Tuesday

I strayed into Facebook by accident this morning. I haven’t looked at it for weeks and wouldn’t have done it deliberately as the experience is distinctly sub-optimal now. I don’t see updates from friends any more and it’s just endless paid promotions.

However, it turned out to be a happy accident as I had a message from someone I have known from university days. I hadn’t known her well back then but she is now married to my closest university friend. That in itself is a lovely story. They hadn’t known each other well either when we at uni together but had met at a reunion we’d organised a few years back. They’d both attended on their own, got talking and ended up marrying. It wasn’t the first rodeo for either of them and they’re besotted with each other. All’s well that ends well as someone once said.

Anyway, they had travelled down from Deepest, Darkest East Anglia and had met Our friends on the South Coast over Easter. We had come up in conversation and they were told about our recent travails with my Mum and Lesley’s dad. The message I saw this morning offered condolences on our loss. We had a wonderful warm and supportive chat. We shared experiences on becoming orphans – her dad had died last year too. I mentioned that I get through my problems by writing and offered to share a sample.

I don’t, as yet, share what I write that widely but searched through my posts so she could see what we’ve through and how we deal with it.

And that’s when I made my next mistake. In searching for a good example to share I started reading.

“I wonder what was going on this time last year?” I had thought.

The post I found described sitting and talking to Mum in her room at The Home. Well, obviously. She never got out of bed voluntarily ever.

I had been sitting and talking or reading and trying to make sense of what Mum was saying for an hour or more before she asked me when Nick was coming in to see her.

She’d had no idea who I was.

That was a tough read. I was more upset seeing that now than I had been at the time. It made me realise how little thought I had been giving to the impact on me in the moment. I wondered, very briefly, whether I should go back and read more. We’ve both been concentrating hard on doing all the estate admin for Mum and Lesley’s dad and haven’t given ourselves space to think about the fact that we’d both lost our parents.

Bloody hell.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. He passed away in March 2025. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.

Image Credit

Original Image by Nick Gilmore. June 2025.