Creative Writing

The hospice nurse called just after dawn, voice soft, rehearsed. I could hear birds outside her window. Too bright for the hour. “Your mother passed sometime in the night,” she said. “We think around three a.m.” But that wasn’t the first call I’d missed. I didn’t tell her that. Just said thank you, scribbled “dead” next to Mum’s name on a grocery list which I wasn’t going to finish, and made a cup of tea.

The truth is, Mum started disappearing a long time ago.

The house was cold when I got there. North London flats have this talent for trapping the damp in their old bricks, cracked plaster lets in the bitter breeze it blows in the decades of grief. I’d left my own flat without even grabbing a jersey. Just keys, and the shoes closest to the door. The ones with the cracked sole that let in rain. She was still in the bed when I walked in. They’d left her there, tucked in like a child pretending to sleep. Her eyes were closed, mouth slightly open. She looked smaller than I remembered. The room was too quiet. I sat down in the old chair that creaked whenever I took a breath.

“You can stop pretending now, you know,” I said.

Nothing. Obviously.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Something messier, maybe. A room ransacked by death. But it was all very tidy. All very…her. The cheap vanilla candles still sat by the windowsill, unlit. Her favourite mug of course chipped on the rim rested on the nightstand, half full of water although no lipstick stain this time. That was odd. She always wore lipstick. Even in hospital gowns. Even when the chemo made her hands shake.

When I was fourteen, I told her I wanted to go live with Dad. She didn’t yell. Didn’t cry. Just lit a cigarette and nodded once, like I’d said I was off for daily rugby practice.

“You think he’ll understand you better than me?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. Mostly because I didn’t know. Partly because I knew the answer was yes.

Dad lasted two months before packing me back in an Uber. Didn’t even come to the door. Just sent me a text: “She said your room is still there waiting for you.”

It was. She never moved a thing. The rugby posters, the bookshelf full of half read books. The photo of us at Twickenham stadium, me scowling into the sun, her wearing that stupid wide-brimmed hat she thought made her look like Princess Kate. It didn’t. She looked like herself, even at a rugby game. I think she hated that.

When she got the diagnosis last winter, she didn’t tell me until her hair started falling out in clumps. I found out when I came by unannounced and saw the bathroom bin full of brown curls.

“What’s this?”

“Kai,” she said, and pulled her hoodie up like it was the end of the conversation.

We didn’t hug. Not really our thing.

She got softer after that. Quieter. Said less, but her silences were louder. She let me make the tea now. Let me pick the movies. Watched me instead of the TV.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t more,” she said one night, not looking at me.

“More what?”

“Just…more.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. Still don’t.

Back in the room, the nurse came in quietly.

“We’ll give you a few more minutes,” she said.

“I don’t need them.”

She looked at me like I was heartless. I don’t know. Maybe I am.

Later that afternoon, I found her box. The one she kept under her bed, taped shut with layers of old Sellotape. Inside: letters she never sent. Mostly to me. Some to herself. Old photos of us. One of her in a leather jacket, holding a baby I barely recognised as myself. She looked tired. But fierce. A storm of a woman.

I found the note she’d scribbled near the end:

“For Kai – burn the red diary. Read the blue one. Scatter my ashes in the ocean. I know you hate the beach, but I love the way it makes you scowl.”

I laughed. Actually laughed.

The red diary went into the fireplace that night. The blue one I kept. Still haven’t read it though. Not ready.

I took her ashes to the beach last weekend. Wore the cracked shoes again. It rained, of course. Wind smacked me in the face like it knew who I was. I walked to the end of the pier and opened the cheap plastic urn.

“You win,” I muttered.

It wasn’t dramatic. The ashes just kind of hung in the air for a second before blowing sideways, sticking to my sleeves and the inside of my mouth. Like salt.

I stood there for a long time. Didn’t cry. Didn’t move. Just stood.

I don’t know what comes next. Maybe I’ll read the blue diary. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll buy new shoes.

What I do know is this, she was messy and brilliant and deeply flawed. She was difficult. And sometimes cruel. But she was mine.

And now she’s gone.

Maybe yesterday. Maybe today. I still can’t be sure.

But I remember her laugh. And the way she stirred tea anti-clockwise. And how she always smelled of her candles and cigarettes. And that feels like enough, for now.

I still sit here wondering. How did we end up like this?