My mother is dying, and not in the Buddhist, Sylvia Plath "we're all dying, all the time" way.
Her body has been compromised, the messages her cells send each other got confused, and now there is rapidly developing cancer in her lung, and most horrifically, in her brain. Just typing that disgusts me enough to taste stomach acid rising, the most brutally unfair place to become ill, a desecration on the shrine to her life, her person.
I've been staying at home a lot, obviously, and unsurprisingly, my university work has been put on the back burner while I cope emotionally and practically.
Mum has been her usual stoic self, we don't talk about it. She just wants to sleep, drink her tea, keep on smoking (as laughably distasteful that seems), listen to her radio. She doesn't want to disrupt any of our lives.
But despite her stiff upper lip, her cancer is catching up with her. First, she couldn't make it up the stairs, so she had to stay downstairs. But she still was ok. Then she had her infection, knocking her out completely over Christmas. Back then we still didn't know she had cancer, she had kept it from us. She seemed to recover a bit, she came home, she was back to normal. It wasn't until later that she began to decline.
Now, she is frailer than I could ever have imagined her to be. She moves with a tricycle/walker that we got from the NHS, which she could use by herself at first.
I stay at home as much as I can. I stay up late, listening for her needing my help. When she could move easily by herself, getting out and into bed with no problem, zooming around with her walker, going up and down the steps no bother, it wasn't such a big deal. I went to sleep without any worry.
Then she got thinner, slower, she needed more help with getting up the little step to get into the kitchen. I started staying up late, listening in my bedroom for the telltale sound of the kitchen light flickering on, coming down and making excuses, assuring my mother that I was up anyway, and that I just wanted a tea, like her.
About 3 or 4 times a night I would sit with her until she went back to bed, trying to make conversation. I still haven't talked about her cancer, or her terminal diagnosis, with her. It feels too cruel to do it, to someone I love, who is dying, who never wanted to have the difficult conversations.
I dread when people ask me how she is. She's getting worse, more confused as the tumours annex more of her brain and more of her, she's thinner, getting lighter for her final journey. The last week or two, she has had trouble getting in and out of bed. Now there is no pretense, she knows I am up for her in the night, because she calls me to come down. She knows I stay awake. Yesterday, I had the horrible thought that all of us were just waiting to be bereaved, trapped in between two points, the names of which I am too frightened to fully acknowledge with words.
Mum was adamant that I stay in university, and so I have also been thinking of all that tedious business, in the back of my mind. Now there are some deadlines coming up, and I have threadbare theories to work with, subjects that I struggle to care about. Today, I came back to my flat near the university, and headed to the university library with my laptop, intending to bulldoze my ideas and theories until I produced something. I stared into space when I tried to read, I desperately switched to Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter when I tried to write. Without realising it, my fingers seek distractions from when I try to let my brain out of its safe space.
About 20 minutes ago, I was finally pushing my thoughts forcefully onto the Word document, rough, shoddy work, but at least it gave me a mound of clay from which I could sculpt my argument. I had stopped, just for a second, to think, or to not think, just for a second.
I had Spotify on my earphones, on shuffle, my playlist including over 9000 songs. In that dead space, my brain briefly off-lining itself while I gain momentum to write again, Amanda Palmer came on, freezing me with her words.
"Love of mine, soon you will die,
And I won't be far behind,
I'll follow you into the dark."
I sat through the entire song, not sure if I should just have skipped it, as I felt that icy boulder I have in my gut thaw, a real, bitter taste to my throat.
Embarrassed to say that I cried there. I swallowed that mysterious lump that comes from crying. I think the Chinese guy to the side of me saw that I was crying, but I'm thankful he didn't say anything.
After I got myself together again, after I grew used to the wound that the song had created, or exposed, I felt....the same? Worse? Better? My life at the moment is like a kaleidoscope of brown and grey, even when it turns and changes, it's just more of the same aching dullness.
This whole thing with my mum at first made me scared about where would she go when she died. I was raised a Catholic, then I was an atheist in my teens, and now I confess that I am agnostic. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. I don't think the picture painted in the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qua'ran, or any other holy book is the perfect, accurate story, I don't think it is the exact blueprint for how the cosmos works. Ultimately, these religions were created, I think, to act as an adhesive for communities, creating immutable laws for everyone, and explaining unknown things. Of course, the belief in the afterlife is part of that last thing. Even knowing this, in my cold, rational brain, I can't quite believe that a person ends completely.
Part of this lack of belief in disbelief is something I can't explain without sounding mildly insane.
I have always had this sense, that the pair of eyes I look out of is a complete fluke. That I could have just as easily be looking out another pair of eyes, and using a different pair of hands, being called a different name. I have never liked labels placed on my identity, or people assuming I like this or that because I am female, or because I am straight, or English.
Because I am well aware that there is a part of me, deep in my mind, which is neither female or male. It has no sex, no nationality, no race, no preference. I would stay awake for a long time as a child, thinking about this other me, that was looking out of my eyes, knowing they were only mine by chance, and knowing that these eyes are only mine for a limited time.
As a child, when I went to sleep, this is all I would think about. As I got older, as I absorbed the culture I grew up around, I did not have so much time to reflect on this opinionless, sexless, ageless edifice in my mind, thinking instead about how I could fit in with the others, whether I'd get a job, if I would fall in love.
But that thing still lives, it has always been there, it sits, unchanging in its appreciation in the randomness of this body and this life, a dark, hard, immortal rock in ever-changing currents, the mountain my house is built into and on.
I don't know what to call it, not entirely sure if I can call it part of me, and if that it is the "real me", and the personality I have developed is just a growth. I don't want to use the word "soul," as it is too value-laden, but it suits this rock within me in some ways - it is unchanging, it watches, it is nothing but itself. If I lose both my legs, this rock of me will not be chipped, it will not be scratched, it will remain as unmoved as it always has been. I could lose my eyes, and it will only increase in its heaviness, in its presence.
If the part of me that is me is my brain, what happens when it rots? Does it rots away around this rock of me? Does the rock of me stay?
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