One of my mother's favourite comedy sketches was Phone Call from Long Island. In this radio piece, a distraught daughter calls her mother to tell her the woes that have befallen her that day – the kids are sick, they're snowed in, the car won't start, she's got guests coming in an hour and there's no food in the house. In a strong New York accent, the mother responds comfortingly, "Don't worry darling, Mama is here". She promises to trek across the city on various forms of public transport and reassures the daughter that she will do everything she can to solve all of her problems in no time.
At the end of the phone call, they discover that the daughter had dialled the wrong number and has been speaking to someone else’s mother all along. After a comic pause, the daughter asks plaintively, “Does that mean you’re not coming?!”
Spring 2016
In March 2016, my mother received a similar phone call from my sister in London. Her husband had been rushed to hospital with acute pancreatitis and was gravely ill in the critical care unit. She had a three-year-old and a four-month old baby at home and she needed her mother’s help. Without hesitation, Mum hopped on a plane to London and set about being mother, grandmother, babysitter and housekeeper, freeing up my sister to visit her husband in hospital daily.
After a difficult day spent watching her husband fight this life-threatening and painful illness, my sister remembers how much she valued coming home to a cooked dinner, a glass of wine and the calm, comforting reassurance that only a mother can provide.
Having packed for a week, my mother stayed with my sister consistently for three months, until her husband was finally discharged from hospital to continue his rehabilitation at home. Mum always said that she “would climb Mount Everest for us”. Little did we realise just what kind of a mountain she had been facing.
Immediately on her return from London, my mum was diagnosed with a cancerous tumour in her colon, a recurrence of the cancer she had fought off three years previously. This tumour had been growing for some months. Mum had been aware of it, but knew that if she told anybody, she would immediately be sent to hospital and she refused to leave my sister’s side while she needed her. Mum probably knew that her days were numbered and, just like a lioness will fight to the death to protect her cubs from a predator, my mother made a conscious and deliberate decision that her daughter came first.
Summer 2016
Around the time of my mother’s diagnosis, I discovered I was pregnant. I remember my mother squealing with delight from her hospital bed as I told her the news of my impending motherhood. As a woman who lived permanently in the future, she had baby names and a nursery colour scheme picked out before I left the room.
After nine and a half weeks I miscarried my first pregnancy. I still have nightmares about lying on the bed in Holles Street being told that the baby I thought I had growing inside me was merely a clump of cells without a heartbeat. The family I thought I was going to have slowly imploded around me and I was left feeling empty, useless and bereft of joy.
The statistic stating that up to 25 per cent of pregnancies miscarry is no consolation when 100 per cent of your pregnancy has been lost.
The first person I wanted to see, the only person I felt would understand my loss of motherhood, was my mother. We drove straight from Holles Street to St Vincent’s Hospital where it broke my heart to tell her that there would be no baby.
In June, Mum was discharged from hospital following five hours of surgery to remove the cancerous tumour. We went away together to heal ourselves. My mother’s favourite place in the world was a mobile home in Co Wexford. I nursed her surgical wounds and she comforted me as I flushed my motherhood down the toilet.
At the end of the summer I think I made her the happiest mother in the world as I told her that I was, again, expecting a baby.
Autumn/winter 2016
I admired my mother’s stoicism as she embarked on a course of chemotherapy. I admired her bravery as she was knocked back with a diagnosis of inoperable oesophageal cancer. I admired her tenacity as she progressed through various invasive treatments and procedures which promised to keep her alive until my baby was born. In spite of her heroic efforts, as my baby bump got bigger, my mother got sicker.
Anyone who has had a miscarriage knows how cautious you are in the early days, hardly allowing yourself to believe, never mind get excited about, the growing life within you. After my 20 week scan, when I saw my healthy baby squirming around on the ultrasound screen, the first person I wanted to tell was my mother. As we sat together in St Vincent’s Hospital, doting over the blurry black-and-white photos of the newest member of our family, a brusque doctor came in to tell her in a matter-of-fact manner that she wouldn’t be able to take anything by mouth for the foreseeable future.
Finally overwhelmed by the realisation that Mum might not be around to meet my baby, I left work the following morning crying uncontrollably. When I visited her that afternoon, I noticed Mum had put on a full face of make up and styled her hair in an effort to look as healthy as possible and reassure me that there was no need for me to be worried about her. My Mum always put her daughters first.
Spring 2017
On a stormy night in February, I held my Mum’s hand as she slipped away from this life, exactly two months before I am due to give birth to my first child. Despite her valiant efforts, she was unable to surmount that final mountain and now I am left to climb my own mountain of motherhood without her.
Losing your mother feels like an amputation or organ failure: a part of you dies, irretrievably. Of course, I carry her with me every day, her bravery, her humour, her tenacity and her love. People try to comfort me by telling me that becoming a mother will somehow distract me from my grief. However, at the moment, I have to face the thought that she won’t be with me as I graduate to motherhood, that she won’t have the chance to share in the joy of something that she was so looking forward to. When the baby is screaming, the house is a mess and I’m exhausted and I make that “phone call from Long Island” in need of the help and comfort that only a mother can give, it really will mean that she’s not coming.
