Bibelots of Doom

An echo of nothingness coming.

Why does crowding oneself with precious bibelots lead to a feeling of nothing doing, death? This moving process, I mean the process of moving in some ways reminds me dying, or the preparation which goes into it.

When I was told I had cancer in 2010 someone suggested that I should, ‘put my things in order,’ and there was a certain satisfaction in that, although I didn’t take the advice.  I remember a woman who looked like Glenys Kinnock appearing on my ward and talking to me about managing, 'chronic illness.' All the time she was talking I was thinking, she's got the wrong person, this doesn't apply to me at all. I utterly refused to accept the idea that any of it was really happening to me. Later

I imagined myself rewriting my will and giving things out to friends, rather sentimental scenes which I enjoyed.  As I pack the past, wrapping ceramic and silver plated things, I'm walking in the shadow of that time again, getting the echo of something which I  thought was over.

I have to do this to help my mother, now that she has cancer, but I also want to claim and hold onto all this stuff. Quietly without discussion we start ploughing up the past, trying to keep our lines straight and tidy, resolute tidying of our life together which we know is almost done with. It was when she said on the phone, 'Do you want those old table mats?' that there was a sudden clutching inside. The orange and yellow M & S mats, my brother and I bought together one Christmas in about 1983, used for every Sunday lunch since, should I take them and with them something of all those Sunday afternoons when she, after about an hour of rest after lunch, would start preparing the tea. I'd hear her Kenwood chef going, she'd be making the pink mousse we always had before reluctantly switching off the TV and trotting off to Evensong. Although it was only us it was always served in the elegant dimpled glass bowl I am now holding. As I look at the shiny, brightly coloured mats with their red and orange flowers I cannot really believe that it is really over. No more Sundays at home. No home.

I am moving from one bedroom to three so I tell myself I need all this stuff,  plus the 1970’s sideboard in which to display the spoils,  and the 980s sofa. It’s almost messianic, longing for a new place I will call my own, even though I have never had a home in that place before. It has to work for me in this ‘promised land’  because when my mother does ‘go,’ when she moves to this old folks home she’s set on, the future will see me  doing what gay men and single women all have to do – make a new family out of friends who come and go with varying levels of intimacy, only rarely with any long shared memory or deep affection. I will be cooking the Christmas lunch from now on, at last. Alas.