My Mother, March Madness, and Zucchini Bread

I was woken up by Emily tapping on my shoulder. She said something like 'The nurse said it's almost time. She hasn't got much time left.' 

I was on a sofa, college basketball was on TV. It wasn't a sofa or TV that I knew. I came to in the next couple of seconds. It was late at night on the 20th of March 2010. I was at the Gilchrist Hospice facility, in Towson. My mother had been here for slightly over a day. 

I would watch her take her last breath in the next few hours, during the early hours of the 21st.

The days that followed are a blur. There was letting people know my mother had died, there was organising a funeral, there was deciding where to bury her. There were phone calls, and emails, and visits, and more phone calls. Then there was the funeral.

The weeks that followed were odd. There was the film I was an extra in, there was a sense of not knowing what to do with myself in Towson for the next few months, there was the offer to teach a statistics course, there was the declining of the offer. Then there was the chicken pox.

The months that followed were depressing. There was the trip to Ghana for the Ghanian funeral, there was the move to Edinburgh, there was the difficulty in finding a job, there was the Thanksgiving where I wanted to be alone, there was a snowstorm that shut down the city. Then there was a new year.

The years that followed have felt unstable. There was the moving from job to job, not feeling like any of them were 'right', there was literal lack of stability with the fall my father took in Sierra Leone, there was the seemingly never-ending adoption process. Now, we're in the seemingly never-ending citizenship process. To be honest, I'm thankful my mother isn't around for a lot of this stuff - it would have driven her crazy.

It took about 3 years to come to terms with my mother's death. 

In the hours after my dad fell, 2 years after her death, I kept saying to myself 'You better not die on me. Not here. Not now. Not in this way'. I was thinking a lot about my mother during those hours. My mother's death was still haunting me.

Three years after her death, I went to Ghana, and saw how everyone had moved on and I very much enjoyed my time there, seeing people for the first time since her funeral. That trip brought a sense of closure that I needed.

Still though, I feel like I'm missing an anchor, and my ship just doesn't feel as steady as it did while she was alive. I've come to terms that this will probably never go away and now try to put my energy into being an anchor for the next generation.

So I'm here now, 5 years after Emily woke me up. 5 years after my mother died. To honour my mother tomorrow, I'm going to make zucchini bread. 

During her funeral, I talked about how she taught me to bake, and how one of the more meaningful things that happened between us was when she devoured a loaf of zucchini bread I made, a few months before her cancer diagnosis, which was the moment I felt that her teaching had finally paid off. 

To thank the people who helped us out after she died, I made each of them a loaf of zucchini bread. 

Zucchini bread, like March Madness, now always reminds me of my mom, so to thank the small family I have around me now, who's helped me not get too down this week by distracting me with requests that I laugh; requests to say 'oy vey' or 'dios mio' in crying/laughing/happy/sad voices; reading children's books in odd accents; and having tantrums, I'm going to make us zucchini bread. 

It's only fitting, since we can't all stay up late enough to watch college basketball.

I miss my mother