Mum

This blog has been written with the full consent of both my parents. My mum would love to read any (nice) comments or messages you would like to leave, either on here or twitter/facebook.

Food is inextricably linked to both memory and comfort. What's the best thing you've ever eaten? This isn't a question where the answer is likely to be "the tasting menu at The Fat Duck" or "lunch at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons" (though Lord knows I wish it was). This is likely to be a question where the answer is so personal it's almost secretive. An answer that requires all the senses and memory. An answer that won't necessarily tally up to anyone else's idea of a good meal.
Christmas dinner when I was about 7 and still believed in Santa, high on the magic of the thing, eating in the dining room by candlelight as it slowly got dark, with fairy lights and people everywhere. Every Christmas dinner for that matter, especially the one when my kids gave me a round of applause afterwards, even though most of it came from Messrs Marks and Spencer.
Soft beetroot sandwiches in the old van - not like a people carrier, but a Transit with seats bolted in the back, the only thing we'd all fit in - on the way to the seaside, where more beetroot sandwiches and squash awaited.
Chips in the back of that same van. Chips that I didn't like because, for some reason, I had a mortal hatred of them until I was about 14. I used to eat monstrosities like pineapple fritters to avoid the horror of chips. On holiday, we would sing all the way back to the caravan at the tops of our lungs, full of chips and warm coke from a sandy plastic cup.
Then later, much later, a massive cheese toastie, a kitkat and a pint of tea, after a night of illicit drinking down the Wellhead.

My mum's roast beef dinner, with all the trimmings and homemade cheese sauce. A meal to revive the soul. A meal I won't get to eat many more times.

My mummy is going to die.

We all know our parents will die. We have that factual knowledge, because that is what happens. Death is the trade off for life. Everyone dies, hopefully in a generational order. It is the right way of things. We reach adulthood under the care of our parents, and then the caring reverses (eventually) and we look after our parents as they die.
But really, we all think our parents are immortal. We think we will have them with us until we are old ourselves, and being old ourselves is such a distant concept that it translates to near-immortality. We've heard the statistics. We see the Macmillan cancer adverts on TV. We know so-and-so's daughter died of cancer when she was only 15, 25, or 40. But until it happens to you, you do not think your parents will die until YOU are ready for it to happen.

My mum found out she had cancer in an unusual, and quite dramatic way, after a few weeks of illness explained away by other causes. She says she's had a good idea about it for a while, but was afraid to get it confirmed. Afraid of the tests, and the internal prodding, and waiting for the results, and the grave consultations. So, instead, she waited until all hell broke loose within and found out off her merry head on morphine in an ICU, far from home. Her official diagnosis is metastatic ovarian cancer. She prefers to simply say she's dying. We don't know how long she has left yet.
But, we will have no false hope here. No platitudes. No denial. There will be no mad dashes to America for some bizarre, unproven treatment.

What we will do is look after her. My mum has had a lot of babies. Our ages range from 37 to 15. She has an army of carers, not least my wonderful dad. The joy of a big family is that when this happens, it's not one or two of you bleakly staring at each other over a deathbed; it's a platoon of you giggling over memories, being able to take over and stop each other getting too exhausted. It's a web of support that you don't need to go and look for, with different skills and styles of care. Mum doesn't want to be in hospital, surrounded by strangers. She wants to be at home with us, so she will be.

But back to food. My mum has been cooking professionally for years, mainly in care homes but also for weddings, parties, christenings and wakes. If you've been to a family 'do, you've probably eaten Mum's sandwiches. If you haven't, then you are Missing Out. Her illness has recently meant she's stopped enjoying food, because she hasn't been able to eat. She's even stopped thinking about food.
I can't think of my mum without thinking about food. This is a woman who's most common phrase is "GET OUT OF MY TRIANGLE", meaning sink/oven/surface. A woman who once, halfway through a family quiz, fell asleep until the question "How do you make a roux?" came up.  She opened her eyes, recited the ingredients, and went straight back to sleep. She taught me how to roast a chicken, how to poach eggs properly, and how to manage a kitchen. She has been bulk catering regularly since about 1990. She gave me my own obsession with cooking books - I used to read her hideous 80s cooking magazine collection as a small - and then plundered it to read herself.

I can't eat now. It's not exactly grief because she's not dead, and we shouldn't waste our time wailing about her being dead until she actually is. It's a grief for the future that would have been, if this disease hadn't happened. It's a selfish grief for the imminent  loss of such a wealth of advice (particularly with parenting) and love and care. It's fear. It's a little disbelief because how? She's 54. I thought I might get another twenty years, at least. I can't imagine myself without her.

Let me tell you something about my mummy. She is as strong as an ox. She has given birth to eight babies (my tiny brother Thomas didn't make it) and never had pain relief - one of us weighed nearly 11lb. She has had this cancer for an unknown amount of time, long enough for it to really take hold, and carried on working full time and caring for her home and children. She has coped with her parents dying, with having all these children, with all our dramas - god there's been some dramas -with faith and humour. She has had an acute life-threatening illness and dangerous operation that would have killed less hardy people and sailed through it. She laid in her hospital bed, still very physically unwell, bitching merrily about everything, expecting my dad to be psychic, totally her normal self (aside from immediately after morphine when she started asking about Uboats and hearing tingling). She has taken this awful news on the chin, with black jokes and sorrow and love. She says she's not strong. She says she's not brave. She says she's a coward or she would have gone and got it sorted out before. She is wrong. My mum is being strong and brave and an example to us all.

Mum has requested that, if you feel inclined to do something and can afford to, that you please donate to Macmillan Cancer Support through this link. They are truly being wonderful at the moment.