Sorry, Mum. I love you so much. I love Ollie too. I’m just sorry I was never enough. Love Lexie xxxx
There were other notes – to us, to yourself, telling yourself not to give up. That you had to go on. And you had. Until the day came you couldn’t.
I saw you as a light that had burned out. When you and Ollie are all that ever really mattered in my life, I’d never imagined being without you. A mother doesn’t. There is no way to describe how the loss of your child feels. How instinctively wrong it is. How it shatters not just your heart, but the natural order of everything you’ve always believed in. After, I cried, raged, grieved, a storm that eventually passed, leaving me stranded somewhere I didn’t want to be. Then I berated myself for being selfish when this wasn’t about me.
It was about you.
29
NOW
Dear Lexie,
If I can’t have you back, I can only hope that somewhere in your life, there was someone who listened to you the way that Joe does to me. We all need that, don’t we? To be heard – unfiltered; unjudged.
I tell Joe all about you. Your dedication, your tireless campaigning. Your love. How I hadn’t realised how much you struggled with what you saw as wrong in the world.
‘If that’s how Lexie really felt, there wasn’t anything you could have done,’ he says much later that evening after we’ve moved into the sitting room, where he closed the curtains against the world before lighting a log fire.
‘But I could have tried,’ I whisper. A part of me knew you had burned out, that you were drinking to escape the pain you felt. As your mother, I should have been able to do something. And I couldn’t.
‘Is there any comfort in knowing Lexie did so much with her life?’ he says softly, getting out a tissue and gently wiping my tears away.
In the dim light, I watch the flames cast flickering shadows. ‘She did. So much.’
And you did. More than I can ever explain, than you will ever know; from your first breath to your last, Lexie.
30
BEFORE
Dear Lexie,
I know that life throws the unexpected at all of us. But not everyone knows how this feels. How can they, unless it’s happened to them; this aching, most unnatural kind of loss?
Unnatural. It’s the word I always use to describe your death, in a world on which we’ve strived to impose order, rules. But didn’t the universe itself come from chaos? A bubbling of energy and matter; unstructured? Does it then follow that in essence, that’s what our lives are? The day before your funeral, I felt you with me when I went to Mary’s garden and gathered flowers for your coffin, picking each of them with love, Lucy and I arranging them in silence; both of us thinking of you.
On the day, it stayed dry. People gathered outside the small church, stepping back on either side of the narrow path to make way as your coffin was carried past.
Ollie was so brave; he read some of your words from your last social media post:
When I started out I was determined to mend a system that was broken. But one person alone can’t change the world. I can’t tell people what to do. All I can do is show them the reality and what their choices support. After that, it’s up to them.
But for all that is wrong, this world is still so breathtakingly beautiful.
Somehow, I got through that day. Took strength from the hundreds of people who had come, most of whom I didn’t know. Some had come from miles away, had seen the same things you had. They saw you as a light in the fight you all shared. It was a measure of what you’d achieved, Lexie.
Then, after: the slow return to life that always came after a loss. Only it was to a life that grief had become a part of, that would never be the same without you in it. Difficult days and weeks passed, during which I was forced to confront what, for so long, I’d denied.
As they always do, life, work, had to go on. But it was hard, sometimes, enough for me to question if I could do it, decorating the biggest, happiest days of people’s lives, when my own life was shrouded in sadness; when every bride and her mother reminded me of what I’d lost.
After you died, I went back to Cornwall. I didn’t tell anyone I was going to search for one of those lumps in the sand I’d imagined us leaving there after that holiday. I walked for miles, wondering if it was possible to physically leave the past behind. Over hills, close to the sea as I realised that some souls were just different. They felt through their hearts, craved the depths of human experience more than the rest of us. To me, a sunset was a glorious display of colour; to you, it was something you felt in every cell of your being, just as pain was.
It took for more time to pass for me to begin to accept the past. That I’d tried to help you, but there was nothing more I could have done. That just as I was imperfect, so were you. We all were. It was part of being human.
31
NOW
