Memento mori

Sunday mornings are all about reading the papers and noodling about. I start with the online Observer, move through the Sydney Morning Herald, the IoS, the Australian, the Times, the Torygraph and Scotland on Sunday, via Aftenposten and Dagbladet, with a quick look at the Beeb. I can while away the whole morning with the Sunday papers.

But how I miss having a hard copy version of the Observer scattered over my bed on Sunday mornings. When I lived in the UK, I'd get up ridiculously early, put some clothes over my pyjamas, run to the corner shop, buy an armful of newspapers and a couple of croissants and head home. Then it was back to bed for a snooze before warming up the pastries, making a pot of espresso and taking it back to bed. Breakfast in bed with a presshall's worth of the papers? Indulgent, delightful and one of the best things about the week.

These days, it's more of a sit at the kitchen table in front of a laptop routine, which is nowhere near as satisfying or decadent. But if I didn't do it, Sunday wouldn't be the same.

This morning's trawl brought me up short.

I was reading the Observer and came across this article. I don't know whether it's because Mum's birthday is looming or because Steward touches on points that still resonate almost four years after Mum's death, but her story made me search out the photo above.

It's not a particularly good photo technically, but it is a good photo. It captures Mum as she was in the last "good" phase of her life. You can still see her, her spark, her crankiness, her humour, and she still carries traces of her beauty, despite the illness. But it's also a true image, reflecting that time precisely - my father and I are alive, rude with good health, while death's fingerprints are smudging Mum's face. It's one of the last photos I have of Mum.

There was one particular line in Steward's piece that prompted me to look at the photo again:
My friend Krysia keeps her mother's hairband and says she cries when she wears it because she can still smell her hair on it. "I don't wear it often," she says, "because it could lose her smell."

About three months or so before Mum died, I went down south. On the way to Jindabyne, we stopped at Goulburn to fill up and marvel at the Big Merino. I bought Mum a pair of woolly bedsocks. Her feet were always cold, it was a small discomfort that amplified the larger, harder discomforts of terminal illness. Having cold feet was something she felt she could complain about. So, I bought her a pair of merino wool socks, in a pastelly mauve (a definite Mum colour). When I got back from the Snowies, I gave them to her. They helped, a little. She wore them almost constantly.

Of all the things that belonged to Mum that I have with me, the socks are the most important. There's still a lingering trace of her scent on them. It's a combination of Mum and eucalyptus wool wash and baby powder and Mum. It's the best smell in the world. They're in a drawer, in my room.

There's nothing else in that drawer. Just the socks. The socks my Mum wore for the last few months of her life. The socks she wore the day she died. The socks I remember rolling off her feet before we washed her body and entrusted her to the undertaker.

And like Steward's friend Krysia, I don't bring them out of the drawer very often. In part because something banal - a pair of mass-produced mauve woolly socks bought on impulse in a tacky souvenir shop - can stir up grief again. But mostly because every time I disturb them, a little bit of my Mum's smell - a small, tangible piece of Mum, proof positive that she really was here - disappears forever.