Home is where the heartache is

An evening spent handling the weight of an unwelcome Christmas gift.

My family will bid farewell to my aunty this coming week. The sister. The mum. The matriarch. The magnificent.

The internment is almost a year since she died, died after a long long cancer fight. In time I’ll find a way to articulate the now; but for now I have delved into my unpublished drafts to pick out a piece I wrote about the day I first heard she was ill.

Things had gone far too smoothly already. I’d boarded the 18:30 due North without trouble, laden with last minute shopping; I had a seat in the buffet car, space for my wares and the train was on time.

The trip to my step-brother’s in France — which I had thought was on the Monday, Christmas Eve — was actually on the Saturday afternoon, robbing me of two days of present buying. A textbook case of my casual attitude and misguided belief in my ability to get things done leading me to the brink of ruin. I am after all, a procrastinator.

It was not a trip I looked forward to as much as I usually did. Although I’d have a chance to get out on the snowboard and see my extended family, having spent the last 8 months in London, I was keen to spend some time back at home; see family, friends I’d left behind and others returning for the holidays.

Still, I looked forward to giving people their Christmas presents. I’d made some excellent buys this year and I knew they’d be well received by the kids in particular. And there’d be beer; lots of it. It was Christmas after all.

I walked from the train at Wakefield Westgate at half past 8, or thereabouts, arriving to the news that my aunty, a second mum to me, had been diagnosed with cancer. Home was where the heartache was.

I cried. Maybe for a minute, but no longer. I remember thinking “what right have I to be crying?” My aunty was lying there with life still in her. My cousins were having to deal with the news that their mum was dying. My stepdad had to deliver the news to me because I had failed to answer the phone to my mum when she called earlier that day. Terminal illness had struck the family before. Once again, it had crept up and caught us unawares that Christmas. Now here I was crying like I was the only person that mattered. So I stopped. If that seems abrupt, that’s because it was. I didn’t feel sad, I was numb — sickened. France went back to being just a place beyond the Channel.

The denial kicked in. It wasn’t real. I carried on about my business, on to the pub to meet some friends and let pints of Landlord wash the sickness in my stomach away.

I could at least seek solace in my village; in people that knew me.

A car passed with the window wound down; “OI, F*** OFF YOU BLACK C***”.

I was home.

I laughed. Belly laughing now as the car was forced to a halt by a turning lorry. Three sets of youthful eyes twenty yards ahead. They sat hunched, turned and staring back stricken with shame through the back window as the car sat now level with the insult that had been spat forth before. Stripped of the cover of passing anonymity, they had to live with it now. That was the worst thing that guy thought he could say to me on that day. Not close, not even close.

The lorry passed, the insult passed, my bitter smile passed — but the reality remained.

Life felt familiar yet alien, like it was being viewed in a mirror. An evening in the upside-down. There are few things truly important in life and when one of them is compromised, everything else loses its definition. A woman who had coped with the effects of a stroke leaving her partially paralysed down one side for 20 years was being told by medical professionals that if the time came, she may have to give up.

She came back home late on Christmas Eve in much better health after a transfusion. Bound to the upstairs of the house but surrounded by family and by love. As much as we could’ve hoped for in the days prior. Christmas 2013 wasn’t the best but it was the most important — the most enduring.

But the doctors did not know Gertrude Mwale. She was to go on smiling, laughing and touching lives a good while yet.