I think of her often.
I was heavily pregnant with my first child when I met her. I don’t remember her name. I remember her face: the hair sparse and thinned from the chemotherapy she had been enduring. She sat in the chair beside her bed, and I leaned against her bedrails for support, too far along to stand comfortably. It was a six-bedder ward, an ordinary afternoon, the two of us talking quietly.
She had only recently been diagnosed. Late-stage cancer, a short prognosis. Her case notes revealed what her words did not: she was still in denial, holding onto the hope that life would not slip away so soon.
As an occupational therapist on the palliative team, my role was to help patients find meaning in the time they had left. When I asked her what mattered most, she did not hesitate. She spoke about her children. “So cute,” she said. She had been a stay-at-home mother for years, and she called it the best decision she had ever made. I was not yet a mother myself, and I remember wondering, privately, whether it was really as rosy as she made it sound.
At that time, I loved my job, and I wanted a balance between my career and my family. But her words stayed with me, and I wondered whether I would one day regret not staying home. I did not yet know that I would end up doing exactly that.
During our session, I gently suggested that she write letters to her children. Among ourselves, we called these legacy letters: a way to leave behind not money or property, but the ordinary things said on purpose, what you were like, what you hoped, what you wanted them to know. I did not put it to her like that. I simply said that one day, when they were older, they might read her words and feel her close. She said she would think about it. I don’t know if she ever did. I wonder if she had the time, the strength, or the readiness to put her words onto paper.
Legacy. The word sits differently with me now that I am a mother myself. Tomorrow is never guaranteed. If I were to leave tomorrow, the earth would carry on, indifferent to my absence.
But in the quiet spaces of my children’s hearts, what would remain of me?
And so I have been writing to them. A letter to each of my children before they were born, and again on their birthdays, almost every year. I do not always know what to say. I write anyway, because she could not, or did not, and I have never stopped wondering which.
Every time I sit down to write one, I think of her.
Her boys were three years apart, the same as mine. She was about the age I am now, around forty, when she sat in that chair. It comes back to me when I notice a new grey hair, or the ache in my back that was not there a few years ago. To be here, ageing, wrinkles and white hair and all the small complaints, is the blessing she was denied.
I still don’t know if she ever wrote her letters. I hope her boys have something of her in their hands, and not only the shape of what is missing.
If this moved you, When Your Neurodivergent Child Asks About Death: What I Said, and What I Didn’t is a more recent moment where mortality found its way back into my kitchen. The companion essay drawn from the same years in palliative care is When Doing Our Best Doesn’t Feel Like Enough. And what I reached for years later, after my own diagnosis, is in I Didn’t Read Any Autism Books After My Diagnosis.
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