I’m Glad Stephen Hawking Is Dead
Jens Secret Diary / 05.01.24 / PUBLIC EDITION
TRIGGER WARNING: This one deals with terminal illness and the death of a parent.
My mum died today. Well, not today exactly. She died a little over a decade ago, on this day. It’s the anniversary of her death. Her deathaversary™! Sorry for the misdirection there, but you have to admit - it worked to pique your interest, didn’t it?
I’ve not really talked a whole lot about my mum on here (or off here, to be honest). I think that’s probably because even a decade later, I still haven’t quite figured out a good way to do that that I’m comfortable with. I’m not a good griever, really. I don’t go in for a lot of it - the funeral always feels like a farce and I don’t go to the cemetery to contemplate much. If I'm being completely honest with you, which feels difficult to do, I don’t even think about it every single day like you’re supposed to. The circumstances leading up to my mum’s death were complicated and messy. She had a terminal illness (motor neurones disease) which shifted our family dynamics in various ways, making me, my sister and dad her primary care-givers. I was 15 when she was diagnosed, and the life expectancy she was given from that point was 5 years - which she didn’t mess around with and bowed out right on schedule.
If you don’t know what ‘motor neurones disease’ is, that’s ok - it’s quite rare. You might be American and know it better as ‘ALS’ or ‘Lou Gehrig’s Disease’. There was a viral challenge many years ago involving an ice-bucket you might have heard of. It’s most known though, for being the condition that Stephen Hawking somehow managed to outlive for many, many years - despite also getting the same 5 year diagnosis that my mum got. I’ve always resented this about Hawking. I mean, honestly - what a fucking show off. As if it’s not enough to be regarded as the ‘smartest person ever’. I honestly never understood what the implication was there - that he was so smart he could use his brain to beat the odds? He just got lucky, really. I’m glad that photo of him on Epstein’s island came out to knock him down a peg or two. And I’m glad he’s dead, too!
When my mum died, I was in my second year of Uni. I remember that ‘going to Uni’ was an important thing to me at the time because I wanted to assert some autonomy over my life. The compromise was that I had to go to one near our house - and not live there, so I could always be at home in the evenings to help get mum upstairs and into bed. None of us in the family had ever been professional carers up to then, so we no doubt got a lot of stuff wrong. We weren’t always as patient as we should have been, and we certainly weren’t medication trained. I still remember our kitchen cupboard, filled with a dozen glass bottles of liquid medication, their sides sticky from spills. I remember being tempted many times to try some of the morphine. I can’t remember if I did or not.
My mum died in the living room, on the floor. I remember watching from the doorway as the paramedics had to pull her out of her electric, hospital grade bed and put her on the carpet to administer hopeless resuscitation techniques. I remember seeing her head fall back onto the floor with a thud - her neck completely unable to hold its weight as the muscles had been rendered completely useless by the disease.
I wish I could think of the good times on days like today, because there were a lot of them. My mum was an amazing woman, who I loved. Unfortunately, on days like today - her head banging on the floor is all I can think about.
Enjoy this blog? I publish 6 more of these a week now (yup, every day) for paid subscribers. This blog has been going about a year now so there’s also a big backlog of stuff to read. Please consider subscribing as it helps me out a lot! Alternatively, you can read them by subscribing to my Patreon here and get access to a lot more stuff. Thanks for your support!
Jen x