Twelve years after Mummy’s death, I still reach for her
I hate rollercoasters. Unlike most people, I dont think of them as fun rides you queue for with laughter in your mouth and sugar on your tongue. For me they are terrifying. They are rides that drag your body somewhere it never agreed to go. The climbs of sadness. The sharp turns into rage. The sudden spirals into numbness so clean it almost feels like peace, until you realise it is only emptiness with better lighting. The near-vertical drop that sends your heart into your throat each morning when you wake and, for one split second, forget. Then remember. She is gone.
Rollercoasters end.
Grief does not.
It has been twelve years since Mummy died, and I am still on the ride. Most days it slows to something almost manageable, the carriage clicking forward in that neutral space where you can pretend you are steady. Then a day like today comes. A year like this one. A season that asks more of me than I know how to give. And suddenly I feel it again; that long climb toward the peak, the dread gathering in my chest, my body bracing for the drop before the drop has even come.
You never stop needing your mummy. Especially not one who loved as fiercely as mine did.
Mummy poured herself into me. All of her children, but brother and sister will tell you I am her child in all the ways that matter and some of the ways that wound. My temper lives close to my passion, just like hers did. I used to hold a cigarette with my index finger hyperextended. Even now, years after quitting, that same finger still bends back when I hold my tennis racket. The body remembers what the mind tries to misplace. I wear my nails long, bright, loud sometimes—patterns and colours with no interest in modesty and invested in rebellion. I struggle to forgive like she did. I can ruin my own joy with the same gifted hands I use to build joy for other people, because some part of me still believes they deserve softness more than I do. I know how to damage a good thing and still mourn it as if I had no hand in the breaking.
So many of the things I carry, repeat, and am trying to repair were hers before they were mine.
Because I am my mother’s child.
There are days I am angry with her—angry for words spoken long before the tumours spread through her brain, before illness could be blamed for cruelty that already had roots. There are days I miss her so badly I want to crawl into bed beside her and let her gather me up like I am still small enough to fit cleanly inside her care. I want to sit on the floor in her bathroom and watch her profile as she puts on lipstick before going to work. The smell of 4711 on her chest before bed. The certainty in her voice. I want her to kiss the ache in my forehead and tell my inner child what she used to tell the rest of me when life split open:
Everything is going to be okay.
Because that is what mummies do, even when they do it imperfectly. They are safety because they keep reaching for you, even with shaking hands.
No matter how old I got, Mummy never stopped trying to make me happy. And no matter how unevenly she went about it, she was always trying to fix something.
I remember sitting in the living room in Cayman, our second home, trying to finish my PhD. I had been working for hours, building citations line by line, trying to force order onto an argument that already felt bigger than me. Then my laptop crashed. Everything disappeared. A whole month of citations gone in one blink. Before ChatGpt could rescue the time and energy had lost, I climbed into Mummy’s bed and cried for an hour, then dragged myself back to the chair outside her room to begin again.
There was nothing she could do. She could not restore the missing work. She could not return the time. She could not hand me a new month and tell me to use it better.
But she did something we all thought her body could no longer do. She still found something to give.
She walked.
I saw her grip both sides of the doorframe, her long nails—painted some bright coral peachy colour, bordering on what one might call tacky, pressing into the wood of the doors so she could steady herself . Then she reached for the walls. One hand. Then the other. A slow choreography of effort. The distance from the bedroom to the living room was short, but that day it was a country. She crossed it anyway. One step. Then another.
Just to make me smile. Just to give me a reason to begin again. Just to say, without saying it, that all was not lost because she was still here.
That was my mummy.
I have never known what to do with a love like that except keep carrying it.
I was wired to love her. I used to say that if she died, I would jump into the grave beside her. Dramatic, yes. But also true in the way only daughters can be true about mothers who made themselves the centre of gravity in a child’s world. She was my person. My wayward best friend. My first place of return. A woman with a furious temper and a love just as fierce.
Six months after I gave her my kidney, we sat in the doctor’s office waiting. That kind of waiting feels like being strapped into the seat at the top of the ride. Everything still. Everything suspended. The air thin with dread. Her hands folded in her lap. She had not cried, but worry was already leaking out of her eyes. Her body already knew that it was rejecting my kidney.
I turned to her and said, “Don’t worry, Mummy. I’ll give you my other one.”
I meant it.
The doctors made sure I did not have to. Science, luck, privilege, timing—whatever name you give to what God put in place to provide the mercy that intervened. But on a day like today, when grief rises in my chest like that awful pause before the drop, when I want to tell her things only she would know how to hold, when I want to hand her my tears and let her name them before they drown me, when I need to hear her say, It will be okay, Baba. We will fix it”
All I want is to give her the other kidney so she can be here.
To sit beside me while I mourn her. To hold me through the ache of missing her. To make impossible things briefly feel survivable again.
If it meant, for one hour, I would not have to carry her absence alone.
Maybe that is selfish.
But it is true.
