MEMOIR | ESSAY | WRITING | CREATIVE WRITING

My Mother’s Nine-Month Journey to the Other Side

She was the only passenger aboard. We all stayed silently ashore

My mother (photo by author)

I long for my mother’s bread

My mother’s coffee

Her touch

Childhood memories grow up in me

Day after day

“To My Mother” by Mahmoud Darwish

My mother died on Thursday 28th December 2023. She died peacefully (or so I’ve been told). She was found by my niece’s husband, who, like my niece, is a doctor. She was pronounced dead at 9:36am, local time in Havana. I was informed of her passing at around 9pm, local time in London.

The above are facts. Every single one. Facts are like bricks on a wall: cold, impersonal, impenetrable. You can’t talk to a brick (or to a wall, come to that). Same with facts. You can try to stare them down, and you will fail to break them, or choose to close your eyes in their presence, knowing that they’ll still be there when you open your eyes again.

But all walls have cracks. Whether by (faulty) design or time-ravaged existence, lines appear, fissures set in. The hardest rock is never immune to splitting. In human beings these gaps…