I promised an essay on Detransition, Baby this week, but a thing like that needs thorough research that I’ve not been able to finish for my self-imposed deadline.
Instead I’m sharing a short story I originally wrote in the winter of 2023. I think (hope) it’s helpful if you’ve ever experienced complex grief, and I have had people both laugh and cry while reading it so if you want a quick manic episode this might be the post for you.
A lot of it is true and a lot of it isn’t, but it’s about abuse, terminal illness, tree care and difficult mother/daughter relationships, so please be warned.
Gall
The first seemingly impossible thing is the cancer itself. All terminal illness – any death – seems absurd, but that diagnosis: terminal, three months tops. We are in lockdown when we get the news and it seems very likely that Mum will die without me ever seeing her again. Every phone call we have drags with the potential weight of it, that goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Our love is a scabbed over wound, but on borrowed time I’m reluctant to pick at it. Instead I say: ‘Growing up with you wasn’t always easy, but I understand why it was so hard. I love you, and I forgive you,’ and for a short while after, we have something like an understanding between us. If you squinted a little you could even call it closure. I keep saying to friends, other family, ‘If this was a movie, this is where the credits would roll.’
❊
So then there’s the next impossible thing: she lives. The doctors are baffled by it, the way she just ... keeps going. Tumours spread rapidly and ruthlessly through her body, but she goes on a holiday, has her 60th birthday party.
What kind of person would I be, if I didn’t just keep loving her and forgiving her day after day, as she lives on and on and on? She’s the one who’s suffering, she’s the one who’s sick, not me. But – but still: I am buckling under the weight of it, and I am furious, and I am terrified. Each night I lie awake, what if she dies while I’m sleeping? I think, and Oh god, but what if she lives?
❊
On a summer’s day four years past her so-called best odds, Mum finally moves into hospice for good. What had started in her breast and liver has moved into her brain, and she is beginning to mix up words. ‘The foxes have got me.’ she tells me, when I come down to visit, then, ‘Can I have the pixies?’
‘Let’s finish the form, Mum.’ It’s a cloud diagram, each fluffy circle a space to write down the things the patient likes. A cheat sheet for the staff, to help them bond with her.
‘Feelings-thoughts-light-family,’ she tells me, looking not quite at me. She is almost blind. ‘Stop that!’
‘Okay, I’ll write that down. What else?’
‘Trees, I love trees. When I die I want to be a tree.’
‘You’ve said, Mum. I’ll write trees. What about music? Should I write down the bands you like?’
Silent, she pulls at her chin to scratch a hexagonal patch of rash.
‘Jenny? What do you love?’
‘I’m a blue toothbrush you’re a pink toothbrush, won’t you marry me in haste?’
I put down the form and hum along as she sings; once Mum gets hold of a melody, it’s really not worth trying to get her to drop it. But it seems strange, now that the tumours are pressing down on her brain, that she can still remember so many song lyrics word-for-word when she sometimes can’t even remember her own name.
‘I’ll be true, toothbr—nngh,’ Mum’s body heaves forward as dry, violent coughs shoot through her.
‘Have some water,’ I pick up the plastic cup, helping her tip her head back to drink—
Something is wrong with her mouth.
Her crooked and nicotine-stained teeth are now cracked moss-green, and a film is growing over her uvula. No, no not a film, a wire – wires? Not wires. Vines, I realise, it looks like vines.
An orderly hears Mum’s gargled protest and pops their head round the door to find me panicking, stretching my mother’s lips wide so that my fingers can claw freely at the wooden feeling of her tongue. I think he thinks I am trying to choke her; strong arms pull me away. Once free, Mum is unfazed and begins to sing again, ‘I’ll be true toothbrush, just to you toothbrush—’
‘It’s in her mouth,’ I pant. ‘Look in her mouth.’
A harried nurse tells me it’ll be three hours at least before a doctor is available, so I reluctantly call my aunt, Mum’s younger sister and her primary carer. She joins me (exhausted, weary, kind), and together we build a makeshift research library. She sifts through piles of notepads filled with Mum’s medical history: all her symptoms, meds, the different treatment plans, while I have ten or so tabs open on my phone: WebMD, NHS, Cancer Research, Reddit... There’s nothing like this anywhere.
When Mum first got sick, I’d been overwhelmed by the amount of information available online, how many millions of people had lived and died the same way my mum was going to. One night, I’d even searched “abusive mum terminally ill”. There’d been so many results that I’d been appalled, then embarrassed, by how many people had been through what I was going through, how unspecial my pain suddenly felt. I look up from my phone to watch Mum doze, lean forward tentatively to examine sap-like drool on her chin. This, at least, could be something new.
❊
When the doctor finally arrives she examines Mum’s body quickly but carefully, feeling gently over the lumps of cancer in her abdomen and her steroid-swollen limbs. When she reaches the wrists she pauses, frowning. They’ve noticed it too, then: the soft, wrinkled skin has hardened and roughened like bark.
‘I’ll need to call in a consultant,’ she says finally.
‘Another one?’ my aunt demands. Her pen is poised upon a fresh page of her notepad, ready to jot down next steps. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happening? Can’t you say?’
For a moment the only sounds in the room are Mum’s laboured breathing and the anxious tapping of my aunt’s pen. Eventually, the doctor shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry, no,’ she admits. ‘I’m sorry.’
When Mum coughs in her sleep her nightie shifts upwards, revealing swollen knees. Perhaps it’s just the harsh overhead lights, but to me they look whorled, almost carved. As the doctor fends off my aunt’s persistent questions I brace myself and reach out and re-cover them, moving slowly so as not to wake Mum up. To avoid getting splinters.
❊
It had been explained to us before, how unusual Mum’s case was, how many odds she’d beaten to live almost four years when any bookie would have said three months.
‘There’s still so much we don’t know about cancer,’ we’d been told by a chorus of medical professionals, ‘we’re making new discoveries every day. Nothing is impossible.’
It’s not the cancer, it’s her, I’d wanted to tell them, she’s the impossible one. That broken, bizarre brain inside her head: the one that had once twisted words and made them weapons, the one which convinced her that every choice her loved ones had ever made were ways to put a knife in her back. The one that despite all of this, despite everything, could produce wonders: words to make me feel safe, to feel seen, to laugh like a child. If the magic of Mum’s ongoing life was science we didn’t yet understand, couldn’t the reverse be true? If anyone was capable of casting spells, it was her.
❊
I end up staying with my aunt for the week, visiting Mum each day and meeting more doctors, specialists, scientists and then: two botanists, and a landscape gardener.
In between their examinations, I watch horrified and fascinated as the roots of Mum’s new symptoms take hold. Literal roots, sprouting between her toes, need to be circumnavigated while I rub lotion into her aching soles. A nurse shows me a used nappy full of sap. The wiry ends of her post-chemo hair thicken and curve, and on the last morning before I go to get my train home, split into leaf buds.
‘I’ll be back in a few days, Mum,’ I tell her, pushing past twigs to kiss her temple. I can’t remember the last time it was safe to cuddle her, but before she got ill, I would often summon the enveloping warmth and the tobacco-wine-talcum smell of her in the small hours, when I was struggling to sleep. As the cancer spread, her scent changed to carry the less comforting notes of broth and medicine, and it made me reluctant to inhale too deeply on visits. As I kiss her head now, however, I sniff hard: earthy, and like ozone. Like a forest after a rainstorm.
‘Have you got a cold?’ she asks, panicking – still so terrified of catching something from me, though how would it manifest itself now? As tree rot? Fungus?
‘No, Mum,’ I say soothingly.
‘What?’ She turns to me. She can only see lights and shade now, and there is something leafing at the corners of her unseeing eyes.
‘I don’t have a cold.’
‘A cold? You’ve got a cold?’ She pulls sharply away, her foliage scratching into my chin.
‘I’m going now,’ I sigh. ‘I love you.’
‘See you soon,’ she says, turning her attention back to the Emmerdale reruns on screen. Another magic trick: from sound alone, she can tell you about each character and remember their entire backstory.
‘Amos,’ she says. I shut the door.
❊
‘The verdict is we’re not at end of life, as she’s eating so well,’ my aunt explains two days later. In the background, above the white noise of windy traffic, I hear the click of her indicating, ‘though obviously, it’s mostly soil she’s eating now.’
‘Obviously.’ I manage. On the other end of the phone, whichever direction my aunt was turning means that she loses signal – typical, on those country roads – but though I hear the tell-tale beeps of the dropped call I stay on the line, repeating myself, ‘Obviously.’
When she calls me back we talk through next steps, ‘So now we know what soil she needs, we want to move her while it’s still safe,’ she explains, then hesitates.
‘Right? And?’
‘Well, I was wondering ... where do you want to plant her?’
It isn’t a question I feel equipped to answer. Take the fact of the tree out of it and I still don’t know what to say. I know why it’s me my aunt is asking, though: there are my brothers and sister to consider; they have all been visiting Mum too, of course – but it’s me who has beaten my own odds and finally gotten close to her now, in her life’s final season.
The truth is I don’t want her to die believing that she isn’t loved. She is so sure that no one, not even her children, can actually love her and her life’s work – willing or otherwise – seems to have been pushing everyone she’s ever cared about away. For a while, I’d followed her example. But now... Now I’m in the habit of pulling the people I love as close as I possibly can.
Still: there are times when I’d like to be a tree, too.
‘Plant her by the farm,’ I decide, ‘the one where she grew up.’
❊
It’s called transplanting, moving a tree. You create a root ball at the tree’s base – literally a ball, a circle of roots in recently watered soil – then gently tie up the branches. Mum still has enough of a voice to protest this, but with some coaxing we get her arms up over her head and her hands together. I help the nurses bind her and when we eventually ease her upright, where we’d anticipated residual looseness of limbs there is only the thick rigidness of her trunk, her tumours now gall in the bark.
To soothe her on the drive over, I work through the twine to grip onto the bundles of new leaves and twigs that had so recently been fingers. ‘You won’t be alone,’ I remind her, stroking at trembling branches. Each of her children have picked out our own trees, and we’d planted them in the field the day before. They were not so close that they’d be blocked by Mum’s canopy but, still: we’d all be nourished by the same earth.
We make sure to point out our plots as we wheel Mum past, describing what she can’t see.
‘I’ve got the best patch, Mum—’
‘—no, you haven’t! I’ll get way more sun.’
‘I’m going to be the tallest. Again.’
Mum’s leaves quiver, their rustle akin to laughter.
When we reach her spot, my brothers and I pat in the soil around her gnarled feet, and my sister cuts away the twine to get her free. My aunt, ever the forward-thinker, is pacing up and down the field to try and get enough signal to look up the weather for the week. Focused on our work, it is a few minutes before we realise that Mum’s face has gone. In its place is a bump in the joint where some of her branches meet and stretch upwards and her body is stiff, as though rapid rigor mortis has set in. But it is not that. She’s simply hardened into wood, unmoving except for what had been her hair, swaying in the breeze.
Impossible, to not be able to say goodbye. Impossible. Stubbornly, I push at her.
‘Come back,’ I tell her. ‘You have to come back.’
How could she not? Why would she not? How could she have kept living so long, metamorphosised and transformed and proved she was just as capable of miracles as she was of curses, capable of changing, capable of being what she wanted, but still not be what I needed?
Why did she want to be a tree when she could be my mum?
I wait, staring up into the leaves, willing them to bend down and hold me, for a long, long time.
❊
She is not a fruit-bearing tree, but in the autumn her golden leaves are so, very beautiful. She stands tall when it’s windy and is a wonderful source of shade when it’s warm. It is very hot, this summer. It’s almost too hot to move, but I really do need to be going, so I use her trunk to push myself upwards and begin walking away, back through the field. As a breeze blows past me you could almost hear, if you wanted to, a whispering in her leaves. Goodbye, it maybe says, or it could be the chorus from one of her favourite songs. It could even be I love you. Anything is possible.
Oh. Just oh. ❤️