“Using warm and loving memories as fabric, I stitched together a comfort blanket”: Anxiety and Grief

I remember cutting the filters off my mum’s cigarettes when I was a child. I had just discovered that people die from these yokes. I cried and snipped them off, thinking I was saving her life because, in my nine-year-old mind, this is where the danger was, the filters. I thought that’s what gave you cancer. Remove the filter, remove the chance of losing my mum. Simple. She wasn’t pleased, and having experimented with rollies in my later years I understood why, but she also understood that I did it out of wanting to keep her safe. The idea of anything bad happening to her upset me no end as a kid. As an adult too.

I was problematic for babysitters because I’d ignore their instructions to go bed when she was out for dinner or something. I couldn’t sleep until I knew she was safe and sound, just in case she was in a car accident. I guess some of this is pretty normal for a child, but the truth is that my anxiety over her wellbeing never really went, even during my teenage years and early 20s. I could mask it better, but that stomach feeling, the one which feels like a flame being held below your intestines, often surfaced.

I haven’t had that feeling in regards to her since February in 2015. I haven’t needed to.

We’re all sitting in a semi-circle around her bed in St Vincent’s Hospital. She was unconscious, and I remember realising that it was taking longer and longer for her to complete one full breath. I counted the seconds between her inhaling and exhaling, sort of like how you can count the seconds between seeing lightning and hearing thunder to gauge the distance of a storm, but it was her who was moving further away. She was dying.

A ‘massive bleed on the brain’ the doctor said. That’s one of the few things I remember of that night, being numb when he walked into a very cramped ‘family room’ and revealed to us that she was ‘gravely ill’. When she died, and it dawned on us what had happened, I brought my little sister outside the hospital, the two of us in floods of tears. We hugged and pinky promised that everything would be alright. We were fully-grown adults, aged 26 and 23, but in that moment we were like two young children lost in a shopping centre, not really knowing what to do but drawing comfort from the fact that we had each other.

I felt drunk on sadness for the next few days, to the point where everything is kind of a blur. I don’t know if I can’t remember because it was four years ago or because my mind wasn’t recording much of what was happening in the first place.

I skipped the first three stages of grief – denial, anger and bargaining – and went straight to the depression phase I think. I’d spend my days sleeping, ringing her voicemail and watching Breaking Bad on Netflix. I had purposely avoided this show in the past because I knew it was about a man who gets lung cancer. The idea of her getting the same disease caused that stomach feeling to surface. It terrified me so much that I wouldn’t watch it in fear of learning something about lung cancer that I didn’t already know. To this day I know its symptoms, the prevelance and a bunch of weird stats. If she ever had a bad chest infection, I’d worry it was cancer immediately and then turn to Google in an effort to dowse my anxiety. Eventually I’d read something that alleviated my worry and everything would be okay, but you can’t use the internet to self sooth without amassing quite a lot of morbid information that you wished you could forget. Even writing this now it’s hard to believe I used to do that, but I did unfortunately.

When she died, I went back to my therapist immediately, a beautiful man named Terence. He helped me through a lot of my anxiety in the past. I rang him within 15 minutes of her death, before informing her friends even, and left a voicemail on his phone. I knew I’d need to see him. Death can spark a very pro-active approach in people. I also got a new panel door delivered to the house and a carpenter in to fit it, a couple of days after the funeral. No idea why. Maybe I was trying to force a sense of normality again. Or maybe I didn’t skip the denial part after all.

The real reason for going back to Terence was because I knew the last thing I had said to her. She was about to leave the house to visit a friend on the Sunday evening. I was working and had to write a match report for a West Ham and Manchester United game, a match report that had to be published within a minute of the final whistle, but a late goal meant I had to rapidly re-write the first four paragraphs. Fucking Daley Blind. I felt a lot of pressure and stress and when mum had called into me to ask a question, I shouted ‘YES!’ at her in a pretty hostile tone. All she had asked is whether she could take a key. She wouldn’t even need one. Two hours later she collapsed. Four hours later she was gone. I never did tell Terence about this I don’t think, even though every week I promised I would. I never told anybody actually.

The most common phrase of comfort that everybody offered at the time was ‘at least she didn’t suffer’. And they’re right. Relatively quick and painless. What a way to go. I wouldn’t change a thing, but the downside of sudden deaths is that they deprive you of the chance to say goodbye, the chance to not shout at her in her final hours. You find yourself obsessing over regrets without going in search of the closure that circumstance robbed you of, because finding anything in the darkness is difficult, but I did find it, closure, eventually.

Using warm and loving memories as fabric, I stitched together a comfort blanket.

Regrets are as inevitable as dusk and sunrise when a loved one passes, irrespective of the circumstance I think, but when the sadness recedes slightly there is much solace to be drawn from little things: We howled laughing over a segment about tattoos on The Late Late on the Friday before she passed. I’d surprise her in work with the new Jo Nesbo book when it came out. I told her how proud of her I was that she quit drinking – she didn’t have a drink problem in the conventional sense, but she was, by her own admission, a problem when she drank. I taught her how to use a laptop and reassured her that it didn’t really matter if she sent accidental Friend Requests on Facebook. When she was going to bed, she’d say ‘Goodnight baby boy, love you’ and I’d tell her the same.

Little things like that at the time, but massive in the end.

A week before she died I also sat her down and thanked her for sending me to Terence, insisting that it changed my life. She loved this. A mission she had started two decades previous had been completed. One of my earliest memories in life was going to a therapy session. I had a number of therapists before Terence, and the fact that one finally worked made her proud.

I still miss her – especially on February 9, the day she passed. I’m sad that she’ll never see me become a father, or a husband, but she did see me become an adult and a man. That’s enough. She died knowing I was going to be okay.

She was cutting the filters off my smokes for years, trying to save me. To have been able to thank her for it provides all the closure and warmth I needed.