I should start by saying that my favourite genre to read is memoir/biography. It is surely for the same reason that I was drawn to practice in family law. I’m in it for the human stories. But I have also long known that one has to be pretty self-centred to consider one’s life worth writing about, so I prefer to call it ‘me-moi’. I want to open with this because this post falls squarely into that genre.
I also should add a disclaimer. All me-moi is also fiction. And that is particularly true in my case. It is quite a lot to ask of you that you believe what I write from memory because my memory is clinically compromised. Memory is one of the executive functions, and having ADHD means my executive functions are… unusual. Add to that the studies that say both grief and trauma can impact and compromise memory, and you’ve got yourself a deeply unreliable narrator.
Pausing there (as Judges like to say when a witness is talking too fast or too much), I should also say that I don’t really know if what I’ve experienced is technically ‘trauma’. I used to think so, but then my godmother said she didn’t think so, and ever since I have been hesitant to use the term (and, also, hesitant to spend time with my godmother).
Anyway, back to me-moi.
There is a ghost in my garden, and it is about time I told you about her.
My mother died when I was 10 and she was 40. I always understood that she was in the middle of developing a love of gardening when she died. I have vague memories of her talking about the sweet peas growing on wicker plant supports in the borders of our Wandsworth garden.
But you have to understand how little I knew her. What do we really know of our parents when we are 10?
I knew that she was a riot. She designed and made incredible games for our birthday parties, made elaborate birthday cakes – like a pirate ship with rice paper sails – and peeled grapes to place in a bowl at Halloween so that our friends, blindfolded, would think they were touching eyeballs.
One April Fools Day, we came downstairs for breakfast only to find that the table was set for dinner. The whole day we ate meals in reverse.
I know that she had style. I loved watching her get dressed up. Part of my inheritance was an extraordinary Gucci jacket, with huge shoulder pads and a black, white, and gold motif, that I foolishly let go at some point I don’t remember when.
I know she loved the song, ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ by Dusty Springfield, because I remember being parked across the road from school, running late, but singing it with her at the top of our lungs, with the radio blasting, until the song finished. I know she loved the song ‘What a Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong, because it was played at her funeral.
A note on the music you choose for your funeral. There are two songs that, even all these years later, I can’t hear without crying – they are ‘Wonderful World’ and ‘Fields of Gold’ by Sting. The former was played at my mother’s funeral and the latter at my father’s. I cannot hear either without sobbing. I’m crying before the second bar.
So just, you know, before you choose a song for your funeral, ask yourself if it is one your children/loved ones will hear a lot in their everyday lives for years after you’re gone. That way you might be able to minimise the times they’re caught snotting up in a shopping centre.
David had no popular music at his funeral, but I was listening to Billie Eilish’s ’BIRDS OF A FEATHER’ on repeat in the weeks before he died. “I want you to stay/'Til I'm in the grave/'Til I rot away, dead and buried/'Til I'm in the casket you carry”. File under: Sobbing before the second bar.
Back to Mum.
She loomed large in death, as in life. When she died, my father set up Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust. This extraordinary tribute to her went on to save lives, largely thanks to the tireless efforts and fundraising of her friends. A true sign of love. Tragically, though this is not for this post, the charity closed last year after a very short period of apparently idiotic financial mismanagement. I’m still pretty mad about it.
Mum was creative. She made amazing things and, along with her sister, Tessa (who my brothers and I lived with after our dad died suddenly of a brain tumour in 2003 – proper orphans) sold them out of our living room at Christmas markets. I maintain that had she lived to see the digital age, she would have been wildly successful and probably would have grown up to be a Sarah Raven or a Carole Bamford or a Butter Wakefield.
It is only recently that I have reflected on the fact that Mum was ill for most of our childhoods. She first exhibited symptoms of cervical cancer in 1992 just after the birth of my little brother, but was given a series of misdiagnoses and her symptoms were minimised by GPs. It was not until she went to see a private gynaecologist in July 1995, who sent her for a scan, that she learned she had cervical cancer. Of course by then it was advanced. DO NOT MISS YOUR SMEAR TESTS.
I have a journal that my father occasionally wrote in over a period of 10 years. This is not, by any means, a chronical of his day-to-day life, but rather a notebook in which he occasionally scribbled some thoughts, lists, or goals. It is here that he recorded his dismay that the problems that had been present in their marriage over the previous years could largely be attributed to this lurking disease. That the ill health my mother complained of had been all too real, and that she had been slowly dying without either of them realising.
This isn’t a post about cancer, though. Nor about the staggering rate at which women’s health issues have – for millennia – been under-researched, dismissed, misdiagnosed, and overlooked. I will say that my mother’s death was preventable, and there is almost nothing worse or more painful than living with that knowledge.
What I don’t know, but what I theorise, is whether as well as turning to God in her final, chemo-filled, years, she found peace and solace in her garden.
I have told you about how I came to gardening, but there is part of the story I have left out.
I told you that I had burned out and developed depression and been signed off work earlier that year and how turning my garden from a paved-over dumping ground into a flower-filled haven had been a huge part of my recovery. I told you about how I had, on a whim, stopped off at my local garden centre on my way home from the tip one sunny afternoon and how that had set off my obsession with gardening.
What I didn’t tell you, and what I didn’t realise until a year later, is that the date of my trip to the garden centre was the 3 May 2023. 24 years to the day after mum died.
My brothers and I have never marked either of our parent’s death-iversaries. I don’t think any of us have even had it marked in our diaries.
My aunt, Tessa, on the other hand, still keeps a paper diary, and in it, every year, she writes all birthdays, death days, and other important milestones. This is written as [first name] [surname] [number in brackets]. I.e. On my birthday in this year’s diary it will say, “Lucy Maxwell (37)”. The year Tessa no longer has her dog eared, pocket diary with its mechanical pencil bookmarking the date, and its neatly recorded births and deaths, stashed in her handbag or coat pocket, a part of what keeps my world together will have ended.
So, most years, we will receive a text to remind us to remember that the relevant parent died that day X years ago.
I recall the last conversation I had with my mother like it happened 10 minutes ago. Given what I’ve told you about the state of my memory more generally, this should strike you as significant. I also recall the last conversation I had with my father like it happened 10 minutes ago, but that is a story for another me-moi. “I will always be with you,” she said. “I’ll be sitting on your shoulder,” she said, tapping me on the shoulder with her jaundiced, emaciated finger, “telling you ‘no, Lucy, not that boy’”.
If only that had been true. It could have saved me a small fortune on a ridiculously ill-considered wedding, and a ghastly, expensive divorce two years later.
For a while after she died, I tried to believe what she had said. But even at aged 10 I was too cynical to believe all the crap I was being fed about how she was ‘up there’ (where?), ‘sitting on a cloud’ (what?), or had (my least favourite) ‘passed into the next room’ (oh, has she? Then maybe she could pop back…).
But something startling happened when I first dug holes in my garden and planted flowers. I felt closer to her than I had in the 24 years since she had died. I thought I had never gardened before, but then memories resurfaced of gardening with her when I was a child. There was nothing that I could quite get a full grip on, just a fragment of a memory, and the momentary thought, “I think maybe I’ve done this before”.
I am not a religious person. I wish I were. Neither am I ‘spiritual’. I’m a cynic, a pragmatist, a realist, I’m a lawyer for goodness sake. But there is something otherworldly about how present mum has felt to me at times, out in the garden. Not that I ‘saw’ her, not that she ‘communicated’ with me, and surely the feelings I’ve had are long-forgotten memories surfacing, rather than anything more woo-woo, so don’t start googling ‘application to section under the Mental Health Act’ yet.
On 3 May 2024, I had marked in my calendar the anniversary of 1 year of gardening. This was a major milestone for me, the marking of a moment of great significance in my life. A turning point. And the same day, a text from Tessa, “I can’t believe it was 25 years ago! It was a beautiful, sunny weekend just like today”.
It was. Mum died in the early hours of the morning of 3 May 1999. Dad came to my room a few hours later to wake me up, and sat with me on the bottom bunk of the bunkbed my mum had installed during a ‘Changing Rooms’-style bedroom make over. Mummy died this morning.
It isn’t like the movies. There’s no screaming or gnashing of teeth. There’s quiet. Mum had been ill, and we had been amazingly sheltered from much of her illness, but we were given sufficient, age-appropriate information to know what was happening. That afternoon, we sat outside in her garden, in the warmth of the sun, and quietly began to experience the world without her.
Part of me – the tiny part that wants to believe in magic – believes that it was Mum, tapping me on the shoulder, on 3 May 2023 as I drove away from the tip, whispering in my ear ‘why not pop to the garden centre? Perhaps there are answers for you there’.
There were. And somehow, she was there, too.
I think this year I will invite friends over on 3 May. The garden should be full of tulips and roses and things. It is a Saturday, and if the weather gods are kind the sun will come out. And we can sit in my garden - not far from the one my mother tended - in the warmth of the sun, and be grateful for this great inheritance.
[ Photographs by Mum of her garden, circa 1996 ]
I am so sorry for your 10 year old self. These anniversary dates can have a powerful positive or negative energy throughout our lives. My mother also died of cancer, ovarian cancer, when she was 63 and I was in my early 30s. My first child was 15 months old. It was also undiagnosed, almost symptom-less, and she hadn't wanted to bother the doctor with her one slight, very occasional symptom. She died 3 weeks after she was diagnosed, untreatable. It was also early May, all the life of the world awakening again and the day the swallows returned. My father never recovered, living another 26 years in a state of profound depression, which reached its depths each year as the anniversary of my mother's death approached. As an only child it was my task to get him through every day, from a distance, and in particular that time of year. So anniversary marking held only negative energy for me. But when my father died I chose not to remember the day of his death, but of his birth, when we would always go to cut down the Christmas tree (this being the north of Scotland, any handy forestry plantation furnished the (free) goods).
You have discovered a wonderful positive energy in the anniversary of your mother's death and one which obviously goes far beyond marking a specific day into changing your life. You've also helped me by your writing in that it came to me while reading your post that what I need to do, after so many years of the negative energy, is to celebrate my mum instead on the day the swallows return each year. There is always rebirth in the natural year.
This is beautiful. And hard—my boys lost their father young. Memory and ghosts and what triggers them are fascinating. Years ago, before the EU, I was pulled off a train and questioned from a sound sleep in Czech and answered (briefly) in Czech, a language I hadn’t spoken since I was 4 or 5. And when I couldn’t repeat that feat while awake the border guards became very suspicious. I find my ghost/memories visit most often when I’m cooking —something about the physical movement of stretching strudel. My mother says I can’t possible remember, that I was too young, but my body remembers. It happens in the garden too (especially with tomatoes) but not as much.