Only One Mother

“Goodbye, love,” my mother’s farewell made me pause and turn back one last time to offer a final wave.

Her smile was brave, but her eyes remained fixed on me, as if she knew it would be the last time she would watch me leave her. I had no choice—I had to go. The world was beginning to shrink around us as the Covid pandemic spread. Borders threatened to close; flights grew scarce, and uncertainty hung in the air like a thick fog. My partner, Lisa and I, were faced with an impossible choice: stay in the British Isles, risking indefinite separation from our home in Adelaide, or leave before the shutters came down on everyone, trapping them in travel limbo. Every instinct screamed at me to flee before it was too late.

As stories of others caught in pandemic exile began to emerge, I feared being stranded in a country that no longer felt like home. I sensed what was coming, but I didn’t realise that leaving my mother would be the last time I’d see her alive. Within a year, she would die alone in her bed from sepsis and other aging ailments. The best efforts we made from the other side of the world to keep her safe from Covid, helped her avoid its cruel affliction. However, we were helpless to stop time and its effects on the human body.

On reflective thought, it must have been terrifying for her standing alone in such unfamiliar surroundings with sterile, off-white walls void of any familiar trinkets or photographs. The single window offered no comfort, overlooking a grey concrete courtyard, while the air in the room felt thick and stifling—far too hot for her liking. She must have felt trapped in a place that wasn’t hers, in a building alien to her, wondering what she had done wrong to end up in such a suffocating space. But, she refused to come back to Australia with us, so we had no other option but to accept the assisted living accommodation from the local council.

We had done all we could to dissuade her from her choice, so there was nothing more we could do, nor was there any other reason to keep us there. The cold truth was that Lisa and I had to return to work—our tickets were already paid for; our UK house was sold, and like my mother, we too were homeless in the small Berkshire town where together, we had once lived. Even the offer of a two-day layover in Qatar couldn’t persuade my mother to travel. So, we left, reassured that she was safe for the time being, while we planned how to change her mind from afar to eventually bring her to live with us. At the very least and for the immediate future, she had a roof over her head.

With time running out, we said our goodbyes and left the UK just before the Covid lockdowns took hold. But even as we boarded the plane and began our long 29-hour journey back to Adelaide, my thoughts remained behind, fixed on my mother. I pictured her standing there in the narrow hallway outside her assessment apartment; her figure small and frail against the doorframe, looking pitiful and hopeless. Throughout life, she had always been so resilient, yet now her body seemed to betray her—a slow decline I had failed to notice until that very parting moment. The Peter Pan figure who had once bounded through life with a lightness had disappeared, replaced by an old woman weighed down by time and a crushing sense of loneliness. Her body language hinted at the unspoken like she knew this would be our final goodbye. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my mother had known more than she let on. I questioned if she had sensed that her time was nearing its end.

The image haunted me on our long journey home. It revealed tell-tale signs I had previously ignored, because on several occasions before we moved to Australia, I’d often found her in the small, cluttered kitchen of our old house, her thumb pressed firmly on the electric kettle button as it boiled well past its limit, with what seemed her favourite smell of burnt toast lingering in the air. On each of those moments, she stood by the kitchen counter, her back to me, gazing out at the overgrown garden, quietly conversing with someone unseen, her voice soft but certain. The endless steam from the kettle, the hum of the washing machine, the worn floor tile beneath her feet, and the faint drone of the American-style fridge all seemed to fade away as she spoke, as though she truly existed in another world or could see something I couldn’t.

I never pressed her on her secret conversations, but her open discussions would bombard me with complaints about her swollen ankles, arthritis, failing hearing, and the “gadgets” she struggled to operate, like modern TV remotes and microwave oven controls. For that reason, I would have expected her to tell me if she thought she was dying. It was something she often wished for in moments of frustration with a modern world she found increasingly difficult to navigate.

“I wish I had a gun,” would be a familiar outburst. “I’d end it right here and now.”

I either dismissed or ignored her private ramblings. They were always delivered with a certain level of amateur dramatics. Certainly, a demand for attention, but a scenario too far-fetched to feed it any concern.

Her misgivings and complaints seemed to be a protestation against the world moving too fast for her to keep up with and a society becoming too complicated for her to care about anymore. Perhaps, she had simply given up—willing herself towards an end. I don’t really know, but I wish I had been there when she passed, if only to give her someone to say goodbye to, instead of dying alone in her bed in surroundings she hated.

As I stare out at the vast open skies of Australia and the beautiful pristine Adelaide beaches—this new life I’ve built, miles and several years since that farewell—I hear her voice still, as clear as that moment I turned to leave. Her brave attempt at a smile, remains etched in memory, a reminder of all the things we leave behind and can never return to. It was a farewell in every sense of the word. Not just for that parting, but for everything that was, and everything that could never be again.

Time has a way of dulling some memories but sharpening others, and I often find myself wondering what she truly knew. Did she sense her own end approaching, like the tide slipping from the shoreline—unnoticed but inevitable? Or was it simply intuition, recognising that life was pulling us apart in ways she couldn’t resist?

The pandemic, the move, the frantic scramble to find her a place to stay—all those things I thought were some of the greatest challenges of my life—now seem small compared to the simple reality of her absence. I thought we could address her issues via telephone conversations upon my return to Adelaide, but as with all things too late, that conversation never took place. Most of our telephone calls materialised as one-sided diatribes of how unhappy she was, how lonely her life had become, and how she hated where she was living.

What was obviously missing from our calls was the animated stories she liked to tell me of her Irish upbringing and the childhood friends she would entertain in the lanes of Limerick. Instead, she chose to voice as many complaints as she could about her miserable existence before departing from this life, inflicting on me an Irish mother’s guilt that I had spent my life trying to deflect. I tried to listen, to understand, but instead, I chose to tune her out, abruptly ending the calls once she gave me her grocery orders to fill from the other side of the world. I just couldn’t listen to her misery. Like Covid, it carried a debilitating energy drain. But when the news arrived of her passing, guilt and weariness were the less of my worries, as sadness loomed large, hovering over me with overwhelming questions about my own involvement in her passing. Had I done enough? Had I been a good son? What could I have done differently?

In the land of my wonderful new home, so far from where my journey first began, I’ve come to realise that my mother’s softly muttered goodbye was never about my leaving. It was her quiet way of preparing me, and perhaps herself—for the day she knew would come, when she wouldn’t be there to say it again. She was letting go long before I understood, perhaps still clinging to the belief that her goodbye was temporary. That somehow, I would return to her. We both knew there were things left unsaid, yet somehow, there didn’t seem a need to voice them in the rush of leaving. The look in her eyes said it all. It wasn’t until much later that I realised she had foreseen the moment when it would be me reciting our final farewell. That elegy was uttered via video call from Australia to her graveside via my cousins’ iPhone, as I had developed—and still have, an aversion to flying long distances due to suffering a blood clot in my left leg from a previous visit to the UK. So, funeral arrangements, cremation, and burial in the family grave were all actioned through the Internet. Something my mother would not have grasped the concept of.

“Gadgets,” I hear her cry out.

I’ve since come to terms with my guilt-ridden doubts and have determined I could never have changed her ways or her mind. She never told me she was fading, whether out of denial or to shield me from anguish. Perhaps that’s why she stubbornly refused to come with us to Australia, even when Lisa and I had planned to make the journey easier for her. Perhaps, her excuse of the journey being too long was a veil to hide the fact that physically, it would have been too strenuous. Maybe she needed to face her final days in her own way, on her own terms. That would be typical of her. Going out on her schedule, her time. She had always lived following her own timetable.

Her absence is felt every day, yet so too is her presence—in memories, in stories, and in the quiet, subtle ways she appears in the world around me. Though she’s gone, she’s not truly lost. The love we shared—despite our own mother-son hiccups along the way, has been captured in countless small moments over a lifetime, occasional reminders of who she was and still is to me.

My mother would often remind me that, “You only have one mother in this life.” I did, I have, and now she is just a fond memory, no longer a part of our daily lives.

There are a few visual memories I keep that remind me of her, and they never fail to soften my heart. The most tender one is in a photograph capturing a timeless moment in London’s Fortune Green Park on a sunny day in West Hampstead. My mother is pictured kneeling on the soft grass. You can almost hear the distant laughter of children playing nearby, smell the faint trace of freshly cut grass, hear a faint breeze rustling the leaves of the nearby oak trees while ruffling her pleated skirt. The sky is a brilliant blue—presumably, as the photo is in black and white. There’s not a cloud in sight, and in her arms; she cradles an infant—me. The devotion in her eyes is palpable, and they appear to be eternally locked on mine, her expression full of pride and motherly love. It’s a frozen moment of pure happiness that had been stored away for posterity’s sake—where later, after her death, it would be discovered in a discarded box of photographic memoirs forwarded on to me to break an only child’s grieving heart.