood friend, the one my Mum always joked I would marry, because he was hot and charming or because I wanted to do something she wanted? I still don’t know the answers to these questions. It appears now that every mistake I make will always link back to what I have been through. Even now I am a terribly disorganised person, I struggle to do the day to day things that others appear to find so easy. I am told this is because I am struggling to deal with my loss. But what if I’m just disorganised? Does my whole personality link back to what has happened? My mind block on memories of who I was before the tumour gives me no answers.
As you can see I wasn’t an optimistic, smiling person throughout it all. I don’t believe anyone can be. But without strength you can’t have happiness and vice versa. Happiness isn’t something that just comes one day; you can’t take it for granted. You have to work on it, especially throughout the hard times.
I remember leaving my house one day, looking up at it, its green shutters and messy plant pots and I thought to myself; I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I had never felt emotions like the ones I was going through that year and it was enlivening. I truly felt what it was like to be living. Then that same day I fell into a pit of sadness and wrote in my diary that love means nothing; no matter who we have in our life we are alone. I had both these crazy emotions inside of me, battling to see who would win.
The day she died I saw something that confirmed to me that I would not let the depression inside me beat me. It was snowing heavily and I was staring out the window of the hospice, all I could hear was the clack of my Grandma’s knitting needles and the sounds of my Mum’s croaky breathing. I couldn’t look at her too long, her left eye was half open and if you looked closely there was no life in it, the other one was glued tight shut. I concentrated on the snow. It had wrapped everything in its blanket apart from a couple of crocuses who were poking their vivid purple and yellow heads through the white. They hadn’t let the snow get them down. They had kept fighting through it. So I resolved I would do the same, my Mum was a brave person- she had kept her vivid colours showing despite an illness which was trying to fade them out. I could do the same.
It wasn’t easy, from the day she was diagnosed to the day she died my world had been slowly crumbling down. I searched hard for the beauty in the wreckage. I occasionally still do. On Sunday, it was four years since the day she died and we sat in our little, winding, windmill of a house and were together. My sister chose to remember her by braving the once feared photograph drawer. I wasn’t quite there yet, I am still having the greatest difficulties in remembering the way she was before the cancer took over.
But I am trying, and I can remember certain moments, certain smells, certain songs. And when the crocuses come I see her in them, the embodiment of positive thinking. It’s from those flowers that I know she is there still smiling. And so can I.