I didn't know my mom was dying until the day she died.

Obviously I knew she had cancer. Dad took my brother and I on a long walk the previous summer and told us. But she was having chemotherapy to treat it, and besides, it was impossible that my mom could die. People die from cancer sometimes, but I stuck that thought right at the back of my brain where I couldn't think about it. It was impossible. Moms don't die.

She had been in the hospice for a long time, it must have been weeks. I was fifteen years old and I didn't know what a hospice was or why people went there, and nobody thought to tell me. It seemed to me like a swanky hospital. It was so much nicer and more comfortable than the hospital she had been in before, so I thought she must be recovering and was at the hospice to get better. My dad stayed there a lot in the week, and at the weekends he'd drive me and my brother up to visit. In the weeks coming up to Easter, more and more family members had come to stay nearby. It was nice of them to spend Easter with us, I thought.

My mom had only talked about dying twice. When she had to retire early from her job, we found out that me and my brother would be entitled to a “child's pension” as we were still under her care. Reading the small print though, my mom told us that it was “only payable upon death — and I've got years left”. I was uneasy that she said “years left”. Surely she meant “decades”? I made a joke about “bumping her off in her sleep” so my brother and I could get our money — she laughed the incredulous, wide-eyed laugh she used to do when I said something cheeky, and then she left the room. The second time was when her sister, aunty Barbara had come to visit, and she told my mom about the new house uncle John was doing up. “You'll have to come see it, you know, before you go”. “Go where?” my mom said, glancing over at me. “You make it sound like I'm going somewhere!” and she laughed that incredulous laugh again. Before you go. I thought about what that meant, or rather, I stopped myself from thinking about it, and stuffed that at the back of my brain, too.

On the day before Easter Sunday, aunty Eileen, my dad's sister, came to our house. It was just me and my brother there — dad had spent the night at the hospice, which he had been doing more and more lately. I can't remember what aunty Eileen said, but me and my brother got into the car and we drove, in silence, for an hour, to the hospice. We were, on paper at least, a Catholic family, and I played guitar in the church band. It was the last rehearsal that afternoon before the Easter Sunday mass, I asked Eileen whether we would make it back for the rehearsal. “I wouldn't worry about that right now,” she said. That was the moment I realised that my mom was about to die.

We didn't go straight to the hospice. Eileen decided to — distract us? cheer us up? — with a trip into the city. The city had a beautiful 11^th century cathedral, and we went there first. There was an exhibit on, the centrepiece of which was a medieval throne that had allegedly been the seat of the king of England, centuries ago. My aunt spoke to the security guard in the exhibition room. He unhooked the barrier and told me I could sit in the throne, and my aunt took a photo.

I don't remember going to the hospice. Mom's room was crowded — there could only have been seven or eight relatives in there but it felt like fifty. Fifty adults standing around her bed, forcing their cheeriest smiles when me and my brother walked in.

“...and she sat on the throne of the King of England, didn't you Hazel?” - aunty Eileen told a brief, pointless story about our morning at the cathedral. Mom looked at me and made a noise. She was quiet, mumbling, slow from the pain relief drugs she was on. She turned to my dad who was kneeling close to her on the other side of her bed, holding her hand. I could just about hear her, though her words were slow and pained - “what time did she wake up this morning?” Dad repeated the question to me. “Half ten”, I said. “Half ten!” my mom whispered, and looked at me with concern. “You'll miss the whole day”. (I've been an early riser ever since).

“Hold her hand, Hazel, here”, aunty Barbara grabbed my wrist and put my hand on top of my mom's. “Feel how warm her hands are”. I, an awkward, tall child, half-stood and half-knelt at my mom's bedside, holding her thin hand. I felt my face prickle and flush with embarrassment, as a room of sixty or seventy or eighty adults watched me, holding my mom's hand. Aunty Barbara was right, her hands were warm. And though she was slow, quiet, raspy, not-quite-there, she was alive, and she was in the room with us still, right then, physically and mentally.

I don't know how long we were there, it could have been 2 minutes or 2 hours, but eventually aunty Eileen took us home. The one hundred adults wished us goodbye, loudly and cheerily. I looked at my mom, and I knew it now, for certain, that this was the last time I would see her, and the last time she would see me, and if I wanted to say goodbye to my soon-to-be-dead-forever mother this was the time. I was embarrassed. Despite the six thousand adults and six thousand pairs of eyes staring at me, I said goodbye to my mom for the last time — I squeaked a tiny, clipped “bye,” and left the room.

My dad came home around 6am, Easter Sunday. He came to my room, woke me up gently, sat on the edge of my bed, stroked my hair, and told me that mom had died. That she died around 3 o'clock in the morning. I think he said “we both love you”, but maybe my brain wrote that memory in. Then he left, walked across the hallway, knocked on my brother's door and told him too.

I didn't cry. I wasn't sad. I didn't feel anything. I went back to sleep, and woke up hours later, still feeling nothing at all. In the days, weeks and years that followed, I never felt anything about my mom dying. I thought I must an uncaring, unfeeling robot, incapable of emotion; a horrible child who didn't love her mom, because surely any normal child would have cried and cried and cried.

There's no good age for your mom to die, but fifteen is tricky. At fifteen you want to be treated like a grown up, so you act like a grown up. But internally, you're still a child, experiencing the most profound pain any child can possibly experience. And when the grown ups around you treat you like a grown up, when they take you at your word that you're “fine, thanks”, and they stop asking how you are, that pain has nowhere to go, and some essential emotional connection inside you snaps in half like a branch. You don't feel it, but the damage is extreme. You grow into an adult with major depression and anxiety disorder, you have attachment and commitment issues because your brain knows that the people you love the most can suddenly disappear. You have no idea what people mean when they talk about being 'happy'. You are desperate to please your friends but you never allow them to know anything about your past in case they find out what a horrible person you are. You always feel deeply, profoundly alone, no matter how many people love you. You're always “fine, thanks”, however much you want to die and disappear forever. And you feel like this for years and years and it never even crosses your mind that it might be connected to your dead mom, until somebody convinces you that, maybe, you should try therapy.

Recently I've found myself thinking about the two billion adults in the hospice who stood and watched and never budged to let me and my brother spend a few moments alone with our dying mother. Sometimes I think about my dad, on the phone to somebody a few days later, saying “yeah, the kids are doing fine”. Sometimes I think about my teachers at school after the Easter holidays — all of them knew my mom died and not one of them said a single thing to me (apart from Mrs Rothwell, the English teacher who called me a “brave, brave girl” as I left class one day). And for the first time, I find myself feeling something — I feel angry. I feel so angry. Sometimes I think about you — my friends — and your mom who you love, or your mom who you hate, your mom who you call every week, or your mom who you don't speak to, your mom who always criticises you, your mom who loves you back, your mom who doesn't accept you for who you are. I don't know what that's like and I don't know how hard it must be and I'm so sorry.

I don't have a way to end this piece, but this isn't really something that has an end. I will never be able to fix the damage. But out of the muddy swamp of the back of my brain, I am starting to pull it into the light, a little bit at a time. I want to think about it.

21^st january 2021