I wonder if I’ll ever stop reaching for the phone to call my mother.

Today, I wanted to ask her the name of our next-door neighbour from 50 years ago.

Yesterday, I wanted to send her a photo of the sunset over our lake taken from our new upstairs window.

The day before, I had a question about baking powder.

Every day I reach for the phone and every day the realisation hits.

I have her phone.

It’s sitting on my desk.

She’s no longer here to answer it.

It all happened so quickly. Last September she was playing golf. Six months later, she was dead.

Dead.

It’s a month today since she shrugged off that mortal coil and went to meet her maker. There’s a part of my brain that simply won’t accept it. Rationally, I know she’s gone. I can see the emptiness. I can feel it. I have the death certificate. It’s there. In black and white. I was at the funeral.

When Boss died nine months ago, mam told our Parish priest that while she knew she’d been to a funeral, it wasn’t my dad’s.

I know now what she meant.

It wasn’t denial; it was the otherness of it all.

I chose the readings, wrote the prayers of the faithful, picked the hymns. I assigned parts to a willing cast of players and choreographed the proceedings. I shook hands and smiled as people commiserated and offered their condolences, many of them feeling a similar shock at the suddenness of it all.

I was there.

And yet I wasn’t there.

I remember once being a bridesmaid at a wedding in Galway and the bride telling me afterwards that she’d have loved to have been at her own wedding.

This was like that.

The detachment. The need to keep going. To organise. To make sure everyone had someone to talk to and no one was forgotten.

This is what my mother did when my father died.

Now it was my turn.

I’d thought I’d lost mam before – during COVID. The day I deposited her at the hospital under the pitiful eye of a knowing nurse, I was sure I’d never see her alive again. When we’d left the house, Boss hugged her and thanked her for everything, saying he never thought she’d go before him, that their end would be like this, wrenched apart after more than 50 years of marriage to die alone.

Thankfully it wasn’t.

She’d pull back from the brink twice again, each time her body a little weaker than before, but her spirit strong, inalienable.

When she asked me to come home in early February, I knew.

There’d be no coming back this time.

For five weeks I sat with her every day. We laughed, we argued, we sat in silence – just as we’d always done. More often than not, she slept and I read my book. She told me to let the doctors and nurses do their jobs. That I wasn’t to interfere. But I did.

Never before had I realised how important it is for patients to have someone to advocate for them, to fight their corner. It’s too easy to be subsumed by the system. Hospitals are understaffed and what staff they have is overworked. I pitied those patients who had one visitor a day for ten minutes; they in turn envied my mother.

Mam was blessed with great relatives, neighbours, and friends. At times I felt like a bouncer at a nightclub, standing sentry, allowing a maximum of two visitors at a time for a set time only. But as the weeks went on, she was less and less able to talk. It upset her. It upset her visitors. It upset me.

It was all very upsetting.

I had time to prepare. Of course, I did. I knew the end was coming. All we wanted was to get her home. That’s what she wanted, too. Both my parents were adamant – they did not want to die in a hospital. I doubt it’d bother me where I die but they were adamant.

We were lucky. We got them home. Both of them. Both died at home, surrounded by their family, finally at peace.

Surprisingly, both resisted. They held out. I wasn’t sure what they were waiting for.

We’d been brought up alongside the firm belief that there are worse things in life than death. That they would take their time exiting this world surprised me.

Dad held on till the feast of the Sacred Heart, 16 June. For mam, it was the feast of St Joseph, 19 March.

A month ago today.

Tomorrow, we’ll have her month’s mind, a mass held one month after a death. Frank McNally did a lovely piece on it in the Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times, describing it as

… a moment of calm after the funeral storm, a time to reflect and move on.

Calm, yes. Reflection, yes. But I don’t think I’m nearly ready to move on.

The words of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, come to mind:

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

It’ll take a while to get my head (and my heart) around the massive change that’s looming on my horizon. I feel as if the very bedrock upon which my life is built is crumbling.

But then I catch myself saying or doing something in the voice and manner my mother would have used and I think perhaps, that as long as I’m alive, she’ll never really be dead.

From the many stories I heard in the weeks leading up to her death and at the wake and funeral and the many more no doubt I’ll hear tomorrow, mam left her mark on so many lives.

She was a legend in her own lifetime.

Thanks, mam. For everything.