in this little house I know so well: I can’t imagine how I could be anywhere else. That night, after we all finally go to bed
(it is strange, this, it doesn’t feel right somehow but staying up all night won’t help and I am so, so tired), I go to the loo, the baby pressing on my bladder. I find my way there
instinctively, without turning on the lights. It’s comforting to realize I know every inch of this place; that I can find my way around in the dark.
Over the next few days, we find out a little more. My mother – my beautiful, funny, ferociously loving mother – was walking through Rome’s Termini Station that morning. She was
on holiday with two old friends, Jack (her adored ex-husband, the man she married before she met my father) and his partner Brian. They had just stepped onto one of the flat mechanical walkways
that carried passengers to the platforms and were moving along it, separated by a few yards, when the section that my mother was standing on collapsed inwards, crushing her in the mechanism. My
mother was killed instantly, Jack and Brian told us, despite heroic attempts from passers-by to save her. Later we will find out that that the walkway was being repaired and had mistakenly been
left open and accessible (the ‘no entry’ cones had been placed at the wrong walkway by maintenance staff), rendering it fatally dangerous. It was a happy morning, Jack and Brian assure
us, and a good trip. My mother had been planning, Brian adds, to buy clothes for my new baby.
Whatever I have previously imagined grief to be like, from reading and television and my imagination, I am wrong. It is not operatically dreadful, a soaring, wailing, instant heartbreak
accompanied by the rending of garments and the gouging of skin. Things carry on. We are still ourselves: we drink tea and talk and eat biscuits. I sleep, constantly: fatigue keeps coshing me round
the back of the neck and I have to stagger off and lie down. Olivier spends a lot of time in the backyard smoking, keeping my stepfather, made garrulous by shock, company. The rest of the time he
is on the phone to the consulate and the airlines and the coroner, using his vast energies to get my mother’s body home (this takes on an inordinate importance; I need her to be back). It is
a thick fog of logistics, tiredness and unease, with a considerable, inevitable, amount of life as usual, thanks to Theo. We go to feed the ducks, we visit the Railway Museum and play with the toy
trains in the Early Learning Centre, between awful administrative tasks and visits from devastated friends and family.
There is a lot to be done. We have to choose a coffin (from an awful laminated catalogue; sitting on the slippery Co-op Funeral couch I get the giggles and choose badly) and organize a funeral
(venue, food and flowers). Piles of post begin to arrive from people whom I have never met or even heard of, detailing the ways in which my mother touched their lives. Others turn up on our
doorstep: a huge contingent of family, brothers and sisters, a former neighbour with the slightly eccentric gift of a microwave, colleagues and acquaintances. A criminal prosecution is underway in
Rome and we have to find representation, and my stepfather becomes very ill and ends up in hospital suffering the after-effects of shock.
Throughout it all, I feel detached. I function relatively well practically, but emotionally, I am almost entirely absent, enveloped in a thick cognitive fog, the insulating bulk of my pregnancy
acting as a shock absorber. My mother is absent from my thoughts – her real, vital self, the person who was going to Rome to drink wine and admire ecclesiastical vestments and buy baby
clothes for her new grandchild.
At her funeral I try, really try, to conjure her up. The sight of my mother’s small coffin, carried by my father and Olivier, makes my sister and I clutch one another again and sob, but
the feeling passes. My sister has done a magnificent job
(it is strange, this, it doesn’t feel right somehow but staying up all night won’t help and I am so, so tired), I go to the loo, the baby pressing on my bladder. I find my way there
instinctively, without turning on the lights. It’s comforting to realize I know every inch of this place; that I can find my way around in the dark.
Over the next few days, we find out a little more. My mother – my beautiful, funny, ferociously loving mother – was walking through Rome’s Termini Station that morning. She was
on holiday with two old friends, Jack (her adored ex-husband, the man she married before she met my father) and his partner Brian. They had just stepped onto one of the flat mechanical walkways
that carried passengers to the platforms and were moving along it, separated by a few yards, when the section that my mother was standing on collapsed inwards, crushing her in the mechanism. My
mother was killed instantly, Jack and Brian told us, despite heroic attempts from passers-by to save her. Later we will find out that that the walkway was being repaired and had mistakenly been
left open and accessible (the ‘no entry’ cones had been placed at the wrong walkway by maintenance staff), rendering it fatally dangerous. It was a happy morning, Jack and Brian assure
us, and a good trip. My mother had been planning, Brian adds, to buy clothes for my new baby.
Whatever I have previously imagined grief to be like, from reading and television and my imagination, I am wrong. It is not operatically dreadful, a soaring, wailing, instant heartbreak
accompanied by the rending of garments and the gouging of skin. Things carry on. We are still ourselves: we drink tea and talk and eat biscuits. I sleep, constantly: fatigue keeps coshing me round
the back of the neck and I have to stagger off and lie down. Olivier spends a lot of time in the backyard smoking, keeping my stepfather, made garrulous by shock, company. The rest of the time he
is on the phone to the consulate and the airlines and the coroner, using his vast energies to get my mother’s body home (this takes on an inordinate importance; I need her to be back). It is
a thick fog of logistics, tiredness and unease, with a considerable, inevitable, amount of life as usual, thanks to Theo. We go to feed the ducks, we visit the Railway Museum and play with the toy
trains in the Early Learning Centre, between awful administrative tasks and visits from devastated friends and family.
There is a lot to be done. We have to choose a coffin (from an awful laminated catalogue; sitting on the slippery Co-op Funeral couch I get the giggles and choose badly) and organize a funeral
(venue, food and flowers). Piles of post begin to arrive from people whom I have never met or even heard of, detailing the ways in which my mother touched their lives. Others turn up on our
doorstep: a huge contingent of family, brothers and sisters, a former neighbour with the slightly eccentric gift of a microwave, colleagues and acquaintances. A criminal prosecution is underway in
Rome and we have to find representation, and my stepfather becomes very ill and ends up in hospital suffering the after-effects of shock.
Throughout it all, I feel detached. I function relatively well practically, but emotionally, I am almost entirely absent, enveloped in a thick cognitive fog, the insulating bulk of my pregnancy
acting as a shock absorber. My mother is absent from my thoughts – her real, vital self, the person who was going to Rome to drink wine and admire ecclesiastical vestments and buy baby
clothes for her new grandchild.
At her funeral I try, really try, to conjure her up. The sight of my mother’s small coffin, carried by my father and Olivier, makes my sister and I clutch one another again and sob, but
the feeling passes. My sister has done a magnificent job
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