It’s hard to forget your mum

Jackson Biko pays a beautiful Mother’s Day tribute to his beloved mother. PHOTO| FILE

What you need to know:

  • I have these moments when I’m sitting alone, feeling depressed as hell. Weak moments when something stirs the ghosts of my mom and I can’t function at all.

  • There are times these moments come flooding ashore and I go to a bar I’m certain I will not run into anyone I know and I sit in a corner with my whisky and wait for the grey feeling to clear.

You can always pick up the phone and call your mother. She will answer, won’t she? There is comfort in knowing that your mother is only a phone call away. You are still living in this perfect world that hasn’t been fractured by death; a world that is safe and secure and is founded in this deceptive notion that death is a concept.

Your mother is healthy. She has that hearty laughter. She visits. Fusses over your weight. Your choice of women.

Your hairstyle (or lack, thereof). Your marital status. In the meantime, death watches and waits. Patiently. And then one day your mum won’t be able to answer your call.

I have these moments when I’m sitting alone, feeling depressed as hell. Weak moments when something stirs the ghosts of my mom and I can’t function at all.

There are times these moments come flooding ashore and I go to a bar I’m certain I will not run into anyone I know and I sit in a corner with my whisky and wait for the grey feeling to clear.

There are times it catches me right when I’m driving home, at night, and I stop outside the gate and kill the engine and sit there in darkness, with the radio off, and I think of her.

I think of her when she was healthy, when she loved her tea, and how on Saturdays she would wear her leso and walk around the house with a cup of tea in hand, cleaning and dusting and fussing and whining about how we just can’t keep things where they belong: “Biko, I’m tired of picking after you! No woman will ever live with you with this level of carelessness!” (hahaha!)

ENDURING MEMORIES

I think of her at the hospital, when I had taken her for a scan and she was literally a bag of bones, weak and breathless. They made her stand with her chin placed in this metallic surface, and this ugly machine took scans of her chest that contained a broken heart and other organs that were slowly failing. I think of how one night she sat on her bed in my house, and as we were chatting, she told me that she was tired of being sick, tired of taking drugs.

I knew what she was saying. She was tired of living like that, with a terminal illness. She said it with her head bowed dejectedly because she would get nauseous if she raised her head.

I sat with her until very late into the night because I knew she was scared to let go of life, of us – but she was also tired of a body that was irrevocably broken. I didn’t want to leave her in that bedroom alone with thoughts of death and a life that had become laborious, torturous. That night I slept with a broken heart.

Anyway, I think of these moments, sitting in the silent car and wondering what would happen if I called her number and by some miracle she picked up. Just this one time. Just to hear her say “hello”.

Even though I knew I was being ridiculous I would sit there, absorbed in this overwhelming sense of hope in the paranormal.

Finally I would succumb and call her number still saved in my phone as “Nya’ Jim.” Of course the automated lady would remind me that the owner of the number is mteja. Breached by grief, I would break down and weep like a little girl.

Then I would spend another 20 minutes trying to compose myself because you don’t want to walk into your own house looking like you have been crying. It’s unbecoming.

Time heals and there are longer gaps between those episodes… but when they come it’s like they never left.

It’s hard to write about Mother’s Day when you don’t have a mother anymore, but it’s therapeutic to write about memories, good and bad. I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon with a hard tennis ball sitting in my throat.

It’s two days before Mother’s Day, two days before my mum passed on three years ago on a Sunday. Because my mum had a brilliant sense of humour, she decided to bow out on Mother’s Day. That way we couldn’t forget her. (Classic, ey?)

It’s hard to forget your mum. It’s harder to forget her if she was Jane, my mum, big hearted, hilarious, sarcastic, very resourceful, very, very loving, gossipy (which mum isn’t?), wise and a lover of tea. With milk and lots of sugar.

Call your mother today and wish her a Happy Mother’s Day because you still can and because having a mother is the most beautiful honour life will ever bestow you outside having kids.

Happy Mother’s Day, Nya’ Jim. I know you are reading this up there with your lousy reading spectacles which I found ridiculous. You had better be smiling. We miss you terribly. Oh, and Julius is about to get a baby.