Loss

I've been told I can be quite cold hearted. That I don't actually *need* anyone else, and to a certain extent that's true. I've always been more than happy with my own company. In the years in my 20s when I was single I had no issue at all traveling by myself (long distance, not just within the UK), going to football games and gigs by myself and generally enjoying my own company. I am incredibly self-sufficient, I don't need anyone else in my life. Don't get me wrong, I have fabulous friends and I love hanging out with them. But I've just never been one that couldn't cope on her own. I more than cope, I thrive.

My mum I love dearly but we're very very very different people and, to be honest, the vast majority of the time she annoys the living crap out of me. I know the reasons she behaves why she does, it's to do with her childhood, so I do not blame her at all but nevertheless I'm not entirely sure I'll mourn her passing. Apologies if that sounds blunt but there you go. My father I absolutely adore, but due to his illness the man I knew as my father I said goodbye to at least a year ago - if not longer. If he had died two years ago I would have been lost, totally and utterly drowned in my own grief. But now? Now is a different story. I'm not entirely sure I'd mourn his passing either.

Therefore it has slightly sideswiped me when the mother of one of my closest friends died at the weekend. She had been ill for some time but I still refused to fully accept she was as ill as she was. I always thought she'd come back, she was a wonderful woman and so so strong. Funny, generous and I loved her desperately. In some ways I loved her more than my own mother. I have a bond with my mother that no one else can replace, I know that, but I have never had the relationship with my mother that I had with this woman. I would walk into her house and she'd treat me like one of her daughters (she had two of her own, the eldest I have been friends with for almost 20 years now). She didn't live locally, she was over 200 miles away, but I saw her as often as I could. I, obviously, now wish I had seen her more. I'd walk in and she'd just poor me a glass of wine, my own mother constantly lectures me about how much I drink and the drinking problem that she perceives I have. This woman would never ever judge me, my own mother - despite always saying she was coming to see me and not my house, would always turn her nose up when she walked through my door if the place was anything other than pristine. Which I don't think it ever was.

I have not yet experienced loss like this. I had lost all my grandparents by the age of 24. My dad only had his mum when I was born and she died when I was 12 so I don't think I was old enough to even understand what was going on. My mum's parents died within a year of each other in my early twenties and I was never that close to them. Partly because they lived 80 miles away and partly because, by my adulthood, I was well aware of what they'd put my mum through and I wasn't sure I actually liked them. I didn't particularly grieve either of those passings. My dad's sister, also my godmother, died in 2015. She was ten years older than my father and almost felt like a surrogate grandmother. Up until now, it had been her death that had affected me the most. But even that grief has not hit me like this has.

She has two daughters in their thirties, one with a three year old. I feel guilty for feeling as I do. What right to I have to feel this hurt and this loss, this grief that is ripping my insides apart, when she has closer family than I. I don't want to tread on her daughters' toes, I don't want to assume my place in her life meant more to her than someone else's. It's something I'm grappling with, it is not my mother. It is not someone I saw frequently (altho that was more geography, I'm now wishing I had seen her so much more than I managed to. I hadn't seen her for eighteen months). But I can't help how I feel. I don't want to feel I'm taking the spotlight, which I know is a crass way of putting it but I hope you know what I mean. Despite how I feel it is not my mother who has passed.

There is a part of me that thinks that a life has to leave this world for another to be created. And, whilst my body is seriously fucking me around this month, it's still possible that I'm pregnant (we won't find out for definite for at least another week or two) and all I could think was why her. If you had to take someone to make the space for a new life could you not have taken someone else??!? But then if I am going to be granted my miracle child, surely someone as special as this lady (and oh my god was she special) has to be the one to make way.

But I miss her. SO much. I just want to hear her voice one more time, her laugh. I want her to hug me, squeeze me. Just once more.