Mum, the last time we talked, you told me you were gay. I did not realise it was to be our final conversation – I thought we would have some time to talk further and ask more questions (I had plenty), but it wasn’t to be.
You were in hospital about to have an operation. You were near the end, no doubt, but it had not occurred to me that you would not make it.
You being gay must have been the biggest secret you ever kept. At least it was a secret to both your children – I was by then 29 and my brother was 30. Some of your friends and family knew, but many did not. How did you decide who to tell and who not to?
Gone is the romantic image I had built up as a child, of you and Dad finding love later in life before cancer took him away too soon, when I was five.
For months the cancer had taken you – my real mum – away, but on that evening when we talked, you looked better than I had seen you for over a year: your eyes lit up, you were cohesive and eloquent. You seemed relieved and happy to have this conversation.
I asked when you knew you were gay. You told me you had always known – when the girls at school were looking at the boys, you were looking at them.
I asked what your biggest regret was, expecting you to say it was not telling us, having to live a lie. But it wasn’t. You said your biggest regret was June, the woman we met 21 years before when we moved to a new town after Dad’s death and took in a lodger to help with the bills.
My brother and I always knew June was more than a lodger – she became your closest friend and integral to our lives. She was like an aunt to me.
I only found out much later that my brother’s relationship with her had been so difficult and that she had treated him cruelly.
When you died, we were left with your funeral to organise and June to look after; she had always been financially reliant on you. She wanted people to know your secret – we didn’t. You had kept it hidden for so long and we thought it disrespectful to reveal it so soon. Along with our grief we had so much to try to understand before feeling able to talk to others about it.
Your will reflected your regret, leaving your house and few savings to us but nothing to June, with whom your loving relationship had long been over. We tried to enable her to remain in the house but we just couldn’t find a way to make the relationship work.
She moved out. We lost contact with her and have only now found out that she passed away a few years after you. At the time I justified what happened – she was your biggest regret, so I wasn’t going to let her be mine. However, I do regret how it ended. I am so sorry, Mum, I know this is not what you would have wanted.
Then and now, 15 years on, I still have so many more questions: you told me you hated being gay – is this why you lived the lie? If you had been born in another time (and not in 1929), could things have been different? Could you have been your true self?
And the one question that still brings tears to my eyes, makes my heart hurt – we were always so close, shared so many interests, beliefs and attitudes – why did you never tell me?
Your loving daughter
