She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me by Emma Brockes

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    It occurred to her that she had two options: to carry on living, or to kill herself. We sat side by side at the kitchen table. I put my head on my arm. In an odd way, I was less disturbed by the information itself than by the fact of its eleventh-hour revelation. It seemed to me incredible that, behind all those hints and intimations, all those years of comic threats and camp overreactions that I had come to see, more or less, as a flourish of character, an actual solid event had existed. Occasionally over the years I had wondered which would be worse: to discover that something terrible
had
happened, or that not very much had happened at all and that either my mother or I had concocted a drama from nothing. As she spoke, a tiny part of me was relieved that neither of us had turned out to be mad.
    I was also incredulous. Deathbed revelations weren’t something people had. That my mother, who would ring me at work with the news flash that she’d found the socks she was looking for, that the thermal vests she’d ordered for my dad had arrived, that a woman we knew slightly had walked past the house and her ankles were huge, and whom I rang back with the news I’d had tuna for lunch, had managed to keep this from me was extraordinary.
    There was no time to think about it. I knew, dimly, that it would come back at some stage and demand to be thought about. But right then, alongside the daily effort of not looking forward, not looking back was relatively easy. Only once, and for a second, did I have any real understanding of what she had told me—that to her this was not an ancient grievance, easily back-burnered. It was a few days later. She was walking through the door from the kitchen to the hallway. A thought occurred to her in that instant that she articulated to me, sitting at the kitchen table, and that in the face of stiff competition still constitutes I think the most shocking moment of
my
life.
    She looked at me and said, with something like surprise and as if it had only just occurred to her, “I think I have come to terms with it.” Not “came,” but “have come.” As if, in all those years of village life, in the market, at the tennis club, in the midst of our mild existence, a process had been ongoing, another reality alive to her in which she’d been wholly alone.
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    FOR THE SPACE of an afternoon she had sat in her flat and weighed up her options. If she lived, she said, she had to be sure she could meet two conditions: one, that she would never be intimidated again; and two, that she would be happy. She may very well have done this. But—and I knew this instantly—the recollection had a tailored quality to it that suggested the scene had been worked on. It bore all the hallmarks of my mother’s philosophy: that it’s not what happens to you that matters so much as the story you choose to tell afterward—even if the only person you tell is yourself.
    A few days later I asked her, as a joke, if there were any skeletons in the closet. She gave the appearance of thinking about it. “No,” she said, and tilting her face upward launched her most theatrically innocent look. “I don’t think so.” Oh, God.
    She died at 7:20 p.m. on a warm summer evening, in the downstairs guest bedroom of our house. All that talk of “putting one’s affairs in order” had fallen away to this: “You and your dad must stick together.” I had told her we would. She had tried, then, to counsel me about her own death. “You’ll be sore afterward . . .” This was too much, even for my mother, and she looked away. I was furious that she should even try such a thing, such a piece of existential masochism, just as I’d been furious when, well into her illness and unsteady on her feet, she had insisted on going out every morning to feed the birds. I had wanted to