Chris Upton: Lessons from my mother

Feb 19 2010 By Chris Upton

Sometime last Friday evening my mother died, though it was Saturday morning when we found her lying still in the hall, still clutching her walking-stick.

This was as she would have wanted it. It was in the home she has lived in for almost 60 years, the familiar walls and worn carpet, not hooked up to some high-tech machine, and surrounded by strangers.

She would, however, have cursed the fact that she had left the gas-fire on and wasted all that money.

Much has been said over the last few weeks about the right to die and the conscious choice to bring one’s life to an end. Sometimes, however, the body makes such choices of its own accord.

The prospect was, within a few days, that she would have been removed from her home and taken into care or into hospital, and from that point onward her life would no longer have been her own.

And so her body, with a kind of physical wisdom we underestimate, came to its own decision and made its escape. It was a last act of defiance and independence.

I will, of course, miss plenty of things about her, but I will not miss her cooking. If I ever see a product labelled “just like mother used to make” I leave it well alone. My mother was always more interested in her books than in what was currently incinerating on the cooker. She knew that she must do all the things that a wife and a mother were supposed to do, but her heart was never in it.

What Mom fancifully referred to as trifle was actually last week’s cake, covered in yesterday’s custard. If I was only to get pudding if I ate my greens, here was an excellent reason for brazenly leaving the cabbage on the side of my plate.

Instant foods, when they began to creep into the shops in the early sixties, were her salvation.

The small pot of yoghurt, lovingly plucked from the fridge and served on a saucer; instant whip in all its lurid colours; the pre-moulded potato ball; the tin of ready-prepared minced beef, equally lovingly tipped over mashed spuds.

And thus she instructed me, more in actions than in words, that books were more important than meals, and reading was more life-enhancing than simmering.

And I thank her for that.

* Dr Chris Upton is having a quiet moment to himself at Newman University College in Birmingham.