By Sandra Sedgbeer

Death and my mother are no strangers. When she was 14, she almost died of pleurisy and pneumonia. Then, a few years later, her first baby was found dead in her crib at the age of three months. I never knew until just a few years ago how deeply that affected my mother; how she'd carried the guilt with her throughout all the years since that day. Seeing her cry was as rare an occurrence as receiving a hug, or a kiss, or praise for anything that any of us had done. A product of a very poor and incredibly tough upbringing, my mother never really learned how to open herself up to love or how to express what she was feeling. And so we - my two brothers, two sisters and myself - grew up believing that perhaps she hadn't really wanted us at all, or at the very least, found being left with five children to bring up on her own to be too onerous a task to leave any energy left for displays of affection or praise.

Life hasn't treated my mother very well. Death visited her again when my father, whom she met at the age of 14 and married at the age of 18, died of pneumonia on his 36th birthday leaving her with four young children and another one - me - on the way. This was a time when there was very little help available to widows in Britain. Although her large family rallied round and offered assistance, mum's pride made it difficult for her to accept help easily. Moreover her prickly nature, sharp tongue, and dislike of being "told" what to do did nothing to endear her to people.

As a child, I loved my mum. And although there were many occasions when she was "not there for us," I was quick to make excuses for her (as children do) and always wanted to beat the living daylights out of anyone who criticized her (which I actually was far too timid to do). But as I grew up and had a family of my own, the love that I had felt for my mother began to fade beneath the weight of what I perceived to be her many shortcomings. Kissing and cuddling my own children, I often wondered why my mum had never kissed or cuddled me. Whenever I had talked as a child about my own ambitions to be a writer, she had never uttered one single word of encouragement. On the contrary she often looked at me as if I were mad, deluded, or both. "Get yourself a nice, steady job as a secretary, and a nice, steady pay packet," was the only advice she ever offered. Words that I interpreted at the time as having only two meanings: "I was over-estimating my own talents" and "a mediocre job, with a mediocre wage, and a mediocre life is all you can expect, my girl, so forget your fancy ideas and accept what life doles out to you".

When I started having some success as a writer, I felt certain that she would offer a word of praise or two. When I had my first book published, I thought to myself, "She'll tell me she's proud of me now." When I made my first television appearance I was absolutely certain that she couldn't possibly ignore that achievement. But mum never said the words I wanted and needed so badly to hear. Not then nor later as more books came, more newspaper articles were written about me, more television shows wanted to interview me. Her only acknowledgement was to ask me whether "I was earning good money," as if "money" were the only yardstick by which she would judge me a "worthy" person.

"What on earth do I have to do to get my own mother to tell me she loves me and is proud of me?" I used to rant internally. After a while I stopped asking myself that question; I gave up expecting words of praise. Instead I just buried my hurt and shut off my feelings telling myself that I no longer cared because she obviously didn't care. As my hurt gave way to silent seething, I spent many hours reviewing all her shortcomings, and as I did so, my anger and my resentment began to grow very quietly and very subversively at first. But, as we all know, emotions such as these are like a cancer; once they take hold they feed off every little hurt, every imagined slight or rejection, until one day you find yourself poisoned by your own perceptions.

In my mind the mother I had thought I loved as a little girl, was a waspish, unfeeling, selfish, insensitive, embittered woman who couldn't give love because she didn't feel love. By that time I was an independent, self-sufficient adult, bringing up two kids on my own, and doing a far, far better job of looking after their emotional needs, than my mother had with me and my brothers and sisters, or so I told myself.

At some point in her early 70's Mum was finally forced to retire when the company she had been working for changed hands. As someone with few inner resources, no hobbies, and a non-existent ability to amuse herself, this obviously came as a big blow. Working kept her from being bored with her own company. She had always hated Sundays because it meant being shut indoors with no shops to visit nor any people to talk to. Saturdays weren't so bad because I always took her shopping (a self-imposed chore that I resented immensely, because it never gave me much time for myself), and though my brothers and sisters would often visit at the weekend, on the occasions when they didn't she always found a way to pull the guilt-strings by letting me know that she'd spent the whole day in tears.

Without work to keep her occupied, mum's world began to narrow down to one or two friends, daily trips to the shops, cleaning her flat (boy, did she have a thing about cleaning!) and visits from or to her family. Suddenly she was becoming older, more depressed, less self-sufficient, and more and more dependent on me. I was the youngest, but I lived the closest. Working for myself meant I also had a more flexible schedule than my siblings did. Over a period of time, I became her self-appointed "carer." The others played their parts, too, of course, but for some strange reason I felt strongly obligated to play the dutiful daughter. I didn't know it then, but it was the guilt that was driving me. Why guilt?

Because I am deeply ashamed to admit that as I grew stronger and my mother grew weaker, that long-dammed-up river of resentment began to break its way through. Little bubbles of resentment would surface whenever we were together. They would find expression in abruptness and impatience, in my set jaw and hear loud sighs of exasperation at her insistence on always having me do chores when, how, and in the specific manner that she wanted them done. (I never understood what difference it made if I washed her lace curtains every two weeks instead of weekly or bought her brand "A" butter instead of brand "B.") Her inability to see the good side of people, her manipulative behavior, depressions, boredom, negativity, selfishness, self-absorption, lack of kindness, and insensitivity toward others infuriated me. (Did I ever think that I was being shown a mirror? Not for a single moment did it occur to me!)

One winter she slipped over in the snow and fractured her leg. When she was finally allowed home from the hospital she was confined to her living room, unable to move around because her leg was in plaster. None of us had any space for her at our houses, so that necessitated twice-daily drives of thirty minutes each way for me to take care of her. I had two children to look after, a home to run, a book deadline looming, plus freelance work to attend to, but still, I knew my duty and I did it. And so the dance went on. Another burden and another reason for resentment.

By now, though, I was getting pretty adept at rationalizing away the guilt that somehow always seemed to dog my growing pile of "reasons" for resentment. I'd remind myself she was only acting depressed and upset to manipulate me. I was doing as much as I could - more than many daughters would, wasn't I? Good grief, with all I had going on, she couldn't possibly expect me to be all sweetness and smiles, too! To be fair to myself, I did try to make an effort. But the moment I saw her down-turned mouth or heard yet another complaint, my solar plexus would heave and tighten, and the door in my heart that had opened up a little at her helplessness would quickly slam shut within minutes of coming within her negative field of energy.

Eventually mum recovered and everything returned to normal by which I mean I continued stoically to do my duty and mum continued, in her own inimitable way, to "'push all my buttons." Then came the night when I called her to arrange our usual Saturday shopping outing. I'd been putting off making the "Friday night" call as I always had to psyche myself up for a half hour or more of chatter which usually consisted of a minutely-detailed report of which number bus she had got on that day, which route it had taken, who she had talked to, what she had said, etc., etc., and usually terminated with several renditions of "Well-I'll-let-you-go now-oh-by-the-way..." before I would eventually be able to hang up. Only this night was different, because Mum didn't answer the phone. She always answered the phone. So where was she?

I left it a while just in case she'd popped next door to visit her neighbor then I called again...still no reply. I hunted out her neighbor's number and asked if my mother was with her. She wasn't. Had she seen her that evening? Yes, she had. I called my sister to see if she knew anything. She told me that she'd spoken to mum earlier and that she'd said she had a bad headache. My sister had advised her to take an aspirin and go to bed. Mum hated going to bed so we both knew that wasn't likely. I called her neighbor again and asked her to knock at my mother's door. The seconds dragged into minutes...there was a strange feeling in my solar plexus. It felt different than the guilt and tension that normally resided there...it felt a lot like fear.

"I think you'd better drive over," mum's neighbor said ominously when she eventually came back to the phone. "I looked through her kitchen window, and I could see a light on and the TV sounded rather loud so I know she must be there, but she's not answering the door."

I must have broken the speed limit because I made that thirty minute journey in about fifteen minutes flat. Mum's neighbor was waiting for me. Hesitantly, nervously, I inserted the key in the lock, took a deep breath and walked into the living room. And there she was, lying unconscious on the floor. I called the emergency services, then picked up mum's hand, and tried to rouse her. She mumbled something, then started calling me "mummy." I understood then that my mother had had a stroke.

The next few weeks were awful. At first, we didn't know whether she would live or die. If she lived, we didn't know how badly the stroke would have affected her. Slowly, painfully, she went through the process of recovering her speech and her ability to walk. The stroke had affected the right side of her brain and, therefore, the left side of her body. She spent many weeks in hospital having physiotherapy, treatment, tests, more physiotherapy, more tests. And all the while I felt this strange sensation inside me. I think it was the ice beginning to crack around my heart.

It was a tough time for all of us but most of all for my mother. I was in awe of her determination to recover whatever abilities she could. But as I said, she's a tough old cookie and to her credit, she did learn to speak again and even to walk again though she never became really steady on her feet. I thought about having her live with me then rejected the idea. She would need a lot of care, her own room, a place without stairs...and then there was her temperament and state of mind - the stroke had made my mother even more depressive and negative than she had been before.

"Why did this have to happen to me?" she would repeatedly cry. After several months of listening to her bemoaning her fate, rather than appreciating what she had managed to regain, those all too familiar bubbles of resentment once again began to solidify and freeze around my heart.

A few years passed. We all shared the burden of looking after mum. She wouldn't consider leaving her home, and none of us were able to have her live full time with us, so we just visited her even more frequently and took on more chores than we had before. Our lives seemed to become an endless round of shopping for mum, cleaning for mum, housekeeping, vacuuming, taking down her lace curtains every week, putting up a clean set and taking the (barely) dirty ones home to wash them ready for the following week. She became even more impatient, querulous, negative, and difficult to deal with; she was beginning to drive us all nuts. And yet, strangely, it began to be obvious to me that there was a positive side to my mother's stroke. For even as her short-term memory was becoming almost dangerously unreliable, long-term memories were beginning to surface... and for the first time in her life she was talking to me about her experiences. That's when I began to move beyond my own limited, flawed, subjective perceptions about my mother and see the real person behind the image she had presented to the world.

One particular Saturday afternoon we were sitting in a restaurant eating lunch when, right out of the blue, she suddenly started talking about her first baby, the one that had died. My father had been out of work at the time so money was short. To help out my mother had announced that she was going to get a job.

"And what about the baby?" my father had demanded.

"I'll take her to a day nursery," my mother replied.

"Well, if anything ever happens to that baby, I'll never forgive you," he said.

I will never forget the look on my mother's face as she repeated my father's words...or the feeling as those inches-thick layers of ice in my chest suddenly started to thaw. My God, I thought, the sheer weight of guilt that she must have been carrying around with her for all these years! Had she really spent all these years carrying the burden of blame for her child having died?

I tried to reassure that it wasn't her fault her baby had died and that my father obviously must have forgiven her after all, for they went on to have five more! I don't know whether it helped or not. I do know that after that she often repeated that story as if telling it for the first time, and she talked a great deal about her "first baby that had died" and what my father had said.

I don't know whether you've ever been in a situation where your perceptions have been abruptly shifted, but, for me, it was a salutary lesson. I thought I had known my mother. In reality I didn't have a clue. It led to a lot of soul-searching followed by an awful lot of "I-wonder-if-that's-why she was afraid to show us any affection..." type of thinking.

It was the beginning of a whole new relationship between us. On the one hand I was saddened because, now that I was finally learning to put my own judgments and assumptions aside, my mother's memory was so poor that she no longer had the ability to answer my questions about her life and her upbringing or even the capacity to hold a reasonable conversation for any length of time. On the other hand I was just so grateful that this turn-around had come before she died.

It was shortly after that conversation that we all realized that, for her own safety, mum would have to go into a nursing home. We found one not too far from where she had been living. The reason we didn't choose one nearer to where we lived was because we had discovered that one of her older sisters, whom she hadn't spoken to for many years, was living there too. Having to give up what little independence she had was not easy for my mother, but the upside was that she and her sister were reunited, and old enmities were finally forgotten.

When her sister died and the home closed down we had our mother moved to another facility very close to where I was living. She settled in - not very happily - but, with her health and her faculties slowly degenerating, she soon began to forget that she had ever lived anywhere else.

With each passing year, my mother's condition deteriorated a little more. Now, she cannot walk by herself. Her once well-covered frame has become almost as slender as dental floss. Her flesh hangs off her bones, so dry and thin that the slightest knock tears it like a piece of tissue paper. Although she remembers she has five living children, she often gets us confused.

Now it is quite clear to all of us that our mother is dying; that it is only her formidable willpower that's preventing her from letting go. It is ironic that the years that have been the least kind to her have turned out to be the most kind to her children, inasmuch as they have allowed us all to discover that behind that grim, negative, embittered, outwardly uptight and seemingly unloving persona, there was always another woman hiding. My mother is no saint. She was just an ordinary woman who, like many of her generation, had more than her fair share of difficulties and tragedies to contend with. But now, as she nears the end of her time here on earth, we have all finally learned that, contrary to our assumptions, our mother always loved us. It's just that she never learned how to show it (Now she never stops telling us!) We also have learned that this physically and emotionally undemonstrative woman simply craves to be touched and kissed and likewise loves touching and kissing us in return.

I now know (because I overheard her telling her sister) that what I once interpreted as a complete lack of interest in her children's achievements stemmed, not from lack of pride but rather from her inability to comprehend why and how it was possible for her children to aspire higher, push further, and create bigger, wider vistas for themselves than her own. In fact I strongly suspect that the scope of our talents, capabilities, dreams, and ambitions actually frightened and possibly even intimidated her. I cannot be certain, of course, but I once caught her shaking her head in bemusement as she confided to her sister, "I don't understand how they all got to be so clever." It's all relative of course. To someone denied the opportunity of much schooling, it must seem as though our well-educated generation is a lot smarter than her own.

It's a funny thing about perceptions. We all think that our perceptions of people and events are the correct ones. The fact is our perceptions are precisely that - ours and ours alone. As I have (thankfully) discovered over the last few years, my perceptions about my mother were based on my own interpretations of her behavior and actions, and they were as far from the truth as my mother is from the selfish, uncaring, unfeeling woman I once imagined her to be. I'm not suggesting that my mother is a saint...far from it. But there's a lot more to her than I ever gave her credit for. Funny how all if often takes is a little shove sideways to make us look at people from a different perspective.

I've written a lot of words in my time, but I have never, ever written so frankly about something that is so personal to me. The reason I do so now is because of a conversation I recently had with one of our editors of this section. If you are familiar with Twyla's Point to Ponder column, you will know that Twyla's passion is working with those who are nearing their transition. Like a lot of people I haven't spent much time around the sick, the elderly, and the dying. But Twyla has and her voluntary work coupled with her gift of being able to see through the veil that separates the next world from this has given her a valuable insight into some simple yet fundamental truths about living, loving, and most of all, dying.

In the final analysis, it doesn't matter what we have done, or what we believe others may have done to us - or not done for us - there are times when we all need to shift our perceptions; to be shoved, if you will, out of our own so-called reality and be forced to take a good, long, objective look at ourselves, the judgments we make, and our attitude and behavior towards others.

I wonder whether there is someone in your life that deserves to be looked at from a different perspective? I wonder whether, somewhere, there is a crusty, cantankerous, difficult-to-deal with old (or perhaps even not so old) person whose actions or manner you may have misjudged or misinterpreted? I wonder how many people you know who, because of their own life circumstances and experiences, find it difficult to express their thoughts, needs, feelings and emotions? I wonder whether somewhere (perhaps in a nursing home or living on their own) there is an elderly person or relative who, just like my mother, doesn't have much time left and who secretly yearns for someone to take the time and interest to look behind the mask they have donned in this lifetime and see the soul within.

I wonder whether, just like my mother, that person secretly longs to reach out to share a hug, a touch, a kiss, a conversation but either is too proud or simply doesn't know how to ask for it. If you do know of someone like my mother, it's worth remembering that it's never too late to shift your perceptions a little bit. All around the world there are lonely, misunderstood, neglected, people - young and old - whom we perceive as being bitter, unfriendly, selfish, or unloving. But let us never forget that we do not know what that person has lived through, what difficulties they may have encountered, or what tragedies may have prompted them to erect a shell around themselves.

I'm glad I was given the opportunity to shift my own perceptions about my mother. If she had died in 1992, doubtless I would have felt guilty about my often shabby, selfish, and unkind treatment of her, but chances are I would have allowed the river of my resentment to conveniently submerge my guilt. I'm glad I was given the opportunity to get a little glimpse into what may have made my mother the way she was. I'm glad I still have some time left to spend with her without feeling resentful, over-burdened, impatient, unloving, or guilty. I'm glad for her sake, and I'm glad for my own sake too.

Too often we act out of a sense of duty and then secretly resent the recipient of our "good deed." Too often, we choose to not act at all. Sometimes we comfort ourselves by saying we're too busy, or they don't deserve it (after all, what did they ever do for us?) when in fact, the only person we are denying is ourself. There is no question that the last eight years of my mother's life have been the most difficult of all for her but what a wonderful gift she gave to me by choosing to stay and helping me to learn this very important lesson instead of just leaving when she had the opportunity. Love comes in many different guises. Sometimes it takes an almighty shift in our perceptions to recognize it.