By the time I’d reached mom’s home, the morning after she’d died, she, well, her body, had already been taken from her home and taken away by the undertakers the afternoon before, only a few hours after her death. At the same time, I lay face down on a bed in my hotel room in London trying to sob away the pain of it all, finally getting up to go to the bathroom and catching my reflection in a mirror, standing there staring at my wet face.

Standing over mom’s empty bed that morning, looking down at the deep red rose which had been left on her pillow, as a wall of sadness hit me as I thought of her all alone in the Co-Op funeral parlour, upon Salop Street, where my taxi, had driven past only just five minutes before. I would stand there, looking at the rose and remembering holding her hand for that last time.

As much as we belong to the living, we belong to the dead too. We belong to the memories which bind us and the love that takes us by the hand to lead us back down pathways to the past.

3/3