I had a stringent email from Gail today - having read the blog she was a little concerned at my general pissed offedness. I suspect if she had read some of the earlier ones she might have decided not to stay in touch at all! It made me think about all this baring of the soul in public and wonder whether there wasn't some inherent desire for sympathy and reassurance in it.
To an extent that may be true but I also think it is about working things through and I have always done that best by writing. To have an audience is a luxury that I try not to take for granted but isn't the be all and end all of the process.
After yesterday's 'Perfect Day' I had a thought about what perfect days were like - they all involved Mum in some way - from being a small baba and trailing behind her in the New Market to long days in my old Hillman MInx where we would go to Avebury and sit amonst the stones eating a picnic. She was always the very best of company: we could talk for hours about anything under the sun. And we would laugh - constantly - at other people, at ourselves. Perfect days need laughter.
As I grew older in Calcutta the days we spent together weren't as often as when I was young: many times I was coming home as she was off to watch the horses in the early morning. But it was every day that I saw her and anything longer than twenty four hours without her was always too long. The year that I spent when I first came back to England was the loneliest I have ever known - until now. In a sense the blog has become a place that I go to to tell her things and find her again in the memories.
You see - I always told her that I would be useless without her and that was one prophecy that has come to pass - I am useless. Now don't all leap to the keypad and tell me I'm not because it simply isn't true. I have no purpose or use other than occasionally for Peter the blind neighbour. The world wouldn't miss me much - not really. And that makes me question the reason why? Why continue? Why keep trying?
I suppose the answer lies back in Calcutta again. Life was cheap - we saw death every day - bodies laid out on the Maidan after the Naxalite troubles, bodies being carried to Kalighat on their charpoys. Death was all around us and very much a part of life. But depression wasn't a word that was bandied about a great deal - how could anyone talk of being depressed or tired of life when all around people clung to life and endured and survivied.
Mum clung to life too - at the end she couldn't talk - the evil cancer had taken that from her, so she learned to use email to contact her friends. She couldn't eat properly - the tumour was slowly choking her but she continued to try. When the doctor made me tell her that she was dying, that we couldn't go back to Cornwall she called me a wicked girl for ruining her peace. She didn't want to know that it was terminal and imminent. And yet - when the moment came I was with her and she let go, stopped the desparate clinging on to life that was so much a feature of the final days. Once she did let go her face, for the first time in two years, was at peace and she looked like Mum again.
And round in circles I go. You see - I want to be with her, to leave all of this behind and to stop the pretence that any of this is ever going to be any better because it won't get better - it will just go on and on. Forgive me for the self indulgence- I am poorly sick, with a cold.
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