The Back of That.

 2021 was the year my mum died. That's how I'm going to remember this year for as long as I remember years. 

2021: the year my mum died. 

I'm grateful to have seen her in the summer. The pandemic meant I hadn't seen her for a year, and she looked better than I anticipated. She was small and helpless and deafer than she had been, and she'd lost a lot of weight. But I'd seen her at Christmas on a Zoom call, and she'd been emaciated, with long thin white hair, seemingly unable to process what was going on. It was heartbreaking. She unwrapped my gift - a framed portrait of my dad I'd painted - and squealed and kissed it. It was a beautiful moment. I'd reached her. Later that year she told me, on the phone, that she had no idea I'd painted it, despite it being signed. I'm not sure that's true. My brother would have told her at the time - he was there. But my mum's memory was a victim of the pandemic. The boredom, the isolation, the lack of stimuli, all of these things impacted horribly on her, as they must have done to so many others. She hid it well. She was sneaky. You could never tell what she'd remembered or forgotten. I remembered when I was at school and desperate to avoid getting glasses, even though I couldn't see. Softies wore glasses. So I was sneaky too. I got away with it, for a while at least, because I was sharp, and I worked hard at hiding it. I remember how I was rumbled. I had a history teacher who liked me (I've forgotten his name - sorry, mate) and who used to compliment my drawings of hairy men with swords attacking people. He was teaching a class about pre-Roman Britain (I can't believe now that anyone would ever teach this to children in the modern world, but they did then. I'm very certain of this, the shame has seared the memory into my brain). We were learning about the British king Cunobelinos, but I couldn't see the black board and wrote it phonetically, as "Cunnybellanus". And so I was rumbled. I was obliged to get an eye test, and then glasses. I was a greasy nerd for the next four years. 

My mother, in fact, didn't believe I needed glasses. She thought I was faking it, because my friend Paul Sutton had recently been given glasses and she thought I "wanted to be one of the gang". The sort of gang who would fair poorly in a rumble because their specs kept fogging up. Later on she told me I "developed" bad eye-sight because I wore glasses too early, and too often. She was a funny sort of nurse. She trotted out this Spartan notion of my indulgent use of spectacles making my eyes soft and lazy the last time I saw her. She had bad eyesight herself, but rarely wore her glasses, even for driving. 

She was like me, working hard to compensate for a weakness: my eyes, her memory. She put on a good front too. When I arrived at the house, over six months after the Christmas Zoom call, I was amazed at how good she looked. The hair fluffy and clean, face on, eyes twinkling. The house too was clean. It was incredible. As Susan and I went into town I was practically skipping. I had been expecting the worst. She didn't eat much, but she ate some food. She even had a glass of wine. When her carer turned up to put her to bed she shooed her away. We watched old films like old times. It was amazing. 

But as the week continued the facade began to crack. She never looked as bright as that first day again, or as well. She ate less. She ate next to nothing. She was vague and baffled and suspicious. Her memory occasionally betrayed large gaps, and the extent of her helplessness became more obvious. She was very frail. Still, as we left - and she waved us off from her nest, beaming through the living room window - I didn't think it would be the last time I saw her alive. But it's a nice image. A sunny snapshot. I remember that smile, bright enough to sear into my memory. 

Other stuff happened in 2021. My 50th birthday came and went, without much celebration - we were all still trapped in our homes. It was ten years since I arrived in Belfast, and ten years since Kelly died. And what a long, strange decade it's been. In the spring I had a short story  published for the first time and, by the end of the year, I'd published five of them. There was a book launch and everything. I did a reading with a backing band. I also illustrated an American magazine cover for the first time. Art school FINALLY paid off.   

I wrote and directed by first film, "Goat Songs", which was a joy to make, even in a Covid bubble. I'm fantastically grateful to still be able to start new adventures at my age. I didn't write anything at all until my mid-forties, and at fifty I'm a published author, a film director and I have two feature films currently in production, one of them for Disney! This would have been a proper Annus Miribilis, but then my mum died, and she didn't get to see any of this. I published a story about her and she never got to read it. She never got to see my film. I mean, I know her reaction would have been "What the hell was that all about then?" But still...

The thrill is gone. My enthusiasm has deflated. Every endeavour rendered flavourless. I think I was working to try and impress her, finally: "Look Ma! No hands!" Now there's no one to impress. It's flattened me. It will come back, I hope. I'm certain it will, I love doing the work. But I'm very glad to be out of this year. 2021: the year my mum died.