The last act

It began with Billy Beamish on leave from barracks in Autumn 1943, and one last night with his wife, Emma, produced, nine months later a daughter. My Mother.

Yesterday, the final act was her estate closed down all creditors having been paid. One company failed to provide a replacement cheque for about £100.00, and we have been waiting since February for that, for it to never come.

As we come to the end of the year, fourteen months after Mum passed, I gave instructions to my solicitor to close business.

As eleven yesterday the papers came to sign. I posted them back, signed. And by the end of tomorrow the file will be closed and the final payment made to me. There's not much left, but we have managed to pay the mortgage, anything else is a bonus.

Jools asked me this week if I missed Mum. I don't to be honest. As I have said before, the person who I remember as my Mum died over two decades ago. What was left was a shadow, a hint of what she was before.

Over the years I tried to get MUm to change, but it failed. So, I learned to live with it. She was old enough, and sensible enough, to know her mind, and had worked long and hard enough to decide how she would live and take the consequences.

One of those consequences was, in the last three years of her life, the weekly phone calls stopping. Mum thought I was joking, but I wasn't. What point is there of calling if there is no news. She never did anything, or if she had she failed to mention it lest it annoy me, as usually it involved her having an accident of some kind. She failed to mention numerous stays and visits to hospital, after she had fallen and the fire brigade had to be called to help her up. Ot the time she lost control of her buggy in the bank, hit the wall so hard the TV fell of the wall and cut her head open.

She failed to tell me that.

And then there was the smoking.

And the lying about it.

At least at the end she was honest about it, but not even a major heart attack changed her, and promises to me and her surgeon to not start were broken. The coffin nails was bound to get her sooner or later, and two years from that major heart attack, one final one got her.

What little I did was out of respect not for Mum, but for her cleaner, Sheila, who would have to step into the breach, visit her in hospital, go shopping or whatever Mum thought she needed, failing to pay Sheila for the work she should have been doing, and expecting her to run these errands for free.

Since Mum passed, we have seen Sheila right, no amount of money can replace the feeling of being used. And even if Sheila had seen it from other customers of hers over the years, when it is your own Mother, it is embarassing. I think we sw Sheila OK, she still speaks to us, so must be good.

So, memories fade. The pain, the heated words, the herd of elephants in the room. All of it has either faded or has gone.

There is noting else to do now. Just live our life.