After the funeral

The night before my mum’s funeral I ate three large lamb chops and one solid sticky toffee pudding. (With custard). Now for someone who usually picks quinoa salad and sorbet from the menu this was something of a departure. But I was hungry. I was hungry not only for red meat, sugar, and fat, I was hungry for my mum.

Because she’s gone you see. We buried her after the funeral and I stood and watched the coffin being lowered, and heard the words intoned, and I threw earth down into the hole and said goodbye. But I’m still not sure where she is.

Because the mum-ness which was my mum has gone. I can’t see her, I can’t touch her, I can’t talk to her. Scrolling on Facebook the other day, I glimpsed pictures of residents in her care home enjoying a knees up in the lounge. But her chair was empty. And that sums up how I feel.

Her chair is empty.

And I have to try and deal with this. I have to come to terms with it. Because she sure as hell isn’t coming back and I can’t keep stuffing down lamb chops and sticky toffee pudding otherwise I’ll be joining her sooner than I’d like.

The only way – and I mean – the only way to make sense of this is to believe in what I can’t see, trust what I can’t feel, hope where I can’t experience. I guess that’s what faith is.  The Christian faith preaches loud and long the resurrection of the dead and her funeral service last Wednesday had that one wrapped up lock stock and barrel. But it’s all very well to recite the Creed week in week out and chant graciously that you ‘look for the resurrection of the dead.’ It’s quite another thing when the dead is your mum. A line has been crossed and life after death is no longer an abstract concept. It’s the very point of everything.

It's what the Bible calls a sure and certain hope which is a bit of an oxymoron don’t you think? If it’s sure and certain then why is it a hope? Just saying. (All you preachers out there could maybe shed some light from the pulpit sometime.)

I talked about dying quite a lot with my mum before she went and actually did it. And she told me that she was ‘ready’ but I think she could see that I wasn’t. And she said she didn’t want to go because she knew I would miss her so much. And I told her to go when she wanted to and that I’d be okay. But it was all in the future, it was hypothetical. I couldn’t ever envisage a day when my mum wouldn’t be my mum. But in the end, she had no choice which I guess is what happens.

I’ve been reading about the stages of grief again – the ones Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified in 1969 as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. (It did my head in when I lost my first husband when I was aged just thirty-three and had a well-meaning friend try to chart my journey through them. Because you can’t.)  At any given point in the day, I can feel all five at once. I did then and I do now.

And at any given point in the day, I can say ‘Until we meet again’ and I can equally dread that we never will. Richard Rohr writes that ‘People of great faith often suffer bouts of great doubt because they continue to grow.’ Now I would never label myself as having ‘great faith’ but I find that kind of reassuring. Even Mother Teresa experienced decades of doubt apparently, writing to her spiritual director, ‘The place of God in my soul is blank. There is no God in me.’

I need to see what happened to my mum as her Transitus – her crossing from this life to the next. As St Francis did and as we all will.

And what I need to learn to do is carry my mum inside me. And maybe that goes for God too.

Shall I cut myself some slack and just be where I am?