RIP Brenda Floyd, My Mum

When my oldest brother woke me on Sunday morning, around half past six, with the news that my Mum had passed away, I think the first thing I felt was relief that the suffering I’d witnessed over the previous week had ended.

We knew it was going to happen. She’d been almost entirely unresponsive and had barely taken in any nourishment for that same period, and it was decided on Saturday that the kindest thing we could do was agree to let her go, so her saline and antibiotic drips were stopped and her painkillers were increased, to make her as comfortable as possible.

I am the youngest of her five children. She often called me her baby, despite the fact – at 6’4” – I’m the tallest (and, currently, broadest) of all my siblings. None of us wanted her to leave us, but that awful fear was outweighed by love and the desire to do the right thing by her.

No matter, though, how much we’d braced ourselves for the inevitable, there was still a sense of icy shock when it happened… like the involuntary gasp made when plunging into cold water.

I got dressed and went downstairs. With life framed in a surreal daze, I spoke with my two brothers who live here, at my Mum’s house in Carlisle, in quiet tones, getting a grasp of the situation.

My sister and another brother were staying at a hotel in the city, having travelled up the previous day to see Mum, and they were already on their way to the hospital.

I was set to get in the car with my other brothers and head there, too, but I really didn’t want to. I asked them if I could stay at home and they totally understood.

It’s not a decision I regret. My Mum used to tell me that, once a person had passed, their body isn’t the person any longer… it’s just a shell… and I preferred to remember her as the vibrant soul she was, rather than an inanimate remnant lying in a hospital bed.

When they all returned, a few hours later, we hugged and talked, reminisced and even laughed at times. We had all been blessed by her magical love, and that was and remains such a great strength in these dark days we’re stumbling through.

Later, after my visiting sister and brother had left, my ex, Shirley, dropped by. We broke up in the middle of last week, but we’re still great friends. She’d journeyed up from London to attend a funeral, in Newcastle, of another of her exes, and she made a detour to Carlisle (on the opposite coast) to drop off my things.

We went for a sandwich and a coffee in the bar of a hotel in the next village, then I took her to one of my childhood playgrounds; the River Eden, which is (at least, when it’s not in raging flood) as tranquil a place as the name suggests. We hugged, held hands and sighed a lot, strolling without urgency along the banks of the river.

Breakups are often traumatic affairs, but Shirley is a blessing and she helped me so much on Sunday, despite dealing with her own sadness.

It was a surreal day, in all… and I did break and sob my heart out later in the evening… but the sense of loss wasn’t close to as violent as I may have feared, in all the years of fearing the coming of that day.

Although I’ve been fluctuating and feeling somewhat numb, I’m coping far better than I imagined I would. There are two reasons for this: the first is that I’ve been able to practice what I preach and invoke the power of present awareness, and the second is down to the fact, in the middle of all this heartache, the love that my Mum blessed my siblings and I with is still mighty and unwavering, despite her physical passing.

The awful truth of losing her presence hasn’t at all resulted in the feeling that we’ve lost her love. It has given us all a great strength of endurance, and I feel sure – as many people have suggested on Twitter and Facebook – that this love will reassure and bolster me in all my days to come.

My Mum was born Brenda Wise in 1939, months before the outbreak of World War II. She was actually bombed out of her home as a child, after a neighbouring house was hit in a German air raid. Birkenhead, just across the River Mersey from Liverpool, was one of the main shipbuilding ports in the UK, so was a regular target of Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

The youngest of an astonishing nine children, she lost her own mother to cancer when she was just seven-years-old and was then brought up by her oldest sister, Betty, and her husband, Bill – the parents of one of Canada’s most celebrated comedians, Roger Abbott, who passed away in 2011. Along with Roger’s older sister, Jacki, the three of them lived like siblings, and my Mum was actually due to emigrate to Canada with them all, in the early 1950s, but decided, at almost literally the last moment, that she wanted to stay with her brothers, sisters and Dad.

It was a decision that eventually gifted me this Universe I’m experiencing. Her life and fortunes would have been so different if she’d got on that boat. The ‘Canadian’ branch of the family are all very well off and my Auntie Betty is still alive and kicking, just a few years from her centenary.

Instead, my Mum remained in post-war Britain, with all its sacrifice and suffering, and got locked into the working-class life of hard graft and having little, living hand-to-mouth, which is something she never really escaped from.

She met my Dad, Peter Floyd, in the early 1960s and ‘naivety’ led to the impending birth of my sister, so a shotgun wedding being the order of the day, they got married not long after. (It was actually their 50^th wedding anniversary in February, just gone, though they separated – never getting round to an actual divorce – around 30 years ago. We chuckled about it, suggesting they get back together, to which my Mum replied: “Sod off!”)

A series of unfortunate malfunctions in contraceptive measures led to the birth of my other three siblings, before the family moved from Birkenhead to Carlisle, after my Dad found a job at the newly-opened Pirelli tyre factory in the city, in 1970… the year my closest brother was born.

I was born in 1974. She was on the pill at the time and though the family was already suffering from financial hardship, it wasn’t an option that I be denied life.

As I grew up, I remember my Mum telling me, on occasion, that she went to a very well-known psychic medium in the city called Mrs Cummings, and she said that I had been born ‘for a reason’. My Mum joked that this reason was to test her, but I know I did, too many times.

We were the poor family on the estate. My Dad drifted in and out of jobs and was unemployed for a long time. We’d just witnessed ‘The Winter of Discontent’ in the UK, and there was another major recession at the turn of the ‘80s. Although I can’t remember it myself, my siblings recall a time where we lived off potatoes and chives that were grown in the back garden of the house I’m writing in, now.

But although we may have been financially challenged, we were never poor in regard to the love we received, and the primary source of this love was my Mum.

My Dad left when I was eight or so and I only saw him on a handful of occasions after that, over the next decade, but my Mum’s strength and support was constant and unwavering.

A single parent, she got a job at a biscuit factory in Carlisle, then, later, a sweet factory, working absurdly long hours just to make ends meet, put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. She would often work seven days a week, waking at 6am each morning and – during the week days – not returning home until 9pm in the evening. It would be a 12:30pm finish on a Saturday, and 4:30pm on a Sunday. Often, she’d work months without a single day off.

It was about then that I started showing symptoms of being a ‘problem child’. In my early teens, I began truanting from school. I would go up to our local shop and get things on credit… essentially stealing from my Mum, because I knew that she’d have to pay the bill… and I’d gorge myself on sweets and cakes, feeling utterly miserable and ashamed of myself. By the age of 14, I was 22 ½ stone (315lb/143kg). I was very tall back then, but still disproportionately fat. I used to feel like a cuckoo’s chick that had been left in a wren’s nest, working the poor mother wren to despair, trying to feed the monster that she’d taken charge of.

As my teens passed and I moved into my 20s, I repeatedly ended up back at home, locked in a repeat-cycle of depression. I drank too much, I half-heartedly attempted suicide on numerous occasions, then made more serious efforts in my late 20s, but somehow managed to stay alive.

As frustrating and heart-breaking and down-right annoying it must have been for her, to see me go through that spiral of self-hatred over and over again, she never gave up on me. Although she would have been completely justified in kicking me out and turning her back on me, she never did.

I was not a good son, but despite my failures, I was a loved son, and it’s that knowing which helps me so much, in these dark days.

In recent years, things became much better. After my awakening, she watched her baby boy grow into something different; she was so relieved to see me living my life outside the shadow of depression, achieving things that may have seemed impossible in the years before…

I had hoped that she’d have been around long enough for me to really take care of her, to build a level of success that would enable me to reward all those years of tireless love and patience with a more comfortable life in her retirement, but, sadly, it didn’t work out that way.

This is where my awakening – and the gift of the ability to practice present awareness – has been such a saving grace, because although I could dredge my memories and come up with a thousand reasons to emotionally damage or even physically destroy myself, in the midst of this grief, I know that I would just be reacting to the egoic mind’s compulsion for suffering.

The past is gone and I cannot change that, so losing myself by wishing I could is futile and counter-productive to what I know my Mum would have wanted, which is for me to be happy.

The future, too, could be a source of the most agonising pain, torturing myself by trying to visualise all the years ahead without her.

So, here I am, in the now… selecting the best memories and cherishing them, rather than feeling compelled to take the worst and crush myself under what would be their inescapable gravity.

Last month, while sitting with my Mum in hospital, my brother sent me a text, passing on this message from her:

“Forgive yourself, as we forgive you. I love everyone in the world. I hope God loves everyone even half as much as I do.”

Fairplay, she was whacked-up on morphine at the time and may have turned into a bit of a hippy in her twilight days, but I’ll always remember these beautiful, poignant words.

I was gifted life through the love of this angel woman, my Mum. Perhaps, as that medium said long ago, I am here for a reason, and though the days, weeks and months ahead may be painful at times, I know that I will continue to thrive and build my new life, without her, so I can explore what use I can be to the world.

I will miss her, but I will not miss her love, because the love is still here, in me.

(P.S. If anyone has the will and ability to contribute to my ‘fighting fund’… I need carpets and somewhere to hang my clothes! Donations would be most welcome through PayPal, at ‘Lesism@btinternet.com’. Anything would be greatly appreciated.)