“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”
It’s not that I’ve been thinking about my mother more in the middle of a pandemic, it’s just that there are far more small absurdities that I wish I could share with her. Here’s a short (and non-exhaustive) list of things I’ve wanted to share with, or ask, my mother this week:
The YouTube yoga person I’ve been following mentioning “chakras” and “the third eye” in every video. My gratefulness for her free and incredibly instructive videos does not extend to not making fun of that particular exoticising tic.
Whether Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher was better or worse than her abandoning her child in Kramer vs. Kramer, a sin my mother never forgave Meryl for (even though we watched Devil Wears Prada in cinemas twice).
Every single WhatsApp-certified cure for COVID-19 that I’ve seen so far (my favourite is gargling salt water and drinking a bit of turmeric water every day).
The fact that I have started calling the cats by each other’s names and that she might have been right that never knowing which of your children’s name to use is a feature of the tone of voice (yelling).
That I can still eat pav bhaji every day for five days straight.
Whether I should buy Scooby-Doo stamps or Dragon stamps. My wife is of no use in this matter.
My mother died before I could ask her if she felt schadenfreude at Brexit, before I could recommend the Thursday Next books to her, before I could watch the Four Wedding and a Funeral mini-sequel with her.
Here’s the thing about loss (even after the immediate grief has faded): your life is divided into a clear before, an after, and the bridge between the two is lists like this one. I try to compose my lists entirely of things that would have made my mother laugh, or sigh very deeply and roll her eyes at me—any time Bohemian Rhapsody comes on, for example, because I once sent her approximately 40 emails in a row, each with a line from the song. (She wasn’t picking up her phone and I was bored.)
It’s easier to think about goodbyes when you focus on the laughter.
The title is from Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, a book that I’ve been thinking about non-stop this last week for obvious reasons.
My mother once got in touch with Terry Pratchett’s agent (we’re not entirely sure how) because she wanted to get me a signed first edition of The Colour of Magic for my birthday. It came over a month late, with a personal note from Pterry and my mother crowed about her incredible connections for a week after.