LOSING HER
When her mother died, Catriona Innes held onto the clothes that defined her memory the most. Why, then, over the following years, did she wilfully lose every single last item?
Catriona Innes held onto the clothes that belonged to her mother before she died. She explains how letting go of them helped to unlock her grief
It’s there, maybe, under the rubble, amidst the bricks and dust of a nightclub long torn down. My mum’s fake fur coat – snow leopard print, with moth-chewed, hole-ridden pockets, filled with orange Bic pens: the only ones she would write with. It trailed on the floor, gathering dust as she walked, the fur matted like an old dog.
I hated that coat. I hated it so much. Right up until the moment I realised it had gone. She used to mortify me – standing at the school gates, yelling ‘coooeeee’, the coat flung on over a pair of green baggy trousers, covered in moons and stars. She didn’t look like the other mums: with their neatly permed blonde hair, and well put together outfits. I wished, quietly, that she did.
One day, years after I’d left that school behind, the coat hung empty on a hook. I picked it up, flung it on and realised it gave me the edge that 19-year-old me needed to pursue the grungy art students and drummers that I fancied. I realised, far too late, that it wasn’t mortifying. It was cool.
Then I lost it. It was 3am, the coat was bundled in a corner somewhere as I refused to pay cloakroom charges. I’d been drinking 5Op vodka and lemonades all night. My arms were linked with new friends, headed to someone’s flat for an afterparty. I knew I wasn’t wearing it, but I didn’t speak up to tell them to wait for me while I dashed back. I carried on walking into the inky night.
Across town, my mum lay in a hospice bed. Her face bloated with steroids, her once-rosy cheeks now waxy. She wore plain white hospital robes; the only sign of who she once was came in the form of a magenta scarf that we had flung over her bedsheets. That and the bottles of Vinho Verde clustered rebelliously in the sink, that the nurses turned a blind eye to and that we – my dad, sister, grandma and I – served to the queue of visitors that came to see her on a daily basis.
The diagnosis came overnight. One morning, while ironing, she had a stroke. That revealed the tumour, lodged at the back of her skull.
They predicted she’d die within days. By the time she was admitted to the hospice, she’d lived for five months. In that time, she’d morphed into someone I didn’t recognise. Brain tumours do that; an alien form spreading over her nerves, causing irrational thoughts, confusion and anger.
The months following her diagnosis flipped something within me as well: I could look at the woman lying in bed before me and pretend that she wasn’t my mum. I could acknowledge that it was sad situation. But it wasn’t happening to me. So, when she did die, a few weeks after I lost her coat, I felt nothing. It was snowing outside, bringing with it a silence that I felt infuse through me – muffling everything.
When spring came, I was still wrapped up in that fog. My tiny family – now consisting of just my dad, sister, grandma and I – went on a canal boat holiday. Mum loved those holidays and we wanted to remember her how she had been. Smiling and strong, gripping onto the tiller, the sun shining on her face. She always wore a particular pair of sunglasses. They were square and tortoiseshell; one arm always fell off, the screw permanently loose. She’d owned them since the 197Os, they suited her round, freckled face perfectly. I rescued them from her possessions, as I had inherited Mum’s round, freckled face and they complimented me just as well.
On a grimy stretch of canal just outside Birmingham, I prepared to jump onto a bank, a rope wrapped around my arm. The sunglasses rested precariously on my head and I worried that they might come flying off. I placed them, carefully, onto the forest-green roof. But with my leap came a gust of wind, which blew them into the water. For the next two hours, my dad and sister ran a net along the canal bed, bringing up nothing but debris. I crouched on the concrete path, my arms wrapped around my knees, wailing. Confused passersby stopped and asked whether the glasses were expensive, or if they had sentimental value. I answered ‘no’; to both questions – the only reason I was so upset, I insisted, was because the glasses had suited me so much.
After that, I slowly began to shed every single belonging of Mum’s that I had left. There was the scarf that smelled of her: Oscar de la Renta perfume and baby powder, which I watched my flatmate fish out of my wardrobe and tie around her neck one evening. She then pulled out her body spray – Charlie Red – liberally dousing herself and the scarf with it, smothering every last scent of Mum. Then there was the midnight blue lace skirt that I wore as a dress, and left behind at a party, traipsing home in torn tights and a man’s baggy T-shirt.
Each time I lost something of hers, I reacted in the same way I did with those glasses, letting my body take over. For days, I felt physical pain. A deep ache would spread across the back of my head. My stomach would feel empty, apart from when I tried to eat, when it felt like tiny shards of glass were being scattered inside it. I didn’t cry, though. I told myself I would never be so silly as to cry over a lost item of clothing.
Instead, I let the pain consume me, staying in bed for days, curled into a ball. Only surfacing to mechanically pull pints in the pub I worked at, laughing in all the right places when my colleagues cracked jokes.
And yet I never hunted down the items. I could have called that nightclub, asked for that coat at lost property. I could have asked my housemate for that scarf back – did she still have it? I could have phoned that boy, given him his T-shirt back in exchange for the torn, lace skirt. But I didn’t.
Eventually I had just one thing left – an emerald green cashmere jumper. At Christmas two years ago, I drank too much red wine and left it in a pub in east London. I noticed as soon as I left the pub: inside it had been warm, heated by a crackling fire. Outside, without the jumper, the frosty night nipped at my arms. But I didn’t turn back. I walked, one step in front of the other, towards the train station home. The next day, sober and confused, I told myself I’d phone the pub and get it back. But, of course, I didn’t.
Still I didn’t cry. Leaving that jumper on the pub floor had seemed careless, but there was also something mysteriously deliberate about it. After I lost the last item, I kept coming back to this, as the familiar outer body pain enveloped me, dry-eyed but aching. I could no longer deny that something was happening to me. My brain and body were begging me to confront my mother’s death more than a decade ago.
I didn’t cry when she died. I didn’t cry when I went to view her body. And I didn’t cry at her funeral. I tried to. I watched others: their shoulders shaking, their faces reddening and I squeezed my eyes, willing myself to do the same. When I did cry in the years that followed, there was always another reason for my tears – one too many tequila shots, arguments with friends, pressure at work. I never let myself acknowledge that there could be something deeper going on. Whenever I tried to think of her, another distraction would come barging into my mind, pushing her away.
But I couldn’t stop my body from mourning her. Each time I shed an item of clothing, I had been subconsciously confronting that pain, forcing myself to realise she was gone. Memories of her, before her diagnosis didn’t come easily, but her clothing existed outside of my mind. The coat went places with her I never could; she owned the jumper before I was born. Her wardrobe was a physical representation of her that I couldn’t erase, that I could see. And I’d just, almost willingly, lost my final piece of her.
A month later, I found myself at my computer at work, unable to concentrate. I went to Google Maps, digitally retraced my steps and found the pub I’d been in. Using my most casual voice I called and asked if, in their lost property, by any chance, did they find a green jumper? There was a kerfuffle over the line as the bartender went to look. A few seconds later, she returned, saying there was nothing there. I hung up and shut my eyes, suddenly incredibly weary. That night I went home, curled up in bed and began to cry.
The Matchmaker by Catriona Innes is out now
“When I lost something of hers, I didn’t cry. I TOLD MYSELF I wouldn’t be so silly as to CRY OVER a lost item of clothing”