The Hardest Visit

I came over to the UK on Tuesday to sort things out. Dad is in hospital. There's a house to deal with, and paperwork, and a solicitor, and a thousand small decisions nobody thinks about until they're the ones who have to make them. That sentence is doing a lot of work, so let me unpack it slowly.

The house was the first shock. I'd been told someone had been in and cleaned. They hadn't, or not properly. It wasn't the mess that got me, though. It was the silence of it. The house was all there, all of it, and she wasn't in any of it.

Then I found that all of Mom's clothes had gone. Every last thing. I walked into the room and the wardrobe was empty, and I knew what that meant before I even asked. I discovered Glynn had got rid of them, at Dad's request.

As much as it saves me a job, I'm still annoyed. I wanted to do that myself. That was mine to do. Maybe that doesn't make sense to anyone who hasn't lost someone, but clearing her things wasn't a chore to me. It was the last bit of caring for her I had left. It was going to be slow, and it was going to hurt, and I'd made my peace with that. I'd even told myself I'd keep something, a scarf maybe, something that still had her on it. Instead I got an empty wardrobe and a decision that had already been made for me. It was taken off me without being asked, and a part of me will always mind that, even knowing it was meant kindly. Even knowing it saves me a job.

Wednesday was spent sorting things out in the house. You don't realise how much of a life there is in a house until you have to go through it without the person. Every drawer. Every cupboard. Every half-finished thing she left behind. And with the solicitor, who still hasn't filed the paperwork for the deputyship. Hopefully soon. There are only so many times you can hear "hopefully soon" before you stop believing it. I've stopped. I just nod now.

Also on Wednesday, Dad was telling people he was being discharged. He'll never come home. Everyone knows it except him, and he's telling anyone who'll listen otherwise. And the worst part isn't the lie, it's the way he tells it. He's not asking. He's telling. He's already decided he's going home. I have to stand there and listen and not be the one to break it, because what good would that do. Let him have the story. He's the only one left who believes it.

That's its own kind of hard.

Thursday was finishing the paperwork and visiting him in hospital. He's still a horrible man. I don't say that with joy and I don't say it lightly. It's just the truth, and the truth is what it is. And he's forgotten that Mom has died. So I have to deal with that constantly. He lives in a world where she's still here, and I'm the one who has to remember she isn't. He talks around her, and I have to choose, every time, whether to remind him or let it pass, and I have to do it without flinching, because he wouldn't understand the flinch. He doesn't remember her enough to miss her. That's its own small grief, and I carry it for both of us.

And then the best part of the whole trip. I saw Paula again. My sister.

I'm still not used to being able to say that. My sister. It comes out of my mouth and it still surprises me, like a word I've learned in a language I don't speak yet. But every time I say it, it's a little truer.

She got to meet Wendy, Mom's best friend, and Sam, my best friend. Three ladies. I watched it happen.

And here's the thing about introducing the people you love to the other people you love. You hold your breath. You hope they'll get on, but you never really know. People can be polite and still not click. I was ready for polite. I was ready for warm, even. I wasn't ready for instant.

They were strangers to each other an hour earlier, and they fell into it like they'd been waiting for the introductions all their lives. Talking over each other, laughing at the same things, easy as anything. Just like Paula and I have. I sat and watched it happen, and it was like watching something being put right. Not fixed, that's not the word. Put right. Like the universe owed us one and quietly paid up.

Wendy carries pieces of Mom that I never got to have. Years of her. Stories, moments, the version of her that existed when I wasn't in the room. Watching Wendy with Paula, I thought about what that meant. The two halves of my life were in that room. The old and the new. The known and the found. And they took to each other without a moment's hesitation.

Sam knows me down to the floorboards. She's seen every version of me there is. And she looked at my sister and loved her on sight, the way you love anyone the person you trust most brings you and says "this is mine." That's what it felt like. Not being introduced to a stranger. Being recognised.

And Paula. My sister. She is both of us somehow, the sister we didn't know we had. She sat there with Wendy and Sam, laughing, holding her own, and I could see her fitting into my life like she'd always been in it.

Seeing the three of them together, laughing like they'd known each other for years, was the best thing I've seen in a long time. It was better than the rest of that week. It felt like a gift, like something was looking out for me.

I feel very lucky. I keep saying that, and I keep meaning it. Lucky to have found her. Lucky that she is who she is. Lucky that the people I love already love her back. We didn't get the forty years we should have had. But we have this. And this is not nothing.

And I'm bringing part of her home with me.

Three scatter tubes of her ashes, packed carefully in my bag. And on my wrist, a small silver bracelet with a tiny tube of her ashes inside it. Wendy gave it to me.

I don't know yet where the tubes will go. Somewhere in Ireland, somewhere she'd love. I'll know it when I see it. There's no rush. She's waited this long to come home, she can wait a little longer.

The bracelet is different. That one stays. It's a small thing, silver and plain, but it keeps a little of her against my skin, and I feel it every time I move. This tiny weight that wasn't there before. Wendy gave it to me, and I don't think she knows what that moment meant. Mom's best friend, putting a piece of Mom into my hands, telling me to take her with me. As if I'd ever have left her behind.

It's hard. It's really hard. Every time I notice the bracelet, there's a second where the air goes out of me. She's gone, and here's the proof of it, worn on my wrist.

But it's warming too. That's the strange part. I know she's with me. Not in a way I could explain to anyone who hasn't carried a loved one's ashes. Just that she is. In the tubes in my bag, and on my wrist, and in the way the three ladies laughed together, and in everything that house still holds. I'm bringing her home. She's with me now. And that helps, more than I can say.

If anything, this visit was harder than Mom's funeral. I don't fully know why yet. Maybe because the funeral was one day. One concentrated blow, and the people around you, and the ceremony, and the doing of it. This was three days of walking through the life she left behind without her in it. The empty house. The missing clothes. The man who doesn't remember her. No ceremony for any of it. Just the work, and the silence, and me.

And the flight home is delayed by 45 minutes. Probably an hour. The universe really knows how to finish a sentence.