So too a cancer diagnosis and living with the disease. My immediate thought was So this is how I’m going to die.
I’d both lived as a person with cancer and experienced an intense grieving period. For six months after my mother’s death I did not work, I did not watch TV, I did not drink alcohol and I didn’t want to discuss my grief, as it was mainly inarticulate. I exiled myself and gave way to ‘sitting’ with my loss. If I were of a tradition that wore a black band on my arm to indicate mourning I would have done so. Alma Whittaker in Elizabeth Gilbert’s grand novel The Signature of All Things expressed it perfectly when she said: There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body no longer feels it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feelings. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.
To live with cancer was to grieve one’s former life, even when in remission. So too to witness a loved one die from the disease. Cancer scares people to the quick. It was not surprising that people gave inappropriate advice about alternative treatments. Though one person blamed my disease on my mental state, everyone else, medical staff and close friends and family, was truly sympathetic. It was just their tongues’ expressions of sympathy that sometimes got tied.
Mothering and cancer: is motherhood ever enough?
But it is a hallmark of the damaged that when it comes to their own desire instinctively, ruinously, they tend to court its opposite.
Salley Vickers, The Other Side of You
My mother was a ‘bastard’ child, conceived at the beginning of the Cold War in 1948. Her mother was a Welsh woman in her 20s studying stage design, and her father an Englishman named ‘Jim’.
A London working-class couple adopted my mother: Heather Mary Dietrich. Well, if she can’t walk then she’ll really need loving parents. Won’t she? said my mother’s adopted father. This was the folk tale told to me over the years.
My mother was born with a prominent bump at the base of her spine. The medical staff on the London maternity ward imprisoned her biological mother on the ward to comb old people’s hair. She had to stay around and make herself useful in case her baby was disabled and unplaceable. Mum ended up with one leg longer than the other. Her out-of-kilter hips caused her back to kink and required a chiropractor to clunk her spine into line. Later on I’d need the same.
My mother’s beginning would affect her entire emotional make-up. It was a branding for her: abandonment. Her sense of rejection at birth skewed her view when choosing partners. I once joked that she could walk into a room and pick the worst man for her in seconds. She laughed, because it was true.
When Mum reached her 20s she tracked down her biological mother and they finally met face to face in an English pub. My mother had ducked her head under the thick beam of a centuries-old pub and scanned the room. Through the cymbal and crash of drinks being served and noisy banter she’d spotted the only person who could be a relation. A woman with grey hair, soft skin and cautious blue eyes: her mother. The real one. The content of the conversation was a fast-paced summing-up of facts: this school, this course, this house. She left fantasising about what her life would have been if that mother had mothered her. To have had a connection of the mind growing up. She’d loved speaking with an educated and interesting mother, not one at odds to her. When she tried to discuss her biological mother, her adopted mother would collapse down the living-room wall, wailing. When she wasn’t a good girl her adopted mother would caution, We didn’t have to have you, you know.
You couldn’t breed out the Welsh retroussé nose. My grandmother’s nose was my mother’s, mine and my son’s. All of my mother’s Welsh line resided in Wales.
In light of the tendency towards breast cancer in my immediate family, my biological grandmother’s cancer-less status intrigued me. She’d undergone a radical hysterectomy after the birth of her last child, which might have saved her due to the oestrogen drop. Or, the tendency towards cancer was inherited from the unknown father, my maternal grandfather. Who knew?
Mum and I had many conversations about her being a grandmother and me a mother when I was ‘older’. You’ll marry, have two-point-five children and a Labrador, she’d say. I’d giggle, lower my eyes and a bubble would form above my head, with the image of a happy marriage that was mine. I did want this, and if I stood in the present and glanced around at my unwedded marriage I had the happy union of my imaginings.
Mum had a counsellor’s ability to listen, really listen to you, matched with a reverence for people and the human predicament. She went to the depth of the thing that you wanted to discuss, or she could spend hours on an intellectual conundrum. I
