On the death of my mother

The weeks around and after my mother's death have been an extraordinary period of my life.

It began with what seemed like a relatively ordinary medical problem for my mother: a painful sore on her finger. The first doctor said it was a spider bite and operated. By the time a second medical team and hospital became involved, and I had spent days with her, her finger and hand had become gangrenous, her body was full of sepsis, and her organs were struggling.

Because of her disability, she was not treated properly at the first hospital. I watched her endure intolerable indignity which undoubtedly made things worse for her.

Things deteriorated quickly, and I watched my mother become increasingly ill and vulnerable. I ended up sitting beside her in hospital as she was dying. My brothers and I were together with her. Three sons with our mother.

Those last days were incredibly difficult, but they were also a gift. My mother and I had made our peace some years before, and in the last few years we had become very close again. We had good conversations about our family, our past and what was happening in our lives. We had become friends.

We had also spoken a lot about how unhappy I was in Ireland. My mother knew it. I knew she thought I should come back home. When I said goodbye to her in ICU, I think we both understood that, even if we didn’t say it out loud.

Some of our conversations in those last weeks were about current family matters and about things being said about me. They affected me deeply because my mother was the person who had known me longer than anyone else. She knew me before I had become a solicitor, musician, husband, writer, father, or any of the other things I became. She knew me before I had a story about myself.

One night, before she went into ICU, I slept on the floor beside her. When she became frightened, I saw something in her that I recognised in myself. She was a grown woman who had lived a whole life, raised three sons, survived polio and many losses, but suddenly I could see the frightened little girl in her.

It made me think about the frightened little boy that still exists somewhere inside me too. The part that fears being left. The part that wants reassurance. The part that still wants somebody to make everything all right.

Eventually I had to leave her and return to Ireland to sort out my own life. Before I left, I went into the ICU. She was very ill by then and there wasn’t much conversation left between us. I told her I was leaving and going back to Ireland. I thanked her for being my mother. I told her she had been a very good mother. I told her I was glad she was my mother. And I told her I loved her.

Those were the last things I said to her.

When I returned to Ireland, she was still in the ICU. At one point, when I was speaking to her, she said, “Good Matthew. Good Matthew.” Those were the last words she ever said to me.

This has affected me profoundly. For all the things I have done right and wrong, all I have become and all I am still trying to become, for that moment I was simply her son, as I always have been.

My mother subsequently died, and I have been grieving her while simultaneously having to return to my life in Ireland. The experience has changed something in me. I have come through these weeks feeling, in a strange way, as though I have been returned to myself. A lot of the things I thought mattered have fallen away. The old stories. The versions of myself that I spent years constructing and defending.

What remains feels much simpler. I am Matthew: a father, a brother, a solicitor, an attorney and a musician. I have all the history that comes with those things. But underneath all of it I am still the person my mother knew before I had my own story about my own life. And so far, it’s a good story.

Even these past weeks deserve their own chapter. I don’t think I have understood all of this yet, but I know that being beside my mother through the end of her life was more than simply an experience of loss. For me, it was a spiritual experience. It stripped things back and what was left was very simple: a mother, her sons, and their love.

That is the place I have come back from.

And from that place, I made a decision. After all of this, I chose to come home to South Africa and restart the firm where I have always been happiest – my own. Van der Want Attorneys is my way of honouring that simple truth: I am at my best when I am close to the people I love, doing work that matters, with clients I can meet as human beings first.

I am rearing to go. Let’s practice law – properly, carefully, with heart and lots of tech.