Eulogy for a mother: three complete examples, and what makes this one hard

My mother could not throw anything away, and I want to be clear that I do not mean this in a charming way. I mean there is a drawer in that house containing eleven remote controls for devices that no longer exist.

But underneath the drawer full of dead remote controls there was a principle, and the principle was that things can be fixed.

She had a sewing box, which is at my house now. Biscuit tin, tartan, the lid does not fit. Inside it there is a reel of grey thread that I am fairly sure she was using in 1994. When I was small I brought her things constantly — a torn strap, a coat with the lining out, a teddy that had lost a leg in circumstances I never explained. She never once said it was beyond saving. She would take it, and turn it over, and say, “Well. We’ll see.”

And then it would come back. Not perfect. You could always see where she had been. She was not a delicate mender — the stitches were large and the thread was frequently the wrong colour because the right colour would have meant going to town.

My brother Sami reminded me on Sunday that she did the same thing with people. He said it better than I would have: she was not interested in whether something was worth saving. She just started.

She sat with our neighbour Teresa through a divorce that everyone else had opinions about. She took in my cousin for a year and a half in 2008 and referred to it, always, as “him staying a while.” She wrote to a boy from our school who went to prison, every month, for six years, and told nobody. We found the letters. He wrote back every time.

She was not a saint and she would put me right immediately. She was capable of a silence that could last four days. She held a grudge against a woman at the surgery so long that none of us can now remember what it was about, including, I suspect, her. She was terrible at apologising and she never learned.

But nothing came to my mother in pieces and stayed in pieces.

I have the tin. The grey thread is still in it. I have started mending things badly, with the wrong colour, because going to town is a whole afternoon and she was right about that.

Mum — you would want me to say that the drawer of remote controls is still there and none of us have touched it.

Thank you for starting. Thank you for not asking whether it was worth it.

I’m Mark, Pauline’s eldest. I want to talk about my mother’s hands, because I have been thinking about them all week and I cannot get them out of my head.

They were always in cold water. That is my first memory of her — standing at a sink with her sleeves pushed up in November, and her hands going red to the wrist, and her not appearing to notice.

She was a cleaner for thirty-four years. She did the health centre, and then the primary school, and for eleven years she did both, which meant leaving the house at half five and coming back at seven in the evening. I did not understand any of this at the time. I thought she was just somebody who was tired.

Here is what I want to say about that, and then I will stop, because she would hate this.

She never once described it as hard. Not to us. She had a way of making the whole thing sound like a slight inconvenience she had chosen. When I was sixteen I asked her, in the flat way sixteen-year -olds ask things, whether she liked her job. And she said, “It gets done, doesn’t it.”

It got done. Three of us got through school. My sister is a midwife. None of that happened by itself, and none of it was ever presented to us as a sacrifice, because she did not want us carrying it.

So I am going to carry it now, if that is all right, because she cannot stop me.

She was stubborn to a degree that was genuinely difficult. She would not be helped. In 2019 she walked to a hospital appointment in the rain rather than let me take a morning off, and then was annoyed with me for finding out.

The last time I saw her she was doing the washing up, and I said leave it, and she said, “It’s done now.”

Thanks, Mum. It got done. All of it.

My mom died on a Tuesday, which she would have found annoying, because Tuesday was the day she did everything.

I want to tell you one thing she taught me, and then sit down, because there are four of us speaking and she hated a long service.

When I was twenty-three I lost a job I had been proud of, and I drove to her house at eleven at night to tell her about it. She let me talk for a while. And then she said, “Okay. What do you want for breakfast?”

I was furious. I wanted the whole thing — the outrage, the phone calls, somebody to be angry on my behalf. What I got was eggs.

It took me about a decade to understand that this was the entire lesson. My mom had a life story with a lot of hard years in it that she did not narrate to us, and what she had worked out somewhere in there was that you keep feeding people and the rest arrives on its own.

So I am not going to try to celebrate her whole life in three minutes. I am going to say that she was a person of enormous, unsentimental compassion, and that it mostly took the form of food.

I’m grateful, Mom. I’ll do the breakfast now.