It’s 20 years this week since my mother died. That’s preposterous but also, apparently, factually accurate. My elder son was one and he turned 21 this spring (God, she loved him ferociously and would have loved my younger son, whom she never met, just as much yet differently, because she was good at that). It’s not that it feels recent, more as if it happened in another dimension, the foreign country of the past.
I am never sure about the etiquette of marking a death day. Isn’t it nicer – more polite, even – to focus on the person’s birthday? Usually I manage to skirt the issue by not remembering the exact date (I genuinely have to look up her obituary to check). Occasionally, someone else will remind me if they are in the mood to mark it, arousing a vague alarm: uh-oh, will there be emotions with a capital E? Like a cabinet minister sent to boarding school at seven, I find my emotions alarming and embarrassing and mostly try to squash them.
