Please note: this piece contains content that some readers may find upsetting.
I use my keys to open the front door, take the lift to the third floor, and open the door to her flat. I can still smell her, that delightful mix of Shalamar, figs, Bold washing powder and lavender oil. It smells like sheer comfort, friendship, safety and protection. Home. Mother. This is the last time I will come here while she is still alive. The last time I will let myself in with my set of keys like normal, but thankfully, I don’t know this yet, and my mind is compartmentalising and rearranging everything like a weird kind of coping Tetris. An eerie stillness, an emptiness of sorts, has settled within me and in the flat. Shielded from the true enormity of what is really happening, I set about the task at hand. I have a job to do after all.
I have just left the hospital where we said our final goodbyes, ‘See you when I see you,’ and ‘I’ll come and get you when it’s your time, but not for a while, eh?’ She asks me to go and find a piece of jewellery that once belonged to her father, that she has hidden somewhere ‘safe’. ‘Safe’ could mean a number of places, so it’s my job to find it. She wants her nephew to have it.
I look out at the Mosque and the dancing trees that surround The Hidden Gardens and remember every new year’s eve for the past ten years where the two of us have stood and watched the fireworks, lifting our little glasses – her mum and dads – saying happy new year and then hugging each other and always crying. Weeping at times in acknowledgement of the hard year that has been, the obstacles, the pain, the sorrow, silently hoping that this year will be better, kinder. Crying with gratitude for the fun and laughter, the crazy escapades, the milestones, the friends gathered late at night around her kitchen table. I see the dent of her body in her couch where she sat for the past few years, her bones sore, her face smiling, covering the disease that was attacking her body. My couch is opposite hers. Abandoned now, too.
We would lie there for hours just talking, laughing at nothing and watching ridiculous true crime shows, my Glasgow Mammy and I. She had been more like a second mother than a friend to me over the twenty-plus years I’d been in Glasgow - my champion always, my confidant, my soul sister. Even when I messed up in life, she was there. No judgement. Just unconditional love, sometimes tough - her boundaries strong, but always kind. Always caring. She taught me how to love without conditions or expectations, how to just let people be. To take the rough with the smooth. To see the true heart of a person, but to be authentic in your needs and to be nobody’s fool. What a gift to have a teacher like that. She shone a light to guide me through the dark times, shared her experience of life’s ups and downs and showed me that – the best is always yet to come – no matter what age you are or what your current circumstances may be. We never fought.
I finally found the chain, a beautiful gold cross, secreted in a book with some letters. Jonathan will love it, and Karen will be so relieved. I am getting ready to leave the house when the hall light comes on by itself and starts to flash furiously on and off. ‘Is that you, Karen?’ I say. In response, it starts to slow down and flash like a heartbeat, rhythmically, perfectly, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There is a bag of unopened soil on the floor under the light, so I lie down, use it as a pillow and make myself semi-comfortable. We start to chat. I tell her it’s ok to leave, not to worry about us all. We will be ok. I reiterate everything I’ve said at the hospital, and I just lie there laughing and chatting as the light continues to breathe, in and out, in and out, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I tell her that only she and I would be daft enough to communicate through the hall light, me on a bag of soil in my new cream jacket and her in a hospital bed a few miles away.
They say that when people are preparing to leave this mortal plane, they often drift in and out of here and the next place; their spirit straddling both worlds. I must have lain there for over an hour, just watching the light breathe, feeling the pulse, following the hue and electrical vibrations back and forth through the ether, when I realised I was starving. It was late evening, and because of all the high drama with hospitals and restrictions and the like, I hadn’t eaten. ‘Right, I need to go pet and get some food, I love you.’ And with that, the light suddenly went out. As I took one last look around the flat, I could hear children playing in the distance, the sounds of a full playground, bursting with laughter, the din of voices drifting across the summer sky and then as clear as day, Karen shouting my name at the top of her lungs. I left and locked the door behind me.
It took me a few hours to realise that there had been no children at school as it was the summer holidays. A primary school teacher, she had given her life (thirty-plus years) to teaching the children of Glasgow. I like to think it was her students I heard - past, present and beyond carrying her back and forward to her next place, holding her hand and playfully guiding her back to spirit – my best friend, my ‘Glasgow Mammy’ away up the road.
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