anniversary

7th May is the anniversary of my mother's death. Remembering this is not a symptom of morbidity but an acknowledgement that she lived, and dying is the last thing we do. Only a year after her death my father forgot; on that occasion we dragged him out for a meal but never again in subsequent years. It meant nothing to him. It means nothing to me in itself but yet it is a marker for the years that have followed. The more time passes since my parents' deaths the more real they become; for a while they were gone and I mourned them. Now, sometimes, I trip myself up thinking I might just run over to Slough. I can hear the click and echo of particular doors and smell the food frying in the kitchen; it is part day-dream, part hallucination. I can hear the fighting and sense the fear, different fears for all of us: my own fear of violence, my mother's fear of the empty nights, my father's fear of survival. We stowed these fears away privately, harboring them; sometimes they still escape as irrational behaviour even now, many years later. My daughter doesn't fear being alone in our house at night; I'm not very good at this, it's the time when old fears surface.