Yesterday my mum died.

 Yesterday my mum died. 

The death of a loved one can never be properly explained or described since no words ever seem to be adequate and you find yourself struggling to hold everything together. The grief, sadness, sometimes guilt and self-reproach come surging in like a tidal wave and threaten to engulf you with its intensity, ferocity, its power and its heartbreaking inevitability. 

Yesterday my lovely mum passed away at the age of 84 and of course it was the saddest and most painful day in my life. The woman who gave birth to you 58 years ago is no longer around to share the good times, the bad times, the trials and tribulations, the setbacks and triumphs. All seems lost and utterly forlorn. There are no consolations at the moment death happens and any of those compensatory replacements for the raw emotions that may take you an age to find. You are here with your lovely and wonderfully supportive family and those who care passionately for your welfare. But this is not the time for if only and what if. 

The hard, cold realities send a shiver down your spine. Your mother has died but she died peacefully and in a sense it was a blissful release from the almost unbearable suffering she was experiencing both mentally and physically. There is a part of you that confidently believes that death is some far-off country that you'd rather not explore but then recognise as the ultimate finality whether we like it or not.  Of course death will happen to all of us one day but with every passing day we try to push it to the back of our minds while cherishing every single moment and second of our own lives. 

For me personally this was the end of a traumatic journey for my family where the death of my mum felt entirely expected and not completely out of the blue. This was not a shock and we knew that as soon as she became seriously unwell, my family and I had resigned ourselves to our fate. When she passed away yesterday morning you felt as fragile as a sunflower, bending and swaying in the gentle breeze, bereft, devastated, broken inside, helplessly crestfallen, searching for answers, feeling understandably vulnerable, heartbroken because that's the way it should and does feel. But above all you are numb, dumbfounded and shell shocked, not exactly traumatised as such but wishing you'd done more as the first son of your mother. 

When my equally as wonderful dad died 16 years ago the grieving process took many years to register with me. Sadly, my dad and I had absolutely nothing in common and that was an overwhelming tragedy. His mental health issues were frequently discussed and analysed and last month I found some semblance of closure. I took myself into a private room and cried like a baby.

 I began to recall the happy days, the memories of sun-filled holidays to Spain when adolescence was just a year or two away. I remember the days when he would spend the best part of the morning either washing his beloved car or sitting in the family garden listening to the dulcet and powerful tones of the legendary Frank Sinatra. I could still see my dad relaxing in his deckchair, bronzed and tanned in both face and body, sunglasses perched languorously on his forehead, revelling in the togetherness of family life. 

But when my dad passed away in 2005, a small part of me had lost something indefinable. As his son there was a sense that although my dad had died, the tears were difficult to discover. Of course as a kid I can still see myself  longing for him to return from work as a menswear salesman in a shop that is now a pizza parlour. I would stand outside on the pavement patiently waiting for him, excited almost because he was my dad and I loved him deeply. But the emotional attachment was horribly absent. 

Yesterday my mum also passed, instinctive reactions and thoughts raging through your head, battling for attention and recognition. At the moment though it is raw, it hurts like hell in your subconscious and conscious because your feelings are caught up in a private warzone, trying desperately to put everything into some kind of perspective. But you don't quite know how to deal with that minefield of mixed- up feelings as the result of a death of a parent. You cling onto the halcyon days, the day trips to Southend with your grandparents and mum, the groaning bags of egg and cucumber sandwiches, Rossi's cafe, trousers rolled up, knotted handkerchief on head and a packet of Ice Gem sweet treats with our tea.  

You trace your thoughts to those of childhood recollections. You think once again of your mum sunbathing and sun-worshipping for seemingly every waking hour. You remember the one Wimbledon tennis tournament when your mum enthusiastically adjusted her small TV in the garden and then watched the likes of Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors dominating world tennis ad infinitum. You flip through the family archive memory treasuring the long walks your parents took you on at Valentines Park, Ilford, Essex, a park allegedly immortalised in a Small Faces song called 'Itchycoo Park'. 

You can still see your mum spreading out a whole pile of postcards on our Spanish odyssey like a pack of cards, lovingly and diligently scribbling thoughts from an exotic isle. You can vaguely remember the ice cream van pulling into your road and your mum racing towards the vehicle as if her life depended on it. Along with the rest of my wonderful neighbours, parents of your children would obligingly pay for that delightful 99 vanilla ice cream with flake that always seemed to hit the right spot.

But for all the recent complications and petty feuds that scarred my recent relationship with my mum, you find yourself believing that one day that any buried and totally unnecessary animosities will be completely forgotten. You have a misty recollection of your mum pushing you on the park swings that seemed to go higher and higher and then the roundabouts where you were dizzyingly flung around until you'd run out of childhood elation and innocence. But of course with hindsight that never happened because then there were the slides and here was another opportunity to let off youthful steam and energy. 

My mum's story is the most harrowing and horrific of them all. She came to England after the war, the fiery flames of Holocaust hell still burning but now slowly ebbing away with the passage of time. She was educated in England but she was born in Warsaw, Poland when the Nazi stormtroopers threatened to deny her a future before it had had time to unveil itself. She worked briefly as a secretary before I arrived on the scene and what followed was an unwavering devotion to family life in all of its wondrous domesticity. You felt honoured and privileged to be the centre of your parents life because that was my mum's foremost priority. She cared, nurtured, protected, giving unconditional love and yet always convinced she could go that extra mile.

Then those confidential chats before bedtime in our kitchen drift through your mind pleasantly. And yet there had been a complete breakdown in communication because my mum couldn't understand me and there was a sense that an unfortunate barrier had come between us. Here was her son in some terrifying world, a barren wilderness where employment and career - or any kind of a job- became an impossible dream. We used to enjoy those late-night cups of char with a biscuit or two because it was only then that I could open up fully and express my innermost desperation and ever-present anxieties. 

Mum did become very understanding and sympathetic because she could see what I was going through at the time. In a way though it was all very bewildering for her because nothing had prepared herself  for a son who had lost his way in life. So we talked and talked, reflected and reflected some more. At the time Autism in all its varying manifestations hadn't become the topical issue of the day. And yet my mum never stopped thinking of me, considering everything in my best interests and for that reason I'll always love her. Mum, my family and I will always love you. Love you deeply mum. Always forever.