Vanna

Today is my Mum’s birthday! She would have been 65 years old today. Crazy that the time with her was so brief, but they were the best of my life. So full of love, joy and a self expression that I yearn to find every single day. It seems, sometimes, that I still hold every ounce of love that she poured into me, coursing through my veins and pumping through every ventricle. 

Having passed away at 40, and me being here, at the tail end of 38, I am feeling a lot. In around 17 months, I will have surpassed the age that my mother lived, a weird and strange feeling that I can’t articulate. I feel the need to do and be. An instinct that has plagued me since she passed; leading me down roads with a fervor that I can not measure, a desire that is unmatchable and a hope that everything will be okay.

I feel like each moment lived should be used well, that wherever I am, I should be all there and never, ever should I deny myself any sort of love, or joy, or deprive myself of an ounce of living because she herself couldn’t do that. Truly, it has led to great experiences and horrible, heartbreaking ones, but all in the name of living. 

Death at a young age does this. Mortality and loss, the winding, unending roads of grief – they have shaped me, for better or for worse. The truly difficult thing that comes up each and every year around this time (her birthday is very close to the anniversary of her passing) is that I feel like I barely knew her. All I have ever wanted was to get to know her; and through the early years the tragedy was so fresh, I couldn’t see past the hurt. But as I grew and transmuted the pain, I started to feel a bigger sense of loss. Not the idea of a mother lost, or a caregiver, but the loss of a potential friend, a confidant. 

My Mum was more of a myth in my adolescence and 20s than anything else. The myth of tragedy, loss and illness. No one spoke of her as a person after she died; we all knew two things: she was absolutely beautiful and she was tragedy embodied. We would never get farther than that when we spoke about her, it was too painful. The people who could even help me understand her were so incapable of sharing or reflecting, or giving me any idea of who she was beyond the illness and truly, I barely knew how to ask about her. Every memory I had of her was of her struggling against and losing to cancer. Even if I knew certain things about this wonderful person, my brain has most certainly blocked it out along with the more traumatic moments of her end of life.

Still, to this day, my family is incapable of bringing her up – or, we haven’t really broached it. We’ve tucked it away, pushed it aside, living our lives with the gaping hole of Vandana missing from it. A loss that broke us all, and our concept of family.

To this day, I cling to the small things I actually know about her. Things I understood and learned when I was small: how she told me she loved history (I whispered “I do too” back to her as she tucked me in), how she would remind me that I am a Leo and that she is an Aries and how she like the feeling of picking her teeth. How she would find a stray hair of hers, or mine, and pull it through her pursed lips, enjoying the sensation. She told me once she wanted to be a journalist, and I loved how she never knew the lyrics to songs that she would sing to in the car. I remember how my house was always filled with music when she was around, how she would put on MTV and watch music videos while painting her nails (a habit I have now taken on).

All these moments, so beautiful and real. But I still feel so cheated; how, for the life of me, I don’t know her favourite colour or if she liked coffee or if she believed in things like aliens – I really wish I knew. I haven't asked anyone. I'm too scared. What I desire so deeply is the everyday mundane of knowing. It’s the little things that bring the intimacy that I feel like I was robbed of. I lament at the loss of knowing, 

This is part of grief, right? The feeling that may never go away, the hole that is left from loss that you simply learn to live around. 25 years without her and yeah, I guess it is easier but that is because I feel numb to it. We are forced to move on, we are forced to make sense of something that is so inexplicably hard. 

I want to end on a better note, remembering this wonderful person. My Mum was amazing. She was so funny and I watched people look at her with a bit of shock– beautiful but so saucy. She would retort and tease and had opinions, unexpected of so many women from my culture. I loved that and it stayed with me (I can be just as haughty as her sometimes). I also deeply loved her cleverness; I would watch as she would demolish crossword after crossword with ease. How she would devour books and how she instilled that in both my sister and I from a young age. I remember her like this, frozen in time, while I keep aging. An ageless, beautiful reminder of a time when I felt so loved that I was encouraged to express with no fear, no worry and that I would be loved even if I made mistakes. 

I love what my birthday twin, Andrew Garfield says about grief: 'I hope this grief stays with me because it's all the unexpressed love.' It’s a reminder to me that all this pain and grief I have felt since I lost her isn't something to escape (although I have spent days and weeks and months and years attempting to), it's a testament to the love that she brought to my life, even though she is not physically here anymore. 

This post has really reminded me that I do know her, and that the act of accessing all these moments, so hard, so tough, has been cathartic for me. Thanks for reading and getting to know a little more about my Mum, Vandana Chauhan. She was the best.