Life, loss and leaning back into freelancing

I’ve been trying to find the words for so long, but I’ve realised that I can’t. Ironic, really, for someone who is supposed to write and edit for an actual living. So much for that.

Still, I need to explain my absence here – and in various other places – over the last year. This is my clumsy attempt to do that. 

What a difference a day makes

Around this time last summer, just back from holiday, I received a phone call from my sister to say that our mum was unwell. We already knew she wasn’t well, but we didn’t realise at that stage just how unwell. I was supposed to be delivering a training session on freelancing, so I asked my sister if she thought it would be alright if I came back straight after that. The resulting silence spoke volumes.

So, I dropped everything, got on the next Eurostar and raced back to the UK – mouth dry, heart thudding – wracked with guilt about being a bit short on the phone the other night, about working too much the last time I was there, and about living in another country entirely, so far away from home.

Holding her warm, beautiful hand, I had never felt more grateful, and so I thanked my lucky stars and stayed. Stayed until, finally, she no longer could, and she slipped peacefully away, surrounded by love, in the place she loved most in the world – her home. The place she had filled with joy and houseplants and trinkets from her travels – and the most wonderful memories for us of growing up there with her and our dad – before he, too, was taken by the same cruel disease.

Trying to write a tribute

She was the best, most beautiful human, in every way, and we miss her beyond words. As it happens, she was a wordsmith herself – we even worked together at one stage – and she taught me everything I know and love about the English language. One of my very last memories is of her trying to do her beloved daily crossword even as her eyes were failing and she couldn’t read the clues anymore.

During the last few months of her life, my sister and I cared for her ourselves, with the blessing of our brother, and it was the greatest honour and privilege to be able to do so. I feel so fortunate that my frenetic freelance life enabled me to have that opportunity. Freelancing is many things, especially in these turbulent times, but it does at least provide the flexibility to be there when it really counts.

It meant that I could sit and hold her hand, at every available opportunity, as we looked out at the garden she loved so dearly, the huge pine tree standing sentinel outside. That I could learn to care who should win the final in the snooker (Mark Allen, apparently...). That I could stroke her hair even as she slipped in and out of consciousness, her alabaster skin somehow looking more perfect than ever, her latest edition of Puzzler – with that half-completed crossword – abandoned just next to her.

I will try – and probably fail – to write a proper tribute to her another day. But, suffice to say, she really was the most extraordinary individual (isn’t everyone’s mum, but she really, really was...). She had travelled the world herself, also living in Canada for some years, in the days when it was so unusual for a young woman to emigrate to the other side of the world that she was featured in the local newspaper. So, I try to console myself that, at one stage, she lived far away from home, too.

More than that, though, she was the kindest, funniest person, always with a twinkle in her eye, and the best company you could wish for. She was also stubborn as a mule and was immovable on the things she believed in and her sense of what was right. She was so many things but, most of all, she was our mum. 

Looking to the future

So, now, I am attempting to join the real world again in earnest, even as my heart still breaks at every little thing. Seeing her knitting, lying by the armchair, as if she is about to start the next row. Her favourite mug, from which she drank her morning tea, sitting empty in the cupboard. Her glasses folded up neatly in their case... Back in Paris, the reflex still to call her never goes away, and then having to remember all over again that she is no longer here.

Nonetheless, incomprehensible though it seems to me, life goes on, so I have started to write again (hello, editors…). Also, a big focus, as always, is the Society of Freelance Journalists, who helped to keep me going in the most difficult of days. And I recently began work on a new project, copy editing for the most brilliant bunch of journalists who have come together to create a new launch called Reporting from Paris. More news on that soon.

In the meantime, if you’ve read this far, please do hold your loved ones close. Or, if you can't, then plan that trip to see them – or, at the very least, make that phone call to talk to them. Even if it's a slightly grumpy one. Because you just never know when it will be the last.