i got engaged to be married on 13 June 2020 – 12 weeks after the first lockdown was announced, four-and-a-half years after Tom and I met on a dating app, and 13-and- a-half years after my mother, Jenny, died.
The proposal happened on a walk, as they often do. I was oblivious, as proposées often are. That Tom had managed to catch me off-guard was surprising, considering I’d been asking him weekly when he might get around to putting a bloody ring on it. It turns out this ‘don’t-ask-don’t-get’ attitude to love and marriage runs in the family. Thirty-three years previously, Mum, during a dinner with Dad at their local Italian restaurant, stood up between pizza and pudding and announced, ‘I’m going to the loo and when I come back I think you’ve got something to ask me, no?’
But when my proposal came, I didn’t need to orchestrate a loo trip. We were sitting in a wildflower meadow. Swallows were diving over our heads, red kites gliding high above. Tom was mute, engrossed in the birds, or so I thought. I draped my legs over his, breathed in deeply and said, truthfully, ‘I feel so happy right now. You make me so happy.’ To which he said, as if almost on script, ‘Well, I hope I’m about to make you even happier...’
I often think what it would be like if Tom and my mum met. If they were able to share the same bottle of wine, in the same moment in time. I know Mum would fancy Tom – would swoon over his chiselled jawline and brooding brow. My gran, Mum’s mum, certainly did. ‘Oh, if only I were 50 years younger!’ she told me in the kitchen on meeting Tom for the first time. Two years after that day, I described our wedding over the phone to Gran – at the time still only a future fancy. I sketched it out in vivid detail: the second-hand Penguin classics I’d be buying everyone for favours. ‘Make sure my book isn’t too long, will you,’ she said. I wasn’t yet sure if a wedding would ever happen, but I was almost certain that, if it did, Gran wouldn’t be there to see it. She’d been diagnosed with late-stage cancer the month before. Over an hour passed, and together we’d talked through the whole day, ending with the pizza slices we’d eat together at the side of the dance-floor.
I never got to even fantasise about a wedding day with Mum, though, let alone begin to plan one, as I wish we were doing together now. Aged 16, the closest we got was giggling over the ‘future Mrs Wilson’ I’d scribbled all over my diary about a significant high-school crush. ‘I wrote exactly the same thing about Dad! It’s meant to be,’ she told me.
Like my marriage to Chris Wilson, lots of the things that I thought were meant to be didn’t ever actually come to be. When Mum died in December 2007 of secondary breast cancer, she was less than a month away from turning 46 (how surreal it feels now that Tom is in the same decade as her). I often think about the things she has missed along the way – the small everyday joys of living, but the bigger milestones too, both mine and my brother’s. For me, it’s my A-level results and, later, a graduation from Edinburgh University. My first boyfriend and first job. A move to London, then to a small market town in Wiltshire. Birthdays, big and small. And then, of course, my recent engagement.
But what I’ve come to realise is that it’s never in these big moments that I miss Mum the most. It’s in the quiet that follows. This time, the quiet came on the Monday following our ‘engagement weekend’, with its glasses of fizz, emoji-filled WhatsApps and socially-distanced barbecues. Catching the last dregs of daylight, I took my chair out into our back ‘yarden’ with a cup of tea.
The air smelt damp after a thunderstorm and above me blackbirds serenaded. I had in my lap a pile of photos of Mum, looking out at me from different times in her life. I sat and flicked through them all, one by one, my left hand heavy with this new sparkly object, my fingertips tracing over her face – so familiar, yet not touched in over a decade. I saw my own face in hers, and I saw too my own timeline play out in front of me. I saw the hope and the joy and the optimism of moments captured on film – the weddings, the births, the camping trips and dinner parties with friends. Then I felt the inevitable heartaches and tragedies and sadnesses that loom just out of shot, just ahead, in-between clicks.
Before I knew it, my face was flooded with hot, wet tears. My chest collapsing inwards, my breath heaving outwards, in the way it does when grief arrives uninvited. But this time I welcomed it in. I knew that, in order to invite Mum into this moment of my life, I had to invite in the grief that she wasn’t here, too.
So I wrapped my fingers around my mug, closed my eyes, and let myself imagine the ‘what ifs’. I thought of a world in which, after we got home from our walk, the first person I FaceTimed was Mum. I imagined her pixelated face appearing on a technology that didn’t even exist when she was alive. I imagined her squawking into the camera, ‘Oh my God, Em!’ Shouting over to Dad, ‘Robs! Get over here now!’ I think of how she’d want every single juicy detail.
And in that moment, it was enough for me. Of course, it’ll never be enough that Mum will forever only reside in my mind. But it was enough to soothe my whimpering heart. I know now that joy and sadness can, and do, live side by side, if only you let them. It was only in allowing myself to sit in my grief that I could also bask in the deep joy of this latest milestone – for I know how transient and precious they truly are.