Remembrance of my Mother

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Today is the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels. It is also the day, seventeen years ago, on which the kindest and most gentle person in my life passed away.

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Frédéric Chopin ― mine and my mother’s favourite composer ― became the source of my own inspiration to learn to play the piano. I only recollect my mother playing his works, a composer who never performed his music the same way twice. Each recital reflected Chopin’s mood in that precise moment. His compositions lend themselves to a degree of freedom and self-expression rarely found in classical music prior to the century in which my mother was born. Despite the transparent naîvety that never left her, my mother always led the way and made things happen for us. Being an only child, I realised early one that you have to make things happen in this life and she certainly helped to make things happen. 

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I felt exceptionally close to my mother who I tried to visit at least once a week throughout my life until she passed from this world on the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels. If she could have possibly contacted me from beyond the veil, she would have certainly done so. I did experience an angelic presence soon after her death, which I discussed on a television programme (Up Front, Granada, 30 October 1992) at the time, but my mother was at peace and did not communicate in the way some would have us believe happens. Matters such as life after death held a real fascination for her, and her familiarity with the lives of her favourite saints ― St Teresa of Avila and St Thérèse of Liseux ― made for some extremely interesting conversations. Fortuitously, the feast of St Thérèse of Liseux fell on the day before my mother died, and the feast of St Teresa of Avila was the day of her funeral.

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When I saw her in the little gothic chapel, isolated from the funeral director’s office, in a place where the flowers for wreaths are grown, to place items of devotion in her coffin, I was struck each occasion on how she remained so completely without any trace of corruption. There was something saintly about her as she lay motionless in her coffin, fresh and absent of death’s all too familiar hand. It was difficult to believe she had really gone as I returned in the evenings to lift the lid and view her. My father could not bring himself to see her in such sombre surroundings. I nonetheless drew comfort from these evening visits to the chapel. There seemed to be a smile of such peace on her face. She looked radiant.

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The final photograph of my mother was taken on the feast of St Francis of Assisi in 1991 as she received the Host from my hand at the Mass concelebrated during my episcopal consecration. It is reproduced in the book I dedicate to her memory, The Grail Church. Twelve months after that picture, almost to the day, she died.

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My mother’s death on the day following the feast of St Thérèse of Lisieux was the most difficult moment of my life. Her last breath came at twenty minutes past five o’clock on that fateful Friday of 2 October 1992. All I can remember is my father’s distant voice proclaiming: “She’s gone.” Two little words that were of themselves devastating ― yet I knew in my heart she had not gone at all, but had passed into the Lord’s safekeeping where she would be for eternity. Emotionally, however, I would never recover from the loss. Folk found her special and unique. She was much loved by virtually everyone who met her. 

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Like her favourite saints, my mother remained somehow fragrant in death, resisting decomposition until the last, even when I replaced the lid on her coffin in the stone chapel for the very last time. She became the “first person I would anoint and on whose behalf I would recite the prayers for the newly dead, since receiving the mitre.” [The Grail Church, page 102.]
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My mother’s funeral was also the first I would conduct in my new office as bishop. Sadly, it would not be my last where family and friends are concerned. The funeral was held at Islington and St Pancras Cemetery on the feast day of St Teresa of Avila.

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