Today marks exactly a month since my mother died. While time has gone quickly, it has also moved at a frustratingly slow pace. Even though I’m in the house by myself, I’ve spent the last four weeks seemingly in constant communication with the outside world. I’m making calls, receiving calls, compiling documents, waiting for documents, or faxing and emailing documents. I expected this, having been through it before after my father’s death, but I was 30 years younger and probably more patient then. I also had my mother there to at least to share the grief and busywork.

I’ve been trying to go through all of the “stuff” that makes up someone’s life, but that has been difficult. Four years of full-time caregiving meant that my priorities weren’t on housework. They were on crisis management. I was on-call 24/7, in a constant state of fight or flight. Every morning I’d wake up, walk to her bedroom and wonder, “Is this the day I don’t find her breathing?”.

So, there is clutter. Lots of clutter. I have managed to get rid of some of the items that I never really liked or that just aren’t my style. What I haven’t really begun to tackle are her clothes. My mother took great pride in looking nice and well put together. Everything matched. Gloves and scarf, shoes and handbag. For my cousin Amanda’s wedding, for example, she found this lovely gray, Vera Wang dress on sale. She had the gray shoes, the handbag, the perfect jacket, and the gray pantyhose. It took her months to find matching lingerie, but she did. Even though she was the only one who knew the lingerie matched. In fact, that lingerie cost more than the dress!

So, looking through her closets, I pick up a cashmere sweater here or a jogging outfit there and I smell the perfume she wore most of the time: Estee Lauder White Linen. This stops me straightaway and I cry. Sometimes the tears are big, mournful, grieving tears. Other times, they are happy tears remembering a time we went to the museum or to dinner or sat around watching episodes of Eastenders or Call the Midwife.

One of these days, I’ll get through all the stuff that made up her life and integrate the bits that give me joy into the life and home that I’m now creating for myself. I came across a poem by Seamus Heaney called “Clearances” that he wrote after his mother’s death. I found these lines particularly meaningful:

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned
And we all knew one thing by being there.
The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open
High cries were felled and a pure change happened.