I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who replied to my ramblings after my mum died. You probably don't realise it but you helped more than you realise. Just writing is cathartic for me, and knowing that what I'm writing makes sense and is felt by other people too helps immensely.
The funeral went better than we expected, though saying that we didn't really know what to expect. The cremation was a very personalised service conducted by the same pastor and funeral directors that conducted mum's late husband's funeral service and cremation in 1994. We had a bloody good knees up afterwards in a real spit and sawdust biker pub that is owned and run by the mayor and mayoress of Chesterfield.
My mum's house is for sale now and my sister and I just want rid of it. It's not the same without mum in it. There was always a warm smell of fresh home cooking mixed with the strangely comforting smell of cigarettes when you walked through the door, and it's just not there now. Neither sis nor me want to be on our own in the house, though for me it did feel better when dp and me went in the day after mum had been cremated. It was like the 'thing' in the chapel of rest wasn't her; it was a diseased shell, the result of a disease that had finally won and was decaying her body in a grotesque way even just an hour after she'd died, and by cremating her body it was the final thing we could do to stop the cancer violating her even more. Her lips were pursed like she thoroughly disapproved of something and her bottom lip was almost completely black. Her eyes were sunken with red eyelids, her cheeks were wrong with the jowls that had characterised her face so much in life completely gone and sunken into her face, and her stomach was still massively swollen from the tumour that had filled her abdominal cavity, though the rest of her body was painfully thin. The end result of cancer.
It still doesn't feel real. We came back home the day after mum's funeral and went straight to ds's parents' evening at nursery. His teacher told us that ds was exceptionally bright in every aspect and that in reception he'd be singled out as gifted and talented, and when we came back home the first person I wanted to phone was my mum. It took a few seconds for the cogs to click that that wasn't going to happen, though a part of me thinks that she already knows, even though I'm agnostic and not quite sure what I believe in or what happens after we die. I keep seeing things out the corner of my eye, moving shadows and tricks of the light. My brain is definitely playing tricks on me. I was going to apply for an online only job application and the internet in the house wasn't working on the night before the closing date (didn't feel up to doing it on the day before that), and when I woke up bizarrely very early and alert on the closing day all I could hear was mum's voice saying 'just get it done' in the way she knew I needed to be nagged when I was procrastinating, only this time there was no excuse and no reason in my head not to get up stupidly early and do it because she was nagging me from inside my head and there was no hiding place. The application went in at half seven that morning and only time will tell whether it was good enough to merit a stab at an interview, but fingers crossed.
I keep wanting to phone mum. I can't bring myself to delete her telephone numbers from my mobile. I'd often phone her late at night just for a natter about nothing in particular, usually complete bollocks in a conversation that would last over an hour. I want to tell her about so many stupid trivial little things, about things we've done or are going to do, about what ds has done at nursery or the party he went to last weekend. Those kinds of things. Silly things like we need some curtains making for the living room and a couple of months ago the first person I would have asked (and bribed with a box of Thorntons and a bottle of brandy) would have been mum. She's the person I want to tell about the jobs I've applied for as I know she'd be so thrilled if I did get an interview. I feel so empty. We were in B&Q this afternoon and I was talking to ds about growing tomatoes like his grandma did last year and Carly Simon's Coming Around Again came on the music player in the store and I wanted to cry as that was one of the songs we were thinking about playing at her funeral.
Do these things ever get any easier??