The agonising grief of things left unsaid.

- The agonising grief of things left unsaid  | Daily Mail Online
She was able to fly into a rage at the click of fingers.

My mother died in the early evening of a warm spring day.
She died in my childhood bedroom, the windows open to let in the breeze, to the sound of wood pigeons and blackbirds that had far too much to say.
It had not been a happy week.
I work as a scriptwriter and was in a Writers Room for a new Danger Mouse series, surrounded by funny people, when I got the call to come.
I made my excuses, got into my car and drove back, dreading every mile I got closer.
My father, when I arrived, had been given a job by my mother.
I wasn't allowed upstairs to see her before I had watched a small DVD they had made.

He sat me down and put it on.
It was a black and white film of my parents on their wedding day.
They looked glorious.
My mother, a natural beauty, was in a short Sixties dress knocked up by my aunt on a Singer sewing machine the day before.
My dad was in his shirt sleeves, tie still on, and they were dancing together in the back garden of a Welsh miners' terrace house.
I could see washing on a line behind them.
What struck me was how happy they looked.
It destroyed me.

My father broke the news.
This was it.
The end had come.
We had all sat in a consultant's room a year before listening to a handsome man with salt and pepper hair tell my mother her cancer had returned and this time, there was nothing to be done.
She was going to die.

I remember reaching for her hand and holding it and feeling numb.
I was 46.
She was 70.
We're all going to die.
There is still something shocking about being told when.
She smiled at him.
She hadn't wanted him to feel bad.

It was an odd thing. My mother was adored by the nurses and doctors who looked after her.
She had had the same effect on the thousands of students she taught during her career as a teacher.
My mother was sociable, outrageous, wickedly funny and deeply charismatic but she had a darker side; she was quite mad, but I'll get to that.

Having watched the DVD, I made my way up the stairs.
My legs felt like lead and yet there was still a small voice saying it wasn't true.
My indestructible mother wasn't really dying.
But then I saw her and I collapsed and I don't know if I will ever know a deeper sorrow.
She was lying on her side, reduced beyond all recognition and I tried to smile for her but all that came out was a noise I had never heard before.
I was making it.
I apologised. '
At least I know you love me, she whispered.
I'll get to that later, too.

Family members came and went at the house.
She told a distant cousin to 'have a nice life'.
When she slept I lay next to her and filled the time.
I wrote a script for Danger Mouse.

I finished a chapter of a book.
Women from the hospice came each morning and washed her.
I cried every time.
Every act of kindness was something I felt unable to cope with.
Friends rang.
The sun shone.

She was having trouble eating and, during a morning visit from the district nurse, I had tried to give her some apple.
She couldn't swallow it.
The nurse, sitting on the bed packing her things, looked up at me and said,
'Give her something soft. Something like yoghurt.'

I remembered there was ice cream in the freezer and my mother's eyes, for the first time that week, lit up.
I brought her a bowl and she ate every last bit of it.
I actually jumped for joy.
'She's eaten something!'
I told my father.
For 20 minutes I allowed myself to think she might be getting better.
And then the vomiting started.

I have emetophobia, a profound fear of vomit, which began when I was seven and saw my mother throwing up after being admitted to hospital with renal colic.
Now I was unable to go to her.
Looking after her was left to my father and my aunt and cousins who had arrived that morning.
It was a Sunday, beautiful.
But my mother was vomiting and couldn't stop and I was told to ring the district nurse.
She came and I stood at the bottom of the stairs. The nurse gave her an injection to stop the sickness and another to help her sleep. I was called up to look at her. 'She's all right,' said my dad, with a hand on my arm.
I just felt ashamed.
I stood chatting to the district nurse and we went back to look at her again.
Her breathing had changed.
The nurse shook her arm and called her name.
My mother didn't respond and the nurse turned to me and my father and said, 'It's going to be today.'

My mother never woke up again.
We all sat round her, the people she loved the most, and watched as her breathing shallowed and the blue inched up her arm and her fingers turned the colour of a dusty sky.

At the moment of her death, my beagle, who loved her, appeared in the doorway of the room.
She had stayed away, which had surprised us all, but now she came.
She nuzzled my mother's hand and that was it.
She was gone.

Grief is a difficult business.
My mother had been an extraordinary woman.
She had been a whirlwind in my life.
I had loved her but I had struggled to like her because there was one great unspoken truth that had hung over all our lives.
My mother had an undiagnosed mental illness.

When I was born, my mother had what would now be called postpartum psychosis, a psychiatric breakdown that affects around one in a thousand new mothers.
She changed for ever.

The only version of my mother I knew was the woman who was brilliant, wonderful and utterly terrifying.
When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad she was horrid.
She was able to fly into a rage at the click of fingers, scream in shops, smash things, throw books at heads, embarrass me anywhere and everywhere.
I resented it, deeply.
It took me over 30 years to realise there might be something medically wrong with her.

In an age when mental illness was not discussed, I simply thought she was awful, but as her behaviour worsened and became more erratic I realised she wasn't awful.
She was ill.

By her mid-50s paranoia had crept in.
She would tell me her phone was bugged, neighbours were trying to steal the house, my father was having affairs with every cashier in Sainsbury's.
When she was 60, I sat in another consultant's room and listened to her tell him she had been given cancer by a CIA operative in a bookshop in Cambridge.

Nobody batted an eyelid.
We were used to this but we were so scared of her, neither I nor my father ever dared ask her whether she thought she might need help or medication.
We were so weary of the rages, we dared not risk one.

It seems impossible but I never, not once, asked her whether she thought she might have a mental illness.
I never asked her what made her sad, or what made her happy.
I never asked about who she was before she had me.
I never asked her what her parents' divorce, at a time when the shame of such things hung heavy, did to her. I never asked her about her.

We are with our parents for so long it's a shame we don't get to know them but I know this: I failed my mother and I wish I hadn't.
I wish I had asked her what made her unhappy, I wish I had asked her if she needed help, I wish I had discussed her behaviour with a doctor.
I wish I had done something for her that might have made her life a little easier.
There were so many things I should have said.
But I didn't and I feel a loss beyond the grief of what might have been had I had the courage.

My father and I eventually had the strength to discuss her having a mental illness, but only after she died.

Never leave things unsaid.
Because after they're gone, you don't get the chance to put anything right.

The Things We Left Unsaid by Emma Kennedy (Century) from August 22, £12.99.