Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles Read Free Page B

usual that day, because every morning my first thought when I woke up was: I have to go to school, but perhaps it’s the day when the phone will ring and Mother will tell me she’s ready and I can go back.
    The call came two weeks later. Returning home was very strange. I went back to a mother who had lost her husband, her life partner, and along with him all their hopes and dreams. Her life changed completely; she dressed only in black and lilac and took little interest in her shop. It wasn’t just his life which had been cut short, but hers as well. I didn’t know how to help her and she didn’t know how to comfort me, perhaps because we had not shared the ordeal of my father’s last days together.
    There was one question, however, that I felt compelled to ask.
    ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘is Dad going to come home?’
    My mother looked at me in amazement.
    ‘What a strange question. What do you mean?’
    ‘I want to know if Dad’s coming home, because his hat and coat are still on the stand in the hall.’
    ‘Don’t be silly, dear, that’s to let people think there’s a man in the house. You know he’s gone to heaven.’
    That might have been part of the truth, but I was sure she felt, too, that as long as his hat and coat were still there, then so was he. For a while I was genuinely uncertain about whether my father had really died; after all, I had neither attended his funeral nor said goodbye.
    Like most children, grief was a mystery to me. But I had learned three important lessons about death: when parents died you never talked about them any more; you kept their hat and coat in the hall, and you sang their favourite hymn – ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’ – every Sunday at church.
    Many, many things confused me. As the day of my parents’ wedding anniversary approached, I said to one of my sisters, ‘Do I have to go and buy a card for Mum now that Dad’s died?’
    ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped. ‘Of course you don’t, there’s nobody to celebrate it with.’
    ‘There’s me,’ I said.
    ‘She doesn’t want to celebrate it with you!’
    Over the next few months, the foundations continued to crumble. The sudden death of both Dr O’Gorman and my grandfather dealt two powerful blows to the body of our family.
    Those next few teenage years remind me of the English weather on an unpredictable early-summer day: a weak sun shines fitfully, but only occasionally pierces the gloom of a dark sky, heavy with threatening clouds. Two generations of my family died during this time, including my mother and grandmother. Both of these losses shook me to the core.
    I had made a child’s assumption that because my parents had been a permanent feature of my early years, they would remain as reliable, consistent figures in the future. I had never had reason to see my parents as being on loan to me for a limited but unspecified period. The foundations which I had assumed to be built of solid rock crumbled beneath me like moist sand.
    Shortly after my mother’s funeral, one of her longstanding customers innocently asked me in the street, ‘How’s your mother, Margaret?’
    ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ I replied, hurrying on my way to avoid both embarrassment to her and the possibility that she might feel sorry for me.
    I went with my sisters to help clear my family home before it was sold.
    ‘Mum said that whatever you want here is yours,’ they said. ‘One day, you will have a place of your own – you’ve got to be practical. Anything can be stored.’
    ‘I don’t want anything,’ I said.
    ‘Perhaps you don’t today, but later on you will.’
    We were standing in the bedroom.
    ‘Well, I’d like Mother’s scarf,’ I said, spotting it draped over the back of a chair. ‘But that’s all I can cope with now.’
    Although I had attended my mother’s funeral, it was simply too much for me to deal with my grandmother’s death. I didn’t appreciate this until I was in one of the funeral cars on