Intervals E-Book

Marianne Brooker

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 283

Beschreibung

What makes a good death? A good daughter? In 2009, with her forties and a harsh wave of austerity on the horizon, Marianne Brooker's mother was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. She made a workshop of herself and her surroundings, combining creativity and activism in inventive ways. But over time, her ability to work, to move and to live without pain diminished drastically. Determined to die in her own home, on her own terms, she stopped eating and drinking in 2019. In Intervals, Brooker reckons with heartbreak, weaving her first and final memories with a study of doulas, living wills and the precarious economics of social, hospice and funeral care. Blending memoir, polemic and feminist philosophy, Brooker joins writers such as Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson, Donald Winnicott and Lola Olufemi to raise essential questions about choice and interdependence and, ultimately, to imagine care otherwise.

Leseprobe

3‘I am now both mad and grateful for this formidable work of thought, which subtly yet profoundly shifts the terms of discussions on dying. What kind of world have we built for one another, asks Marianne Brooker, where many must struggle to be present for their own deaths? The many who live on borrowed time, in borrowed homes, dispossessed by a society that dangles rights without furnishing means? From nothing less than heartbreak, Brooker has germinated an exquisite and extraordinary reckoning, bringing a sorely needed focus on both the substance of life and the question of a socially just death.’

— Amber Husain, author of Meat Love

‘I marvelled at Marianne Brooker’s Intervals. Out of her mother’s death, she weaves a short, tender, angry yet clear-eyed book about the nature of love, and what it requires of us all if we’re doing it right.’

— Joanna Biggs, author of A Life of One’s Own

‘Both an elegy and an account of interrupted time, in this generous book Marianne Brooker draws together threads of memoir, social history and literature to tell a lyrical, ethical, and above all political story of pain, care, and maternal connection. Deftly, movingly, Brooker reminds us of the interdependence at the heart of all our lives, that we inherit more than biological matter, and that the dying mourn the living, too.’

— Helen Charman, author of Mother State

‘Intervals is an extraordinary essay that is both unflinchingly intimate and radically political. Brooker’s striking achievement is to never be prescriptive while, at the same time, never holding back from the force of her argument. It is, I suppose, an elegy. And like the best of elegies, and the bond it describes – it is charged with life.’

— Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall

4‘A beautifully written portrayal of caring and end-of-life decisions – exquisitely sensitive, passionate and angry in its railing against our broken social care system.’

— Sam Mills, author of The Fragments of my Father

‘Intervals is an endlessly moving and profoundly generous telling of what it means to give and receive care. Stunning in its intimacy and expansive in its political purpose, Brooker’s writing invites us to think deeply about the relationship between giving care and honouring life. Through visceral, tactile details of creating, working, making and tending, Brooker brings us into the spaces where caring happens, where life and its endings happen. A rare, revelatory, and truly radical book.’

— Elinor Cleghorn, author of Unwell Women56

7

INTERVALS

MARIANNE BROOKER

89

‘mothers     hospitals

sex     class     housing

anchored flying

is it enough like this as I am

is the human visible through above &

completely in the material determinants’

— Denise Riley, Marxism for Infants (1977)

‘She embodies an unknowable politics by deepening the shadows in places, tarrying with the anarchy of impersonal memory. Her autonomy undoes itself and disperses into a devotedly plural materiality. Her identifications are small revolutions and also the potent failures of revolutions. She is free to not appear.’

— Lisa Robertson, Nilling (2012)10

Contents

Title PageEpigraph¶ Becoming¶ Mother of invention¶ Naming¶ Loose witness¶ With-woman¶ Living will¶ Dying poor¶ Practical magic¶ Holding¶ Borrowed time¶ Canopy¶ We are the evidence¶ A slow burnSourcesAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

11

¶ Becoming

Some books are old familiars; theirs is a faithful magic. My copy of The Velveteen Rabbit was a gift from my mum on 2 June 1993. She inscribed the date in a diagonal line across the top-left corner of the flyleaf as if it were significant, but I’m not sure why she gave it to me on that day – it’s not my birthday, though hers was a few days before. I would have been one and a half; she would have just turned twenty-four. Now, the book has been with me longer than anything and anyone else, there on a shelf in every house I’ve lived in. Nestled inside a mottled cream slip case, it has a blue cloth cover with the title embossed in gold; its watercolour illustrations are all sandy browns and midnight shadow.

To Marianne, the inscription reads, who made all the toys become real for me. ‘Real isn’t how you’re made,’ says the wise toy horse to the velveteen rabbit: ‘It’s a thing that happens to you … You become.’ Our realness isn’t just on our skin or in our bones, it’s a process, a relation. ‘Does it hurt?’ the rabbit questions, his curiosity tilting into fear. ‘Sometimes,’ comes the reply, always honest. ‘Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.’ We love one another into being, long and close; love builds us up and wears us thin. ‘Once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always,’ the book promises.

But the sentiment doesn’t hold, at least not within the confines of the book. The toy rabbit, old and loved, is eventually thrown away by a nurse as she decontaminates the house following a bout of scarlet fever. Slumped in his sadness and disrepair, he’s visited by a fairy who explains that though the rabbit was once ‘Real to the Boy’, with 12whom he’d slept and played, he’ll now become ‘Real to everyone’. With this, they fly from the rubbish heap into the woods, where ‘all the forest was beautiful, and the fronds of the bracken shone like frosted silver’. Released into being, the former toy is set free to leap and dance with the other rabbits.

Perhaps this arc is curative: the shabby rabbit is implicitly made better, gifted with autonomous movement and only glancingly familiar to the boy he’s left behind. Or perhaps it’s spiritual: the rabbit has died and the forest is a gentle heaven for the loved and lost, or grown-out-of. But there’s something else happening; it’s not just the rabbit that is transformed but the world around him. Unlike the nursery, where ‘expensive’, ‘modern’ and ‘technical’ toys intimidate those who are cheap and ‘commonplace’, the woodland borrows its texture and detail from the velveteen rabbit himself. Newly animated, he’s reflected in his surroundings: ‘at last, at last’ he cries, leaping across ‘velvet grass’. The world changes and becomes, just as he does.

The gift of the book might have been occasioned by moving house. A year or so after I was born, we swapped my grandparents’ spare room for a council flat on another side of town, in a neighbourhood that often smelled of soap, tucked away in the shadow of a looming Procter & Gamble factory. I remember that first home of our own being palatial, perhaps because I was small or perhaps because memory can render pleasure in square metres, expanding the space with the strength of feeling. Certainly, the flat itself must have been small, or just big enough. In a photograph taken there when I was four or so, I’m crouched on the patch of grass outside, hair in a ponytail and smiling straight at the camera. Ahead 13of my time, I’m wearing a black T-shirt, black jeans and tiny, flowery Dr. Martens – unquestionably my mother’s daughter.

The photograph is one of the few remnants of a trove of pictures that we stored in a wicker picnic basket on top of a wardrobe. I coveted the basket for years, quietly unbuckling its leather straps and sneaking photographs into my pocket for insertion into my own clandestine archive: my grandma, smiling in black and white, stuck to the wall above my bed; my father – whom I have never met – forced into the folds of a small, thick square and wedged into the gaps of a vent, just above the skirting board. Much to my mum’s annoyance, photos would turn up under the bed, slipped between book covers or Blu-Tacked to the walls: cut up, sequestered and scribbled over.

Not everything, however, can be hoarded like a book or a photograph. Some stories are myth, passed around like secrets with their own legendary time, all whispers and awe. I had a small circle of imaginary friends, some of my own making and some borrowed from the world (David Bowie chief among them). Every evening, my mum laid out two plates for dinner: one for me and one for Louis-Lou, my favourite made-up friend. She’d wait for me to finish and go to bed before eating the second, untouched plate. I don’t remember this, but she often told the story, proud of both her generosity and her fortitude. As adults we’d joke: ‘How hungry are you, and how about Louis-Lou?’

Once, we wrote a letter to E.T., another imaginary friend. To my surprise, soon after, I found a reply waiting on the doorstep. I’d only just learned how to read and knew instantly that his language of bright pink shapes and symbols wasn’t mine. Curious, we took the letter to our neighbour, the only person we knew with an Alien 14Translation Machine – or so my mum claimed. I watched as she summoned the message up on its screen, the hard drive gently whirring as it translated the otherworldly Wingdings into words. I lost the letter many years ago and don’t remember what it said, but I still wonder at it: the sheer invention, the shared belief.

These tales have a cumulative power: first a whim then a way of life; next a hope then a habit. Childhood fantasies buffer our coming into being and soften the edges between what’s real and what’s possible. Anyone can believe in something, stubborn and singular, but it’s a powerful thing to participate in someone else’s wish. Play engenders a politics of alliance, not transcending our material conditions (impossible), but transforming them, plate by plate, letter by letter, dream by dream. We carried our determined fantasies into adulthood: ‘Real isn’t how you’re made,’ my mum taught me, it’s what you make. ‘The critical promise of fantasy,’ Judith Butler writes, ‘is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise … It points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.’ Well-practised in this art, my mum welcomed in all that was strange and made the world her own. Whether one believes in this promise can depend on the largeness of the world already available. For a young working-class single mum, the world’s ‘contingent limits’ might well be found wanting. There has always been something at stake for us in imagining the world otherwise, a transformative power on which we’d often need to draw.

In 2009, on the cusp of forty and a harsh decade of austerity, my mum started to stumble and slur, slips that her colleagues mistook for alcoholism. Despite her 15protestations, the GP was sure it was ‘just vertigo’. When I was seventeen, we moved from Essex to Devon in search of vaster skies and found, as well, a better-resourced and more trusting health service. Barely a year into our new life, my mum came home from the hospital with an MRI scan in a large brown envelope and a diagnosis.

‘I reviewed this lady today,’ the letter from her neurologist to her GP begins, before adopting an unfamiliar language: ‘The oligoclonal bands are positive in the CSF and I explained to her that she has the primary progressive form of multiple sclerosis. Naturally this is distressing for her.’ Years later, I read a description of the ways in which MS works like a wintering, deep under the skin: ‘the disease had eaten away at the fatty protective coating surrounding her cranial and spinal cord nerves, so that the tips of the nerves frayed outwards, like the scales of a pinecone, and so were exposed to damage and ruin’.

Around 7,000 people are newly diagnosed with MS each year in the UK. About 10 per cent of those are diagnosed with the primary progressive form: symptoms can be varied but deterioration is persistent, with no remission or cure. The diagnosis was compounded by the much faster unravelling of our material circumstances. At first, my mum lost the feeling in her left leg, then her job, then our home. She could no longer travel for work and our private landlord was unwilling to accommodate tenants claiming Housing Benefit. After a short spell on the waiting list for emergency council housing, we moved to a nearby country estate offering live-in work. We gardened and waited tables in lieu of paying rent, returning ourselves to an eccentric form of feudalism.

A year or so later, less able to work outside and climb three flights of stairs, my mum moved again, settling in a nearby cottage. By this time, I had moved away to 16university. She sent me care packages in the post: chocolates, blankets, handmade necklaces and paintings. I sent her photos, trinkets from the market and portions of my bursary. Over time, she weathered three changes in benefits system: Disability Living Allowance, Personal Independence Payments and finally Universal Credit, the meagre support diminishing with each new change of face. She started and never gave up self-employed work, fearing that an administrator with no medical training might find her fit enough for a job outside of her home despite severe pain, incontinence and difficulty walking.

In 2011, my mum was the only person picketing outside her local authority on a National Day of Action Against Austerity. A few days before, miles away, I’d sat on the Student Union floor with a group of friends from the activist group Sisters Uncut. We made her a T-shirt handprinted with the slogan ‘Cut Atos’, the French multinational company tasked by the UK Government with conducting ‘work capability assessments’ – a contract that was worth £100 million a year. I have a photo of her wearing the T-shirt and waving a hand-painted placard made from a retractable walking stick and an old cardboard box: fearless, peerless and proud.

Work capability assessments had devastating consequences for disabled people. Those previously defined as chronically sick and/or disabled suddenly found themselves deemed fit for work and unable to access a lifeline of welfare support. In 2015, nearly ninety people died a month after being declared fit for work; many assessors refused to take evidence from doctors. Spending cuts to public services during this period led to increased rates of poor nutrition, sub-standard housing, ill health and social isolation. We now know that 335,000 deaths across England, Scotland and Wales between 2012 and 2019 17can be linked to austerity, with death rates rising fastest in the poorest areas. As Frances Ryan describes this period: ‘Disabled people – once a source of compassion and care – had become an object of suspicion, demonization and contempt.’ We lived and still live in an age of excess: soaring profits and avoidable deaths.

Writer and artist Johanna Hedva describes their own autoimmune disease: ‘I can say it brings unimaginable fatigue, pain all over all the time, susceptibility to illness, a body that performs its “normal” functions monstrously abnormally or not at all.’ Unimaginable: a hard stop. Somewhat arrogantly, I don’t think I’d ever contemplated the unimaginable before, not deeply anyway. Hedva’s writing is a ‘call to arms’. ‘Stretch your empathy this way,’ they ask people like me, ‘to face us, to listen, to see’, to refuse the unimaginable and challenge a system in which, by its nature, sick people are treated as if they are expendable. Hedva’s demand feels familiar: empathy is the work of our dogged imaginations. We must stretch and stretch, hold as much as we can, try – at the very least – to imagine and promise – all the while – to believe.

Over the years, my mum felt the sharp edge of disability under austerity and still rose to meet life with more fight, ingenuity and generosity than I can properly grasp. She made a mission of multiple sclerosis, busying herself with baking cakes to raise money for the MS Society and abseiling from the Forth Bridge. She found and supported friends through online forums and lobbied Members of Parliament for greater support. Her sense of agency and community ran deep. In 2014, we visited our MP in a canteen in Westminster. She met his posturing with rigour, fanning out pages of research across the table and forcing him to confront what life was like for so many disabled and dying people. She described what her life 18was becoming – trapped, fearful – and what it would be like for her to die – painful, slow. Outside, her fellow demonstrators rallied on Parliament Square, demanding a change in the law to allow terminally ill people the right to an assisted death. But the laws didn’t change.

‘I try hard to live a good life,’ my mum printed on a T-shirt, ‘I’m equally determined to die a good death.’ For her, these were two sides of the same coin. As she campaigned and as her health and her circumstances deteriorated, I often wondered whether she’d ask me for assistance, how I’d respond and what the consequences might be. Implicitly, my accompaniment was a promise that I would, by some unspoken means and at some undetermined point, try to help. But ‘encouraging or assisting the suicide or attempted suicide of another person’ is illegal in England and Wales. Any person deemed to be assisting death risks fourteen years in prison. Individuals shoulder a burden of pain and risk because we haven’t taken collective responsibility for the complex questions of how to live and die well.

In 2010, the Crown Prosecution Service released guidelines advising against prosecution where the dying person ‘had reached a voluntary, clear, settled and informed decision’ and where the person assisting was ‘wholly motivated by compassion’. But tacit decriminalization is a far cry from making sure that assisted dying is accessible, accountable and safe. Writing on medical aid in dying in Canada in 2019, Tina Sikka emphasizes that ‘much of the discourse justifying the need for and right to medically assisted dying is couched in a neoliberal rhetoric of choice, agency and freedom, which not only forestalls a thorough discussion of inequalities in access and service but also distorts how decision-making happens in context’. For assisted dying to be socially just, a 19qualification that has received relatively little attention in a steady stream of newspaper reports and documentaries on the general topic, it must be rooted in ‘a theory of oppression that is embodied, fleshy, affective and relational’. We must ask: death for whom, by whom, why and how.

Denied a liveable life and a legal right to die, my mum made a choice within and between the lines of the law. A decade after her diagnosis, when she was forty-nine and I was twenty-six, she decided to stop eating and drinking to end her suffering and her life. Her MS symptoms were barely treatable and certainly incurable: severe pain, incontinence, fatigue, the gradual but intensifying loss of mobility, vision and speech. But these medical symptoms were compounded by social conditions: isolation, stress, debt and fear of a future in which she would not be able to live or die in her chosen home. We were caught in a perfect storm.

Her decision broke with the ordinary course of things, suspending us in an interval, a middle space between living and dying. The books unbalanced, we stopped paying the bills, stopped working, stopped living on untenable terms and created a bubble around ourselves, at once protective and compromising. At this temporary remove, I found my way around a new type of work: navigating and advocating; lifting and bathing; checking dosages and picking up prescriptions; paying two lots of rent – hers and mine – as we transformed her home into a hospice. This interval was secret and particular – something between us – but common, too, an exception that exposed a fundamental condition of being a human in the world: we are interdependent, both separate from and reliant upon others.

If an intervention describes the act of stepping in – to save a life, or to hasten a death – an interval describes 20the intimate work of stepping back, making space and marking time. An interval like this – all its trust, all its risk – poses the ethical question of how to exist together, in distinction and in relation, to remain two. ‘How do we humans share this cradle, this nest, these surroundings,’ Luce Irigaray asks in To Be Two, dancing between philosophy and poetry. ‘The plants live together without difficulty. And we? How do we share the air? … How do we live together … How is the between-us possible?’ This last question is not one of competing autonomies or momentary assistance, but of continuous ethical relation: sharing, enabling, believing, making possible. Our relations to one another are everything, as constitutive as they can be compromising. ‘We are undone by each other,’ Judith Butler writes. ‘And if we’re not, we’re missing something.’

What has become of us? Disability exposes the structural fragility of social systems. Access to healthcare, social care, housing, food, heat, sleep, leisure time and natural space: each of these fundamental supports are creaking under the weight of capitalism’s crisis, making the space between survival and withdrawal perilously small. Faced with this, there’s nothing inherently dignified about composure and endurance in the face of oppression and disease. Nothing enviable about holding ourselves together, keeping a stiff upper lip, accepting our lot. People who live within the cracks in the system deserve more and better. We need ways of holding one another in our messiest, most anxious, most vulnerable moments; of observing the interval between our individual and collective selves; of losing control, losing our minds and knowing that we will still be held: ‘the one, the other, and the air between us’.

21

¶ Mother of invention

Care is its neighbour, love, made solid. It’s in the touch and the weft, the holding. Anne Boyer describes how, during her cancer treatment, friends sent ‘cannabis popcorn wrapped in the poet Diane di Prima’s hand-me-down yoga pants’. Cancer was hard, she writes, but she had ‘these inventive forms of love to soften it, even if these loves were of the extralegal and unofficial kind’, ‘inadequate and provisional’. Love like this is a comradely patchwork, more comforting, thrilling even, for its particularity and marginality – the whole Hallmark industry of condolence and celebration is found wanting when weighed against our friends’ ingenuity. ‘To love a person,’ Sophie Lewis muses, ‘is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care, insofar as abundance is possible in a world choked by capital.’ Against the odds, inventive forms of love insist on abundance, creating sites of connection-forming, possibility-making, consciousness-raising care and struggle.

My mum knew love like this. When she couldn’t afford her first electric wheelchair, her friends and I clubbed together to buy one on eBay. One friend made a seat cushion and armrests from a cosmic blue fabric, emblazoned with gold stars. We stuck a transfer to the wheelchair’s old, heavy battery that read, ‘powered by witchcraft’. I have a photograph of her whizzing up the hill by her cottage, a shooting star with her dog trotting beside her, her new wig shining in the evening sun. She couldn’t be contained or curtailed; she was a woman drawn to the ‘extralegal and unofficial’, to the DIY and the don’t fuck with me.

Before you can understand how my mum died, you have to understand how she lived. Sick and poor, she made a workshop of herself. When her hair fell out, she 22learned about wig making and tracked down cheaper versions of her favourite styles from foreign wholesalers. When her teeth fell out, she learned how to mould dentures from a bright white and pink polymer. She duct-taped her feet to a tricycle so that she could feel the wind in her hair. She made an eyepatch from an old bra. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. But there’s something else in this mix – a defiant kind of self-love: each act a refusal, each invention a gift. These contrivances were a means of survival, in material terms and in more personal, psychological; even spiritual terms, they gave her a sense of vocation, pleasure, creation and repair. More than symptom management, my mum created a pattern for a whole other way of life: world-making against the world; surviving within and against the material conditions of scarcity.

Arseli Dokumaci describes tendencies like this as ‘activist affordances’: ‘the unspectacular choreographies of the everyday … through which disabled people enact and bring into being the worlds that are not already available to them’. Through this dance – crouching, crawling, arching, grasping – homes are made not just habitable but reciprocal: ‘the fixed, rigid, and obdurate materiality of the environment becomes something else, as if it were alive, sensing, reciprocating and caring for your sick, impaired body in pain’. So much is possible in that glancing as if: a life made otherwise, a wish. These habits of mind and movement have the power to reshape a densely material world; they’re resolute and impatient, unwilling to wait for ramps, rails and concrete forms of assistance installed or distributed at the discretion of others.

In a sun-bleached Polaroid, we’re sat in my mum’s garden, smiling and ethereal (the overgrown lawn, just visible, 23reminds me that my care could be inconsistent, patchy). She liked subtle flowers, tiny blue forget-me-nots and wild daisies, both clustered in the photo’s bottom-left corner. She also took pleasure in the flowers that are particularly hard to pronounce – gypsophila and chrysanthemum – getting swept up in their delicate airs and graces, accentuating each syllable as if peppering her garden with knowledge. I noticed this in her body-words too. A formal, medical diction slipped into our everyday conversations: she talked of manual dexterity, spasticity and optic neuritis. She owned these unwieldy words and made them hers, gently applying the proper label to each of her pangs and tremors. This new vocabulary was different to our usual family idiom: cat soup for ketchup, blancmange for breasts, daffodils or m’daffs for modafinil, an anti-fatigue drug.

A real cottage industry, my mum fused tiny glass millefiori – another word she loved to say, meaning a thousand flowers – in a miniature kiln that fit in the microwave. The small beads of coloured glass fused together to create marbled pendants. She painted signs in the style you might find on an old gypsy wagon – bright, broad brushstrokes against a solid black background. She picked and dried the flowers from her garden with great care, setting the petals in resin to make jewellery. My mum worked at beauty, making the everyday extraordinary. ‘Beauty is not a luxury,’ writes Saidiya Hartman, ‘rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given.’ Nothing in my mum’s home was unadorned; she met hardship with abundance, a ‘proclivity for the baroque and the love of too much’.

Writing about her own mother, Christina Sharpe explores ‘what beauty as a method might mean or do’. 24Beauty as method is a refusal of violence, a permission to be vulnerable. Rather than simple ameliorating harm, beauty makes safety possible. There’s much in Sharpe’s description that my mum couldn’t have known in her own body – Black life, Black struggle – but perhaps a sense of solidarity would have arisen from their shared determination against adversity. ‘When she was dying, my mother still made Christmas ornaments by hand,’ Sharpe writes, describing the shock she feels when she finds them – red felt hearts still held together with pins. To this day, at Christmas, I hang my mum’s handmade red and green bunting. There’s a half-sewn jacket under my bed, cut from a pattern she designed herself and decorated with handmade enamel buttons. One of many unfinished Christmas gifts that I received from her over the years, it’s loosely held together with pins that scratch my skin when I try it on. Removing them would feel like a lie.

As I write, I have a copy of my mum’s old CV folded in my desk drawer. It’s printed on five sheets of pearlescent paper, each one headed with purple vines and a five-pointed star. The text is a heavy purple serif. It’s unashamed, an irreverent relic of late-nineties goth. She grasped at life early. Leaving home at sixteen, she moved to London in the mid-eighties, found a bedsit and a job in advertising. Those were the years, as my godfather would recall, when she began ‘pounding the dance floor at Heaven’. She was twenty-one when I was conceived, violently, and twenty-two when I was born, peacefully. Back in Essex, five quiet years of learning life as a single mum followed. Then, returning to work, she got a job as a local journalist and next as a packer in a newspaper distribution warehouse. She soon became Mother of the Chapel at her union branch. This role is ‘more commonly 25known as a shop steward’, she noted proudly in her CV, but I think she enjoyed the intrigue of the less familiar term, with all its connotations of spiritual refuge and radicalism. I learned from her that writing is as much graft as craft: not just words on a page but stacks of papers on pallets and strikers on pickets.

Her CV includes a long list of formal trainings, including courses in negotiation, bereavement and ‘Violence Against Women by Men they Know’. She had a licence to drive heavy-goods vehicles. Best of all for me, somewhere in the middle of all this, she was once a sales assistant at a local Thorntons chocolate shop, returning home each evening with bags of Alpini truffles dusted in sugar. Over the following years, she worked nationally as a trade union organizer, then as a nursery assistant, dinner lady, community worker, civil servant and founder of a charity. There, she discovered her niche, training young people from deprived neighbourhoods to work with local councils and lobbying the government to invest more in public services. Her dedication, her swagger, her righteousness all fell neatly into place.

There was a complicated production line set up on my mum’s dining table: silicon moulds, tweezers, tape, toothpicks, paintbrushes. Sometimes, once set, small bubbles or cloudy patches would interrupt a pendant’s smooth transparency. Sometimes, once fixed, the flowers would fade, turning grey-brown. Their colour was a winged and fugitive thing. I have a ring like this, with an ashy blossom held in its centre. Set there on a silver band, it reminds me that time moves on despite our best efforts to fix it in place.

Each fault drove my mum to experiment, undeterred – different materials and moulds, measures and 26temperatures. Sometimes her creations were roughly hewn. Each of these perceived failures frustrated her and pushed her to develop a more elaborate, more finely-tuned process. This work became more and more complex, often demanding a greater precision and attention than she could muster, but she persisted.

Even my mum’s body became material for extending and rebuilding. She received a series of botulinum injections in her leg, a treatment that blocks the chemical signals that cause muscles to contract. She had phoned me, delighted at the joke: ‘I’m getting Botox!’ It worked, rewarding her perseverance in finding and advocating for the treatment, but only for a time.

Sometimes she triumphed. There was an enormous poinsettia resplendent on the living room windowsill. It started life as a scrawny rescue from the winter bargain bin, its few red leaves browning and papery at the edges. I was sure it wouldn’t make it past the season. But she repotted it every year, until its tree-like branches extended upwards and outwards to fill an entire window. Whenever the plant reached its limit, roots rubbing up against their plastic boundary, she found a bigger pot. Naming it Ruby, she gave the plant space and love, care and character. Wider than my arm span, it ended up in a pot so large it took two people to lift, and barely any light passed through its triffid-like tangle into the lightly forested living room. This plant is endless: ‘some species can live on, and on and on, for as long as there’s someone around to water them – to bear them in mind, not altogether forget about them,’ Kate Briggs describes. We have a lot to learn from these ‘tending gestures’.

Crafting together taught me how to grieve as well as how to live – this fury of making and remaking, this flare and fade. One spring, we sat at the small, tan-brown 27dining table in the shade of the poinsettia, our equipment laid out in front of us. I bought my mum a new tool or material each birthday. We’d worked our way through all the obvious ones: watercolours, letter presses, enamel paints, candle moulds. That year, I upped my game and gifted her a small blowtorch and two packets of Precious Metal Clay. Under a flame, the clay burns away and small particles of silver fuse together to form a shining, solid-silver treasure. It requires focus – sharp eyes and subtle fingers.