Tag Archives: Multiple Sclerosis

Just Breathe Out

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“I need a little room to breathe” ~ Linkin Park

Or, as defined by my dictionary

Breathe (vb): to exist; be alive

 

I was with my Mum as she took her last breaths. It’s a position as privileged as it is painful; to be able to provide support, comfort, yet at the same time knowing that it is goodbye. A goodbye that is still incalculable, unfathomable, these months down the line and I believe will remain so for some considerable time to come.

It’s the breath that gets us all in the end; coming, going, sustaining us, leaving. We can live long lives without many things but breathing is not one of them.

But to take rich full breaths of life is not a simple matter of just breathing. It is to consciously breathe in life, breathe out what is no longer needed. That breath has to go out to make room for something new.

Yet we hold on so tightly, too tightly, to shallow breaths that do not serve us, that do not allow us the openness that is required to let go, to allow space for what comes next.

Turbine Hall at Tate Modern

Just breathe out, a good friend told me once in a time of emotional hardship. So it is no coincidence my next book is called one hundred breaths. Writing some of these stories has been me breathing out, learning not to hold myself so tightly, letting things go.

A percentage of my profit from these sales will go to Ashgate Hospice who supported my parents and my Mum’s breathing until the end.

 

Princess

one hundred breaths is available to pre-order from Cynefin Road: one hundred breaths

For more information or to support Ashgate Hospice: Ashgate Hospice

For more information on Multiple Sclerosis: MS

Who’s Sorry Now

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Who’s sorry now? ~ Connie Francis

Or, as defined by my dictionary

Sorry (adj): feeling or expressing regret, compunction, sympathy, for an action

 

When I was was 13 my brother had a terrible cycling accident and was taken to hospital. I remember the police arriving at home, I remember going to the hospital with my mum, and afterwards I remember her saying the first thing he said to her when she want in to see him was “Sorry, mum”

Fast forward. I’m 41  I’m going to the same hospital to see my mum and the first thing she says to me when I get to her bed and she knows I am there is “I’m sorry”

My brother had been sorry for damaging his bike, for upsetting mum, for causing worry. Now my mum is concerned about causing upset, fearing worry, taking up our time.

Yet, as I sit there, sometimes with friends or with siblings, sometimes alone, mum talks. She talks about her funeral, she talks about what hymns she might like and what she wants us to do, and she talks her own mother and when she died. And she says the most extraordinary thing, “It’s life, we just don’t have time, we’re all so busy…. I came home, I cooked you all tea. And I got a call from the care home to say that she’d died”

My mum was apologising to me, to all of us, for taking up our time, causing worry, yet also thinking to a time when she was sorry, when she gave all the time she could, to her elderly mother but also to her family.

No, mum, I’m sorry. We’re sorry. You no more chose to have an incurable degenerative disease than my brother chose to have a bicycle accident, or grandmother chose to get old.

I’m lucky, I know. My mum be in an awful place with her MS and that is never getting better. It’s not news. She was diagnosed 32 years and it’s been a slow insidious creep that has ended up here. But she is still here. I’m poignantly heartbeakingly aware of those who don’t have that, those whose parents have died, those whose children have died, friends gone too soon. And the awful inevitability of time.

So I’m sorry. For all those times I wasn’t around, for when I didn’t think, for when I could’ve been better. Yet at the same time I’m not sorry because like mum said it’s life. There is never enough time. All we can do is choose how we spend it and who we spend it with.

 

Princess