It is time to write my last will and testament.

It’s the sensible thing to do.

I would like to have a good death, preferably asleep, in health, not in pain, content that I lived a good life. This may not be how it comes it me. But what I can do is ensure my family are provided for with ease.

My own mother died at the age I am now.

I don’t  know how she felt about her life when she died; if she felt she’d had a good one. A short one to be sure.

She grew up on the west coast of Ireland, moved to London to be a nurse, went to Rome to visit the Vatican, met a married man, had the only affair of her life, came back to London, had me and died nearly three years later of breast cancer.

Would your life fit into one sentence?

What words would you choose?

I choose these ones as they are the only details I have of her life. I know nothing of her dreams, her thoughts, her fears, very little of her personality (though I fancifully catch refracted glimpses of her character in the choices she made with her life and with me).

I only have one photograph of me perched on her knee one Christmas when we stayed with my foster parents. Her face is tilted down towards me so I can’t see her. There are times I have held that picture in my hand and dropped my fingers to raise its lower edge up as if I might lift her face and see her.

But she remains hidden. She is gone and I want more of her.

If she had a will, if she left me anything, it never came to me. I didn’t mind for a long time.

But more recently, I find myself sometimes wishing there was a letter. If I could read her words, I could recover a part of her. I could resurrect her in the choice of her words, in the rhythm of her phrasing, the placement of a comma, her use of apostrophes—I would be the messiah of literary criticism and she would be my miracle.

Every time someone dies, the whole library of memories burns.

This is the letter I wish I had had.

Look for me in these words and you’ll find me somewhere.

I’ll be gone, and you’ll have no more of me but this, and the small sum I am leaving each of you, the children of my dear friends, the children I didn’t have. This is not for a college fund, or to buy a new suit for your first day at work. In fact (and I use my power voice now), the voice of the recently deceased—you are not to use this modest windfall for any sensible ends at all.

You are to use it to have an adventure. To do something perhaps you have longed to do, that you sometimes glimpse in the corner of your eye, that little bubble of a half wish that the hard hard world will try to drown in the overwhelming wave of responsibilities and must-dos.

Forgive it, because it’s not about you.

Right now it doesn’t seem to know any better.

But if you look, you will find beauty, kindness, compassion, love, joy and all the things that you are reflected back at you in the world.

Use this money to seek it out, whether it be to travel, to take a course in something that makes you hum with joy, to take a risk—don’t worry about mistakes, there are none. In this small way, I hope that you can discover a little bit more about you: grow, learn, open.

You might meet people who tell you that there are no adventures left.

Avoid them.

Surround yourself with people who see the silver streams of possibilities that lead from all our hearts outwards. If you are lost, they will point out the way. If you feel you are alone, they will be your companions, If you are ready to depart, they will come to wave you off with joy and will be there to welcome you when you come home.

This is one lesson, but every lesson you will need to learn is out there for you, so listen and learn and never stop listening and learning. This is a letter for you, and a request. See adventures and possibilities everywhere. The world will be what you imagine it to be.

Why do I want you to do this? Because of what I have learned.

You may not understand what I mean right now, but that’s ok. It’s for you, and it’s for me. It’s for the little girl I once was, who my own mother never lived to see grow. I hope she would have been proud of me. I am proud of you.

Love always.

 

Relephant:

A Letter to my Daughter from an Unconventional Mother.

 

Author: Fiona Buckland

Apprentice Editor: Brandie Smith/Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: eliasfalla/pixabay