FOR THE LOVE OF MUM
When Maryon heard her mother was terminally ill, she dropped everything to be with her during her last months. What followed was the most profoundly fulfilling — and, yes, joyful — time of her life...
FOUR months before my mother died, I decided to put my own life on hold so I could devote myself to her wants and needs throughout her final days. I remember sitting in my office, as she got sicker and my own to do list grew ever longer, finding it impossible to concentrate on my work. I was drowning in deadlines and projects, but no matter what I was doing my every thought returned to the fact she would soon be gone.
The phrase ‘I’ve got so much to do’ ran on a loop inside my head. And so I asked myself: ‘What is the most important thing here?’ The answer was, of course, my dying mum.
It struck me that I owed it to her to press pause on everything else. The book I was in the middle of writing and my other professional commitments simply couldn’t compete with my longing to help the woman who raised me get the most from whatever time she had left on this Earth.
It is a decision I will be eternally grateful I took, because I look back on the time we shared as her life drew to an end as being the most precious gift to us both.
Now, as the first anniversary of Mum’s death approaches, I find the grief of my loss is wrapped up in a deep sense of privilege, all because I had the honour of holding my mum’s hand through every step of her final months.
Mum (Rosa to everyone else) was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the end of 2013. Chemotherapy and radical surgical treatments sent her into remission for a year.
But at the start of 2015, tests showed that the cancer was growing again.
Her doctors hit back with ever more aggressive chemical treatments, but by March 2016 it became clear that the chemotherapy was killing her as much as the cancer itself.
In a great act of kindness, the medical team treating her at London’s Royal Marsden explained she had an alternative; she could accept that she was dying, stop the chemotherapy and have less time but enjoy a far better quality end to her life.
It was a conversation I’m so grateful they started, because it put Mum back in the driving seat, giving her permission to stop the treatment that was making her feel worse than anything else.
HER experience echoes the sentiments of Professor Marcel Levi, chief executive of University College London Hospitals, who said last week that he believes the dying are far better spending quality time with their families in their final days than enduring gruelling treatments that won’t ever save them.
As we left the hospital, Mum spoke not of her own sorrow or fears, but instead how she might give something back to the medical team that had taken such great care of her. She said she wanted to raise funds to help them carry out more research into the disease that had struck her down.
‘I can’t swim any more, and I’m not up to a sponsored walk,’ she told me in the car on the way home. ‘But I could always jump out of a plane.’
And so, having learnt that my 84-year-old mum had just months left to live, I found myself researching how I might get her booked onto a sponsored skydive.
Her attitude that day was humbling; the way she reacted in such a positive, life-affirming way to the worst kind of news set the tone of the time ahead. Somehow, she made it easy for me to ask: ‘What else do you want to do before you die, Mum?’
From there on we approached life as though the dress rehearsals were over — everything had to count. That didn’t mean she had to jump out of a plane every other day, but simply that we would fill her days with the things that gave her great pleasure.
She did her skydive, raising thousands of pounds for the Royal Marsden. And I was thrilled to be able to help her fulfill a life-long dream of becoming a Pearly Queen for a day. She had admired the pearlies all her life — she and my grandparents would sing all the old East End songs when I was a kid. To see her dressed up with other Pearly Kings and Queens at an event in the city last year, singing The Lambeth Walk, is a moment that will stay etched on my memory for ever.
But just as special were the everyday moments we shared. She chose to spend whole days trawling her beloved charity shops for bargains, even cracking jokes, saying that before long we’d be taking them back because she wouldn’t need them any more. Back home, she would twirl around in front of my younger sister, Sue, and I in her new clothes, demanding we guess what she paid for them.
My sister lives in Australia, but she too had felt a desperate need to spend the end of Mum’s life at her side, and so quit her job as a contracts and procurements specialist and returned home to care for her with me.
That was another blessing: to be able to lean on and be there for someone who loved her just as much as I did, sharing the experiences, good and bad.
Mum was also a great cook, and carried in her head many traditional Eastern European recipes — it’s from there our family
originates — that had been passed down through the generations.
I’d already learnt to cook many of these dishes myself over the years. But now my sister was home she wanted to teach her and my niece, Chessca, the recipes she felt were an important part of our heritage.
And so whole days were spent in her kitchen, turning each lesson into an event, MasterChef style, with Mum in charge. Competing against each other for her approval, we called out ‘yes chef’ to make the pecking order perfectly clear.
Days like those were filled with laughter, while on others it was intrigue as we pored over old photographs as she told us stories about relatives going back through time.
She took us on journeys into her past, sharing the stories of her life and those of other family members, some of whom had died before we’d even been born.
Meanwhile, my sister and I talked about our own childhood memories, telling Mum over and over again how important she was to us, and how grateful we were to have her in our lives.
Conversations became about so much more than imparting information — they were heartfelt experiences and the most wonderful way to say goodbye. Nothing important was left unsaid. My dad died very suddenly, following an accident, in 1990, and there was no opportunity to do any of this with him.
Then my daughter, Hester, was taken from me in the most traumatic way in 2009, when she was just 21, after she had a fatal reaction to being given a legal high.
Being able to say such a long goodbye to Mum offered great solace, especially having had my daughter and dad snatched away so abruptly.
There were, of course, bad days when Mum felt so ill she couldn’t make it up off the sofa. And there were moments when I felt overwhelmed with sadness about what she was enduring and how, all too soon, she would be gone.
BUT there was still comfort to be had from simply cuddling up together in quiet contemplation. ‘There’ll be days when you may feel unhappy and anxious,’ I had told her soon after the doctors said the end was coming. I urged her to confide in me without ever worrying about or wanting to protect me from how I might feel.
I wanted to be there for her on a spiritual level as much as everything else. For the vast majority of the time Mum remained positive and thankful for the long life she had enjoyed.
But I’m thankful she did feel able to confide in me on the days when she felt sad or even afraid.
We might then talk about what we thought would come after death — where her spirit might go once her body finally failed her completely. She would say that her only real regret was that she wouldn’t be around to watch her grandchildren and recently-born great-granddaughter grow up; that more children would be born into the family after she had gone that she would never get to meet.
It was hard, of course it was, to hear this sadness voiced. But to know she could unburden herself of it with me again felt like a privilege and an amazing opportunity to pay her back for the lifetime of love she had given me.
As a child you take so much from your mother — you let her do everything for you without ever considering the great debt you run up.
Then, there comes a point when she becomes elderly and needs you to care for her, putting you in a more parental role.
It’s a natural pattern to life. But what I hadn’t expected was that when I knew my mum was dying I would start to see us simply as two beings who loved each other so very much.
Meanwhile, throughout all this time, I also arranged my wedding to my second husband, Ben, a Jewish man who Mum absolutely adored.
As a Jewish woman whose two daughters had married non-Jewish men, she was overjoyed at the idea of finally joining me under our traditional wedding canopy, and determined to live long enough for that to happen. Despite being desperately ill as we approached the big day last June, she rallied enough to be pushed down the aisle in her wheelchair by my sister, holding my hand as I walked down it beside her to be married.
In the run up to the wedding the joy of marrying the man I loved alongside the pain of knowing Mum would soon be gone had become incredibly difficult emotions to bear.
But on the day itself I felt only joy; there wasn’t a dry eye in the synagogue as everyone saw the pride on her face as we passed by.
Mum died in a hospice a month later. A few days before we took her there I asked her whether she would like me to gather her girls around her.
That way, instead of us distributing her treasures after she’d gone, she could be a part of the experience.
And so we laid out all her jewellery and most precious belongings on a table, choosing, as her nearest and dearest, what we’d like to keep for ourselves, explaining to Mum what every item meant to us. By the time she went into the hospice there was nothing we hadn’t talked about; nothing had been left undone.
The end was unimaginably hard. All my sister and I could do was stroke her face, rub her shoulders and talk to her through her final hours. It was distressing for us all.
But even so, I still look back on that whole period as being the most precious time of my life, and I know my sister does, too.
We will never regret having made a very conscious decision to be with our mum as her life came to an end — we did it for her, but also for ourselves.
It gave us an amazing opportunity to celebrate our love for Mum and revel in it while she was still here with us. We also got to show our gratitude for everything she ever did for us, and to tell her, before it was too late, how very proud we will always be that we were her daughters.