This is what people say to you when you tell them that your mother has just died. Was it expected? Often, I said no. Sometimes, I said yes. Yes, it was expected. But not by me. My mother expected it. That’s not quite the right verb. She planned it. She planned her own death. And she told us to expect it, but I didn’t. Wasn’t I listening? Didn’t I believe her?
I misjudged her. But would you have expected it? If you had met my mother in the last years of her life, when she was in her 70s, you would have been aware of her timidity. Although she had strong opinions, she moved uncertainly through the world. She was nervous of journeys.
This timidity, in fact, often infuriated me. She was likely to panic when she had to pack for even a small and easy holiday, a straightforward there and back again. She would go over and over the possible missteps. Would she forget her passport? What shoes would she need? Would there be towels?
For my mother, this anxiety around setting off on a journey had always been there, or if not always, then as long as I had known her. So how could I expect that she would set off on the longest journey, so decisively, alone?
How could I expect that courage?
I did not expect it. I did not expect my mother to kill herself.
Yes, she told me.
But for a long while, for the year leading up to her death, for the weeks leading up to her death, I kept my face turned away from the future, from the darkness, from the ending.
After her death, I try to keep alive the last time I saw her, in an effort to keep her alive.
If I don’t remember, if I start to forget, then she will really be gone.
It was a Monday. I had taken a day off work, because of this crisis that seemed to be brewing with her. I was afraid of something, of her sadness, of her apparent decision to start cutting away from us.
In fact, for a long time my mother had been saying, you know that when the time comes I will kill myself.
But even when she said it, it never took shape to me as a definite possibility. My sister and I asked each other, what does she say to you? What do you think she means? My partner and I discussed it. She is lonely, he said. We talk almost every day! I said. That doesn’t mean she isn’t lonely.
And when someone says something like that for years, and never does it, maybe you stop hearing it. Or you stop believing it. In fact, it seemed to be something that she said rather lightly, in the way that another mother might say, I won’t be around for ever you know. A tone that you associate with older women when their children and grandchildren seem to be taking them for granted, a tone to pull their relations back in and make them notice them again. A tone that doesn’t necessarily alert you to a crisis. A conversation that seems likely to continue, over and over again, and not come to a sudden end.
So that wasn’t what frightened me. What frightened me was not the repetition of that old line, but the fact that she was behaving in strange, new ways. She gave away, one by one, pieces of family jewellery. And something else changed. She stopped making plans. She had always been the one who said in September, what are we doing at Christmas, the one who said in January, are we going to Walberswick this summer. But all of a sudden that stopped. In November, I asked her about arrangements for my daughter’s birthday in December, and she said she couldn’t plan for that. I asked her whether she wanted to go to the theatre over Christmas, and she said she didn’t want to make any arrangements.
And then she sent an email inviting everyone in the immediate family to join her for lunch in a restaurant in Golders Green. It was not a birthday, it was not an anniversary. In the customs of our family, this was unusual, to go out all of a sudden for a restaurant lunch when there was no particular celebration.
We all went along, as if it was normal. Ten of us around the table. My mother, my sister, me, and our partners and children. She gave each of us an envelope, for later. Later, we found in them kind cards and wodges of cash.
What did she mean by that, I asked my sister. I have no idea, she said.
And so she went on, scaring us and reassuring us. And then finally my sister went round to her flat one Sunday and confronted her, and asked her why she was being so odd, and she said, I think it is time. Then for a while we all tried to do this impossible thing, which is to try to tether someone to life when they are moving away, tying knots in the ropes of love and memory while they are just as busily untying them.
On the second Monday in December, I took a day off work, and asked my mother out to lunch. I felt that I couldn’t wait till the weekend to see her, which is what we would usually do.
So yes, I knew there was trouble. And no, I had no idea that this was our last lunch. I chose the restaurant. One of those urban, cavernous restaurants pitched at hipsters, serving Indian street food. It seemed perfect for my 75-year-old mother. She sat there in her plain shirt and jeans, her long white hair tied back, and seemed pleased with everything.
After the meal, we walked along the canal. My mother is, was, one of those people who can be delighted and transfixed by the smallest pleasures. At the same moment that we were complaining about how the old King’s Cross had disappeared, we were also enjoying the new King’s Cross. We got a coffee in a chichi cafe next to the canal. It was strangely warm on that December day, in the afternoon sunshine. There were blankets laid out on the chairs, but we didn’t even need them. Our mood lightened. Swans passed by on the dirty water, ploughing their fine proud way. We talked about my children, about something funny that my son said the other day and about my daughter’s art project.
Apparently apropos of nothing at all, she told me that if I ever needed it, the key to her locked cabinet was in the drawer of her bedside table. I looked away, at the swans. “You’re not listening to me,” she said. “No,” I agreed, in a light voice, “I’m not.” I didn’t want to hear this, why I might need that key. That little key, which she needed. So I went on talking about politics, memories, children.
I could not imagine then that this would be our last lunch together. The last of those important unimportant conversations that had studded our five decades of conversations. It’s impossible to imagine the sound of silence.
I left her at Euston station, waiting for her train back to Watford.
Long white hair, pale grey anorak, reading the newspaper.
Four days later my mother took her own life.
* * *
The day itself, that’s a day that blurs in memory. It started for me at the Southbank Centre, where the refugee women I work with were presenting a drama performance to a small, invited audience at lunchtime. We gathered in the morning to rehearse. I know that I was there. I know that all morning women came and went in the studio, carrying chairs, putting out drinks, repeating lines, getting dressed. But if I look into the memory, if I try to catch an image, a phrase, it is as though someone has tipped black ink into it. The ink spreads. I can see nothing. Not a face, not a colour, not an image. I can hear nothing. The ink is spreading out from the messages I was sending all morning to my mother, and when she did not respond, to my sister. My sister lives just around the corner from my mother.
At first we dismissed the fact that our texts to my mother were going unanswered. And then we allowed our fears to surface, and my sister walked round to see how she was. And then she rang me, to tell me that the curtains were drawn in my mother’s flat and she was not answering the doorbell. The ink floods. The darkness spreads.
And then I’m running through Euston station to get on a train to Watford. Images come back, with an edge of coldness. A very polite policeman in my sister’s sitting room. A small glass of sherry, so old-fashioned, in my hands. A letter, typewritten, rather formal. The weight of my daughter’s head on my shoulder as she cries.
No image of my mother, though. Because that view of her at Euston station – white hair, grey jacket, reading the newspaper – that one had become final. We did not go into her flat the day that she died.
We could only imagine it, from what the policeman said. It was peaceful. She was in bed.
Later, we could construct what she had done. Later, we learned that she had ordered the poison on the internet years before. That she had kept the bottle until the time was right. That she had gone to bed with a drink, with the poison, and with a picture of her grandchildren beside her, for a last look.
Later. But not now.
The police brought us the farewell letter they had found on the bedside table. So although she was no longer there to speak to us, her words reverberated. And yet the letter seemed strangely impersonal. It seemed to be written for an audience that was not precisely us.
The day afterwards, we went into the empty flat. And then I remembered what I had not heard at the time, and told my sister where the key to the locked cabinet was. We opened it, and found a book, The Peaceful Pill Handbook, published by Exit International, and here were two letters to us.
These letters were more personal, perhaps. But we both could only glance at them in a sideways manner, as though the charge they held was too dangerous to detonate. I put mine in my bag, and vowed to read it properly soon, soon. My mother had been preparing for her death for a long time, and so it was hard not to find significance in everything that she had left in her flat. She had, for instance, left biscuits and fruit on the table and soup in the fridge. “She left them for us to eat while we were doing this,” said my sister, as we sat in the flat in the first days after her death.
We were already trying to take those steps that you have to take, in the aftermath of a death – steps to tell the authorities, to speak to the police, to the hospital, to the coroner, to the banks, to the neighbours. As we picked up, here and there, in her flat, the things we needed in those first days, we found the letter she had wanted us to send to all of her friends. It was short and succinct.
Hi
I am writing this, for my daughters to send, to let you know that I have killed myself. I always wanted to, when I felt it was the right time, when I could make my own choice. I decided to do so this year whilst I am still happy but very aware of my failing memory and health.
I have been a member, on and off, of various societies such as the Euthanasia Society and currently Dignity for Dying, and so this probably comes as no surprise. Politically I think all people should be able to make this choice without it being illegal and so difficult.
Please be happy for me to have successfully achieved what I wanted to. I have been so lucky in having you as a friend. I wish I could have said all this to you personally but the law does not allow for that, so this will have to do.
I hope the rest of your years will be happy and stress free, with deep affection from Ruth
Alongside the letter was a list of all those she wanted to receive it. My sister and I talked about how to begin. You can’t just email a farewell letter, we felt. There is something about that that feels too heartless, sending out such a message into the indifferent ether of the internet, to land with someone at some unexpected point in their lives and their day. Particularly these people, so many of them elderly, so many of them alone.
So we started to telephone people and tell them what we were sending them. It took us a long time, many days, because every time we had to say why we were telephoning we had to hold ourselves together very hard, and the effort was too exhausting to make more than one or two phone calls each day.
One of the first people I telephoned was one of my mother’s oldest friends, Heather Strange. They had met in the peace movement in London in the 60s, but now Heather lived alone on the wild Welsh coast. I had not seen Heather since I was 16. Everything had changed. But voices do not change, and Heather’s voice was still the same slow and thoughtful voice that I remembered from that warm summer when I thought she held some secret to happiness there in her self-built house on her little smallholding. I told her what I had to tell her, and waited for her shock and tears.
Instead, I heard her calmness. Heather was not surprised. She was sad, but she was not shocked. Apparently my mother had talked to her about her determination to take this path when she began to feel the first signs of dementia. Heather had not done what I had done – averted my eyes and ignored what I heard – when she had told her. Ruth had been planning this for a long time, she reminded me, and she asked me why I thought that she had decided to go now, at a time that might seem premature, but must have seemed right for her.
Her knowledge and acceptance startled me. And it made me think again about what I had done and what I had been to my mother.
While her friends had accepted her decision, I had turned my gaze away. I had thought I was holding my mother in the land of the living, by talking about the children and the menu on that last lunch, by refusing to listen when she told me where her keys were. But I had been shutting my eyes to the reality, to her reality.
I had been in denial, as one says, as though denial were a place rather than an action.
Maybe denial was a place, a place where I had stopped, unable to move forwards.
In that place called denial, I had assumed that at the end of the day my mother would do the conventional thing. That she would go on living, until forced out of life by a failing body.
But she was not conventional in that way. She was unpredictable. She acted by her own rules, not those of others. She decided on her own way.
I had misjudged her so terribly.
During the dark days and months that followed I felt that I was flailing around, trying to understand myself, trying to understand her. I had failed her, I thought again and again. Grief is so much heavier than one expects. That’s what everyone tells you. God, yes, it’s true, the exhaustion, the weight of it. But in my grief, there was also guilt, and the dragging weight of that guilt pulled me down and down. I had chosen to live in denial, and in so doing I had failed my mother.
* * *
So many of us who have experienced the death of a parent know what this feels like: walking into their home, laying hands on their things, and starting the awful business of sorting out and clearing away. So intrusive and intimate and curiously premature, however long you leave it.
But eventually, it has to be done.
As clear as it is that my mother had tried to sort all her things out before she died, it is also clear that she didn’t really manage it. She had always been a spectacularly untidy person, and the struggle to be otherwise, to tidy up the stuff of life before she left it for good, was not successful.
In her little study there are cardboard boxes full of folders of papers, envelopes and photo albums, in random and overlapping categories with miscellaneous bits and pieces thrown through them. Much as my sister and I would like to dive straight through the task ahead of us, we are constantly distracted by memories that eddy around us. Certain photographs are taken out, looked at, left on tables, taken to our homes, put on mantelpieces, stacked into other boxes or albums.
And as we look at the pictures, we take random steps back through time. There is the grandmother with long white hair, smiling, a child on her lap. A step backwards. There is the middle-aged woman squinting into the sunshine in Cyprus with her boyfriend. Another step. The mother who is younger than I am now, newly divorced, with her teenage daughters in Italy. Another step. A woman who looks much too young to be a mother, in a sunlit daze in a seaside garden, with two little girls making daisy chains. And then a tumble that takes me out of the time that makes sense, into the years before I was part of my parents’ lives. Here is a young woman, thick dark hair cut in a bob, the same open smile, a cigarette between her fingers, in an office alongside a couple of young men. Here are love letters addressed to a disused name, Ruth Oppenheim.
Here is a scruffy brown envelope, unmarked. Out of it flutters a frayed paper. “You, Ruth Oppenheim, are charged with the offence shown below. On the 29th day of April 1961, at Whitehall SW1, having been made acquainted with the Directions of the Commissioner of the Metropolis... did wilfully disregard the said directions.” The paper records my mother’s first arrest for civil disobedience, when she was just 19. I knew Ruth was a committed participant in the movement against nuclear weapons. But here is evidence of an arrest that I had entirely forgotten about – if she ever told me about it – which has been carefully kept for over 50 years along with other records of arrests, fines and court hearings. At the time, I put it back in its envelope with the other papers that track this illegal activity, and back in the box with old flyers and pamphlets and newspaper cuttings of demonstrations. The box comes home with me, alongside other bits and pieces, and months later I take it out and look up what happened on this date. I read that the demonstration of 29 April 1961 was described at the time as the largest outbreak of civil disobedience seen in the UK since the suffragette movement. It was organised by the Committee of 100, the most radical organisation of the nuclear disarmament movement of the 1960s. The march had been banned in advance. Despite this, Ruth Oppenheim and around 2,500 others walked silently down Whitehall and sat down in Parliament Square. There were more than 800 arrests, and alongside my mother in the police vans that evening were some of the more celebrated supporters of the disarmament movement, such as Vanessa Redgrave, who was herself only 24.
Perhaps we are accustomed now to seeing young people walking through London with their banners, ready to be arrested for their principles. Then, less so. The whole event, happening as it did before the 60s had got under way, caused consternation and condemnation as well as sympathy. But not at all put off by the experience, Ruth was to go on and be arrested time and again – and to move into more dangerous illegal action of other kinds.
She was not, then, always the timid person that I remember.
She was not, then, always the woman who was nervous about going to new places, who needed endless instructions before trying new things.
No, she was happy to “wilfully disregard” authority, and take the consequences.
How have I forgotten that she was also this person?
As I look through her papers I find more and more of that woman. Her image. Her voice.
Here are other photographs from the same years; this same young woman sitting in front of policemen at the entry to an underground bunker. And again here, the young woman in low-heeled sandals and a knee-length skirt, watching as a man is dragged away by police at another demonstration. Here is a small portrait photograph, of that young woman with her thick black hair and direct gaze, and this one has a little Post-it note stuck to it: “When breaking the law!”
As I go on looking at these photographs, this woman begins to take up more room in my mind.
She wasn’t brought up to do this. For some reason I find that very important. I feel that the reasons for being politically active are becoming so elusive for me right now. Whether that is for personal reasons – that I am just too tired and sad – or for political reasons – that the world is darkening so much that activism feels pointless – I feel completely overwhelmed when I consider becoming politically active again. So when I think about how my mother first became not only politically engaged, but actually ready to break the law on many occasions, I am struck by how much it took for her to push her way out of her family pressures in order to make her way on to that street in 1961 where she was first arrested. The pressures came particularly from her father, who hid his own private history of rebellion and resistance in 1930s Germany from her. And from her mother, who was still grieving the loss of her own family in the Holocaust.
Perhaps it was unsurprising, given their history, that all Ruth’s parents wanted was for their children to fit in, to be careful, to be quiet.
But none of that made sense to Ruth. She was not going to live in silence. Like so many young women in the 1960s, she was going to find new ways to live and to love.
As I follow her back through the years, I begin to understand more and more not just the manner of her death, but also, more vitally, the manner of her life.
And so my grief does not immediately lighten or pass, but it changes. And I change with it.
Natasha Walter is the founder and former director of Women for Refugee Women
This is an adapted extract from Before the Light Fades: A Memoir of Grief and Resistance by Natasha Walter, published by Virago on 31 August (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
