Dying to live

I'm going to die.

I've only just really realised this. It never seemed like a real possibility before. But, I'm going to die and that knowledge has a massive impact on how I want to live.

The suddeness of my mum's - what shall I call it? - demise? life's end? shocked me to my core. One minute she is talking to me on the phone, laughing and telling me she loves me, and then goes to read to my daughters and put them to bed. An hour later, it's all over. Her life as we all knew it. One minute she was involved in every aspect of my life, and the next, she became someone who doesn't know my name.

Now that I know my death is not only a possibility but a definite, I want to make sure I'm really living. I want to be with my girls every day of their lives although I know (I hope) I won't. So I have to make the days I do have, count. I want to write the bloody novel that is haunting me at night. I want to stop being tired and start being energetic. I want to eat as much chocolate as I can and still be a size ten (OK, that's just fantasy I know, but part of living is dreaming surely?)

Admittedly at the moment I already feel half dead - sleep might be something we can do when we're dead, but lack of it makes living pretty hard. BUT, Ruby has slept through for the last three nights, so I'm holding my breath in the belief that we might finally be seeing the light...
I'm dying, but I'm also living. And maybe one of the things I will take from the last five months is that every day I'm living, I'm appreciating the fact that I'm dying - and that is inspiring me to live better.

Lasting Firsts

Like everything in my life at the moment, two ends of the spectrum run in parallel - sometimes so close, the lines lie against each other, indeterminate, entwined, indistinguishable. My mum needs caring in the same way as my baby. My girls teach me as much as I mother them.

And so I constantly memorise every 'last' situation with my mum - her last kiss to me as she said goodbye after visiting me in hospital with Ruby; our last phonecall just three hous before her catastrophic stroke, how happy she'd been; our last hug; our last fight. Everyday moments in our relationship, forever now memorised as momentous.

And alongside that, all my new firsts with Ruby. Her first smile three months ago, like a rainbow after a storm. Her first giggle, a trickle that has gushed into a flood. And now, her first solid food - her surprise, my delight, her excitement, my satisfaction, from those first tentative tastes of rice, to my freezer bursting with bags of heart shaped frozen cubes of steamed sweet potato, brocolli, carrot, pear and apple. I spoon feed my mum - favourite flavours no longer lighting up her eyes, and I spoon feed my new baby, marvellous mouthfuls of taste, surprising and lighting up her face.

Different ends of the spectrum. Same love.