In one of her last few semi-lucid moments my mother quizzed me. She gazed at me myopically and seemed to be asking herself as much as me. “Did I really love you?”
It was the first firm indication of a previously suspected demonstration of approaching senile dementia. There were others, more mundane, less cerebral, mainly related to her toilet habits. Clues that were easier to ignore than to acknowledge.
What did she mean by it? “Of course you did” was an instinctive but meaningless response. She peered at me uncomprehendingly, as though my reply bore no relevance to her question. A question that has haunted me for over forty years.
But how could I doubt her love? Had it not been for her concern, I would have perished ‘neath the surgeon’s knife on my return from evacuation in Fakenham. She never would have dared challenge a doctor’s diagnosis on her own behalf. She was of the generation and the class that treated medical practitioners as gods. But for an offspring she was quite prepared to fight both tooth and nail in some basic, ritualistic simulation of a jungle tiger’s protective shield at a perceived threat to its young.
And later, when she rushed my sister and myself into totally unorganised evacuation to Llanelli in order to escape the sudden perils of flying bombs and rockets. How could I ever doubt the love that she exhibited in my presence in her debate with the headmaster of the local Grammar School? Her insistence that he accept me despite my lack of Welsh that would ordinarily be a basic entry requirement. Her refusal to accept the rules and regulations was a mother I had never seen nor could I have imagined her to be capable of such persistent challenging.
Thus, my mother, tottering on the brink of what was to be a life-annihilating dementia, asking me, in a rare, lucid moment, if she had ever loved me would seem to be a non-sequitur. Was it a sudden recognition of a coldness that she might exhibit to the world, but which did not reflect the love that she really felt but failed to exhibit? For that matter was the “me” really me or was it some other family member with whom in her later stages of dementia she confused me.
But it has induced a question that now I have to pose myself. The recollection of those many wonderful experiences that demonstrate the lengths to which she was prepared to go to defend those values which she honoured though rarely overtly. render the question meaningless.
Unless, unless it be reframed into an accusation of my own failure to recognise to appreciate to reveal the extent of my own feelings.
Perhaps it was I who should have posed the question: “Did I really love you?”