06/09/2026
A BITTERSWEET YEAR
Yesterday I shared about losing my mum, but there is a part of our story I feel drawn to share more fully. Not simply because it is part of my grief, but because relationships can be complicated and the truth of them rarely fits neatly into stories of good or bad, right or wrong, staying or leaving.
For so many years, I longed for the mum I remembered from childhood. She had been the nurturing one, the parent I felt safest with, but after my dad took his own life 35 years ago, something changed. There was so much pain that was never healed, and although I knew my mum was still in there somewhere, too often I couldn’t reach her through the wounds.
Over the years, our relationship became increasingly difficult. The closeness we’d once had disappeared and, somewhere amongst the hurt, I stopped being able to feel the love between us. We had found ways of managing our relationship with enough distance between us, but when my stepdad died 5 years ago, that distance was no longer possible. Mum was already showing signs of dementia and needed my help, bringing us much more closely into each other’s lives again. At times, all those old difficulties made me question whether I could continue without losing too much of myself in the process. I even stepped away once, briefly, but each time I considered leaving altogether, something in me knew that wasn’t my path. Not because staying is always the right thing to do - sometimes it absolutely isn’t - but because this was our particular story.
As the dementia progressed, Mum fought fiercely to hold onto her independence, refusing to accept that anything was wrong or that she needed help. Then a fall and a head injury took around 30 years of her memories almost overnight, and eventually took from her the thing she had fought hardest to keep: her independence. Her final year had to be spent in a care home, confused about why she couldn’t simply go home and desperately unhappy at times with the world she now found herself in.
And yet, in the midst of something so heartbreaking, something I had longed for over so many years happened. We often hear stories of dementia changing people, often how gentle, loving people become angry, aggressive or difficult as the disease progresses, but with mum it seemed to happen in reverse. As dementia stripped away her memories, it also seemed to strip away the old anger, hurt and defences that had made our relationship so difficult. Underneath them, I found my mum again - gentle, affectionate, openly loving, with the softness in her eyes that I remembered from long ago.
It came at such an enormous price. I would never romanticise the illness that took so much from her, or the loss of freedom that caused her so much pain. But in that final, bittersweet year, while dementia was slowly taking my mum away from me, somehow it also gave her back to me.
And perhaps that’s part of why losing her now hurts so much. After all those years of longing for the mum I missed, I finally had her back, but she was already leaving. I had to watch her slowly disappear. And I miss her dearly.
