annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary

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Day 242

This is what I wrote in the memoir group tonight. I didn't get to read out as I had last week and there are too many of us to all read every week. I don't know if I would have done - I don't think I want to come out as a bereaved mother or whatever it is that I am. We'd talked about writing in scenes, each one set in a time and a place and having a beginning, middle and end, so that's what I tried to do here.

Playing rounders, desperately, in a clearing in Black Park, just off the motorway, somewhere near Slough. Cold October, Sammie in her wheelchair, wrapped in blankets, in her bright pink fleecy jacket, her hair whipping round her face in the wind. The family, this motley crew, summoned by the care home, crowded into her room for what we thought was something mundane about her and her life there, her MS. The dour faced old nurse in her navy uniform telling us Sam can't swallow any more - you (she meant us, me, her mother), need to decide whether she should have a feeding tube or if nature should take its course. By which she meant let Sam starve to death. OK, she said. Now fuck off till tomorrow, then come back and tell us what we should do.
I don't know where we slept that night, so far away from home, or how we ended up in that park surrounded by looming evergreen trees, and god knows where the rounders kit came from, but there we were, keeping some kind of face on for Sam's son, only 12, playing rounders for our lives, not knowing what to think of Sam's life, silent, unable to walk or use her hands or eat. Not knowing what to want, for her or for ourselves.
But I'm rubbish at sport and kept missing the ball - I couldn't hit it or catch it or throw it straight, until suddenly I did, I hit that fucker so hard it soared up into the air in a perfect arc and I whooped and cheered in a sudden rush of exhilaration.
And she laughed, her face lit up and she let out out a good, full-bodied, Sammie cackle.
We looked at each other and we knew. We knew and we played on, running and laughing, catching and throwing, peeling off layers of jackets and jumpers, into the dusk of the evening.

I just looked up that time in the blog and I remembered it all wrong. But there you go. Wednesdays are hard.
Three good things today:
1. A good, penultimate counselling session
2. Daughter borrowed my car and we had a hug. An illegal hug, but what we both needed. I only cried a bit.
3. A long chat with Son who had a good day at work and has taken up yoga with Adriene.

All good. xxx

10:35 p.m. - 11.11.20

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