Ritual

Today was my mother’s birthday. She would have been 82.

It’s hard to know how to mark it when someone is no longer here. When she was alive I would go over, armed with cards and flowers and some new clothes from the Classics range at Marks and Spencers. Clothes she would always say she loved then always take back.

That was our ritual.

My mum loved rituals. They were the repeating pegs she hooked her life on. Once she was diagnosed with lung cancer her dependence on ritual, habit and routine intensified. As if she knew the pegs were working loose so she needed to bang them in tighter.

Not surprisingly, food became an obsession. Eat to live became her motto. My sister put on two stone, my mother continued to fade away. When she got undressed I had to look away. Not out of modesty. But because I couldn’t bear to look at her thin and withered frame.

I was entrusted with her shopping. I am not a good shopper. I know this because she told me. Constantly. But I was all she had, so she had to make the best of it. She gave me strict instructions; brands, cuts, prices. I can never open a tin of rice pudding again. The smell is enough to engulf me in a wave of grief.

Then there were the cigarettes. The punctuation marks on each and every day. In spite of inoperable tumours in both lungs, cigarettes were life and death to her. She never gave them up. She pretended she did. I refused to buy them so she got other people to bring them in and told me they were for my dad. That was supposed to make me feel better. Given he had vascular dementia and cigarettes were starving his brain, I don’t think she’d thought that one through. In the end I gave up fighting her on it. ‘What’s for you won’t go by you.’ It’s just a case of when.

One of my most vivid memories is in the hospice, three days before she died. She kept checking the clock, asking me when I was going, telling me I needed to get back up that road before it got too late. Nice to see you come, hen. Nice to see you go! Eventually, I took the hint. As I was leaving I looked back to see her pushing her dying mate in a wheelchair down the corridor. Her mate was carrying her oxygen on her knee. My mother was actually running. They were trying to get to the smoking room before it closed for tea.

Throughout her illness, habit set in. Like a security blanket. After every oncology appointment she liked to go to her favourite cafe. And sit in the window. And look out at the Clyde. She liked to do this with my husband. She peferred his company because he listened to her. I was too frightened to listen because I didn’t want to hear what she might say. They always sat at the same table and she always had a moan about the smoking ban and the fact she couldn’t have a cigarette with her scone.

She never spoke about her funeral. Apart from to tell me that she didn’t want my sister there. She’d been raised a Catholic but had ‘turned’ when she met my dad. I was brought up with one foot in both camps. Left and right. I rejected them both. But when she went into the hospice I asked her if she wanted a priest. She said, no. She didn’t want to upset my dad. But I knew she’d already seen one.

After she died we tried to embrace the ritual of her death with her in mind. What would she want? No fuss. No tears. Nobody making a show of themselves. Or, more importantly, making a show of her. So we tried. We went against her wishes in one crucial way. We let my sister come. She did her mother proud. She held on to her grief until we got out of the crematorium and then it was like a well had burst.

There was a moment at the funeral I know my mother would have relished. My brother’s employers are Arabs and he's been embraced by them as family. They take this connection so seriously they flew to Greenock for his mother's funeral. They drove up to the crematorium in a chauffeur driven Jaguar and formally paid their respects. My mother was a terrible snob and a Jag at her funeral would have been a very big peg in her wall.

Her remains came in a discreet cardboard box. I kept it in my car. For weeks. A fact that made me secure but bothered my sister. In the end she said to me, ‘ mum just wouldn’t like it’. She was right. So I agreed to scatter them.

Now, I know this is a big health and safety issue and there are probably strict guidelines to where you scatter human remains - if not actual laws - but my sister’s need was too great. So we gathered at my mother’s favourite cafe and wandered down onto the pebble beach.

It was damp and dreich. My lovely sister-in-law had picked the wrong shoes for mud flats. My dad lit up immediately. And kept trying to wander off. My poor distressed brother had to grip him by the arm and drag him to keep him with us. I was carrying my mum in a box under my arm and my sister had filled a little wicker basket with things from their house that reminded her. It included six large Bingo pens.

We huddled at my mother’s place of rest, as far out of sight and away from other people as we could manage, and my sister took the Bingo pens and placed them in a line. Like a Bingo Pen Army. A fluorescent guard of honour. And I duly scattered my mother into a sort of rivulet. (I hope it was a rivulet. I suspect it was a drain.) There was a dog sniffing around and my dad was trying to make friends with it so I panicked. She’d sort of clumped a bit so I had to give her a helping hand with a stick. My sister said something deeply inappropriate and very moving and that, as they say, was that.

One thing's for sure, my mother would not have liked it. But then it wasn't her ritual any more.

So, how am I going to mark her birthday? I am going to take my beloved but demented dad to her favourite cafe for a scone. Then we’re going to walk on the stones. And he’s going to have a fly wee smoke.

In her memory.