With memories: How writer clearing lost parents’ home
Empties and uncovers the secrets of the house where she grew up
but, as she was mentally ill for most of my childhood, there was other stuff tangled up in there.
“I wanted to look at this numbness. What was this space where the grief should be? My relationships with my parents were different. They were two different people. So I did grieve, just in a different way.
“After mum died, it was more of a slow unfolding of quite complex memories and feelings.”
Wynne suffered a “nervous breakdown” in her late 40s, not long after Samantha had started school. And the mum she grew up with wasn’t the same mum older brothers Mark and Paul knew.
“One of my brothers is nearly 10 years older than me, the other five. They knew mum before she got ill – but that’s where my memories begin,” she said. “I was a late-born baby. Mum was 42 when she had me, which, in the 1970s, was pretty late.
“I was the apple of her eye, her only daughter. I was stuck to her like glue, but that intimacy disappeared when she got ill. After that she had a lot of anxiety.
“Nobody ever sat me down and explained what was going on with mum. It wasn’t until her 80s when I saw a diagnosis written down by chance that I realised it was a nervous breakdown. All my life, I just had to figure out how to navigate around how it affected me.”
With full-time jobs and lives of their own, Samantha, 52, and her siblings were in no great rush to clear the house, but going every now and again helped Samantha find time to be alone with her thoughts.
“They were together for 68 years... how much of that do I have any insight of the relationship and what went on between them?” she said.
“The process of clearing the house was a chance to mull that over, an opportunity to reinhabit different areas and just let them open up and see what I could learn from them.”
T h r ow i n g and giving away her parents’ belongings brought a rollercoaster of emotions, but helped Samantha realise she lost her mum a long time before she died.
“Grieving in that sense had already been done,” said Samantha. “People talk about the ambiguous loss when someone goes missing, or has Alzheimer’s.
“In a way, I think what I was experiencing for some time was this feeling of ambiguous loss that I had lost my mother but she was still here. It explained why I wasn’t racked with grief when she died.
“It was a slower loss that took place over decades. Because of her illness, she was absent in another kind of way.”
Samantha, who moved to Orkney four years ago, added: “There’s still a lot about mum’s illness I don’t understand. And I wanted to write into the reality of that.
“I think it has taught me that mental illness affects the whole family. It has ramifications.”
As a visual artist, Samantha, who teaches at University of Highlands and Islands as well as online, has had a fascination with space in her work for a long time.
After clearing the house and putting it up for sale in 2014, Samantha realised her focus had actually been about her parents all along.
“This sense of distance between us as a family and of mum because of her illness and silences of a period of life unsaid and my feelings… now it all makes sense,” said the former Edinburgh College of Art teacher and student.
“It had been with me all my life, expressed through my visual arts for many years, which focused on space and emptiness.
“The creative work I had been doing for such a long time had been about these feelings and experiences and trying to express them in a less direct way.
“It took about eight years to get it all down on paper, but writing the memoir has taught me so much.
“The Clearing was certainly an experience, not just in a physical sense but emotionally and mentally as well.
“But we certainly breathed a sigh of relief when the house sold!”
The Clearing, published by Little Brown, is out on March 5