Closer than ever
I’d lost Mum as a child but she’s found ways to let me know she still cares. By Gabriela Thurston, 44
Iwas nine years old and walking into town with my niece, Henrieta, also nine, when she said something really weird.
‘Your mum’s got cancer. I heard Mum talking about it.’
‘No she hasn’t!’ I shot back crossly. ‘I’d know if she had that!’
Truth was I didn’t really know what ‘cancer’ was, but it didn’t sound good and I definitely didn’t want Mum to have it.
Sadly it turned out Henrieta had been telling the truth. Mum had breast cancer.
After treatment Mum initially went into remission, but following an odd incident where she caught her highheeled shoe in her coat and tumbled out of a bus, the cancer came back, and she was never well again after that.
Mum had always been so glamorous: tall and slim, with her dyed blonde hair immaculately styled and her nails manicured, a cloud of scent following in her wake.
I’d always hoped I’d be just like her when I grew up.
Now I watched as she got sicker and sicker.
Things at home got increasingly grim and when I was 10 I moved in with my half-sister Iveta, who was 15 years older than me.
Then one night when I was 11, in the early hours of the morning, I had a vivid dream that Mum had died in hospital.
The following morning, over breakfast, the hospital rang to break the news that Mum really had passed.
I was devastated. Mum and I never had a single conversation about her being ill or the fact she might not make it.
She had never been a cuddly mum with me. Her relationship with my dad had been difficult and she’d already had three teenagers from her first marriage to look after when she’d fallen pregnant with me, aged 40. She’d worked long shifts as a nurse too.
Perhaps because of all that, she’d always been quite strict with me, but she’d made time to read me bedtime stories whenever she could and always made sure I did my homework.
Now I hadn’t even got to say goodbye to her.
It was two days after her funeral, while staying with my other half-sister Melania, Henrieta’s mum, that I was woken by a tug on my duvet. At first I assumed it was my younger niece, Adriana, but when I opened my eyes, Mum was standing in front of me in a white dress.
‘Follow me,’ she smiled. I climbed out of bed, but the creaking floorboard woke Henrieta, whose room I was in.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked. ‘With Mummy,’ I replied. I couldn’t see Mum in the room any more, but when I looked out of the window into the surrounding woods there she was, standing in the light of a streetlamp, waving as she vanished into the dark.
The next day I was really upset, but when I told Melania she said Mum had visited her too. It was as though she’d come to tell us she was OK and say a proper goodbye.
Nan, Mum’s mum, was very religious and told us to light a candle on Mum’s grave and say a proper farewell, which we did.
Afterwards, life went on.
Too young to understand the massive responsibility that
Iveta had taken on with me, I became a rebellious and angry teenager before, eventually, moving from my home in Slovakia to England to work as an au pair.
I was 28 when a few friends and I decided to get a medium over to my house to give us all readings.
It was only meant to be a bit of fun, but the medium soon turned to me and said: ‘I have your mum here.’
I listened as she explained that she could see Mum holding two babies, one dark and one fair.
I assumed it meant that
I was going to have two children, but all that felt a very long way off and I soon forgot all about it.
Then when I was 32, my then-partner Keith and I went through a miscarriage.
That relationship eventually broke down and I met someone new, John.
We, too, experienced a miscarriage when I was 36.
Afterwards I thought about the medium seeing Mum holding two babies, one fair and one dark. Keith had been blonde while John is dark. Had Mum been reassuring me that she’d look after the two babies I’d go on to miscarry?
It was a comforting thought, but as time passed and John and I kept trying without success, I worried I’d never carry a baby to full term.
I was 40 when John and I tried IVF in Slovakia, where it was cheaper. My family helped to pay for it and, given my age, I knew we only had one shot.
Thankfully the treatment worked and our daughter, Freya, was born in July 2018.
But in a strange coincidence my dad died on the exact same day.
We hadn’t got on and the shared date troubled me. I’d read that if a family member dies on the same day another is born it means they are a reincarnation of that person!
Thankfully Mum was there for reassurance again when she appeared to me in a dream.
‘Freya isn’t the reincarnation of your dad,’ she said. ‘But she is here to do something big!’
Now I’m a mum myself I realise how hard it must have been for Mum to leave me behind when I was so young – and how hard her life was.
I still feel her around now and again. I’ll catch a whiff of the body spray she used to wear or wake to realise that I’ve dreamt of her.
She seems to come at times of trouble, or when I need a little pick-me-up. In some ways I feel closer to her now than I did when she was alive.
Whenever we go to visit my family back home in Slovakia we go to Mum’s grave. Freya knows Nan is in her grave and has gone to sleep. Sometimes Freya, now two, talks to someone who isn’t there who she says is ‘a friend’. I’ve often wondered if it’s Mum watching over her, just as she clearly watches over me.
Mum was holding two babies