“Maybe I didn’t treat you
Quite as good as I should
Maybe I didn’t love you
Quite as often as I could
Little things I should have said and done
I never took the time
… You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind”
I’m finding it incredibly hard to sit in my grief.
It feels dark—an overwhelming emptiness of black. It’s thick. It’s uncomfortable. It consumes me. That’s why it has taken so long to write this. When I post this, I feel like it’s the end.
But I don’t want it to be.
I want my mum back. I want to be bored shitless as she tells me for the fifth time how the cook in her village is having an affair with his kitchen hand, according to her neighbours. I long to hear her voice, to smell her, to feel her arms around me one last time.
Elizabeth Kinloch Lelić died on the 7th October 2022.
I wish she had gone peacefully—in her sleep the way movies portray death. But that wasn’t the case. Mum’s dying was slow, painful, and so fucking hard to witness. It was, and is the worst period of my life, and coming from a whole bunch of childhood trauma, that’s saying something.
Spending time with mum on and off for the majority of 2022 was the best decision I have ever made. We became so much closer as we opened up about our past, and our hurts. She made me understand why she stayed with dad all those years, despite his cruelty. She opened up about her childhood and together we researched her lineage through the app Ancestry. She was honest with me for the first time in her life, and so was I. I told her about my life. How hard things have been lately. How I identify as non-binary but my pronouns will stay the same as she/her. She was excited. In her very cute mum, British accent, she told me about a show she had watched about non-binary people and then said, “they dress like you.”
It was magic.
Then one day things got real. My brother and I had to call an ambulance because mum knew she was dying. She was crying. She couldn’t get off the bed. Her pain was through the roof even though she was on heavy doses of Oxy and fentanyl. It was heartbreaking to see the person who used to lift me up with her strong arms and spin me around was now a dying woman who couldn’t even summon the energy to go to the toilet.
But the paramedics were kind, gentle, and loving with her. They made her feel like it was okay, and that she shouldn’t feel embarrassed, because she did. Mum was incredibly stoic and independent, so the thought of having to be lifted on a stretcher was mortifying. They were also kind to my brother and I. As mum was wheeled out of her home for the last time, I cried real ugly tears. The paramedic hugged me, and told me that whatever happens next, they admired mum’s resilience and bravery.
That’s when devastation hit.
Mum spent a few weeks in the palliative care ward at the hospital. I thought that was bad until she was sent to a palliative care home. It was lovely. It had a rose garden mum never got to see. The nurses were incredible. But mum’s time there wasn’t.
She turned yellow pretty quick. Her liver was giving up. Having a conversation with her was hard. She would stop in the middle of saying something and doze off. She was confused and dazed from all of the medication she was given. It was really fucking hard to watch. But my favourite memory from that time was curling up against her in her bed. The feel of mum’s warm body against mine was the last time I felt safe.
During that time, I would go on Facebook and pick fights with right-wing arseholes. I’d comment on their homophobic or racist posts just to get a reaction because I felt dead inside. I wanted to incite a riot but this was the only way I knew how to. Their negative responses justified the anger I felt inside, and boy was I angry.
Then it got worse.
I’ll never forget the week it took her to pass away. At this point, she couldn’t talk. She couldn’t eat or drink. She would moan and gurgle constantly. She was so restless. I spent forever readjusting her pillows to try and make her feel comfortable.
Nothing helped.
My brother, sister and I waited for the phone call. Every day, we would get up early, get ready and head to mum’s bedside to watch her die just that little bit more. But we were always conscious of the impending doom that phone call would cause.
And then we got it.
My world collapsed. Knowing your favourite person in the world is dying, and then them actually dying are two different emotions. I don’t remember a lot from that day but what I do remember is holding my brother and sister close as we mourned our mother.
Walking into her room to say our last goodbyes was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. The home had washed and dressed mum, and put a lovely bunch of flowers on her chest. But all I could do is look at her lifeless face. This person—my mum was my everything. I tried to protect her from dad throughout my childhood. I did anything to make her happy and now she was lying on the bed, eyes closed, at peace but gone from my life.
I wasn’t at peace though.
I spent the next few days trying to obliterate her memory with booze. The more the better but it just made me more sad. Mum not being in my life any longer was, and is still a heavy burden to carry, and 3 months later, it hasn’t gotten any easier.
I miss her in every quiet moment of every day. There’s a massive chunk of my heart that is missing because she’s gone. People tell me that it will get easier.
It hasn’t yet.
Since mum’s death, I’ve had a few firsts. My first Christmas and New Years without her. They sucked. It’s not getting any easier, in fact, it’s getting harder the more I realise what she meant to me.
Ismet, Emina and I will scatter mum’s ashes at Easter. The thought triggers my anxiety. I hate not knowing how I’ll go; how I’ll feel when we actually do it. I feel numb.
The only thing I’m glad about is mum isn’t in pain any longer. But the selfish child in me still wishes with all my might that she was still here.
Here with me.