Love Sucks

Love Sucks - 35

“You know, these past few days I sat at my friend’s house, on the window sill in the spare bedroom, listening to the rain hammering against the window, preparing this long speech about my mum,” I held up the folded piece of paper I’d tucked into the pocket of my cardigan. “But then I realised I didn’t need a script to say goodbye to my own mother. She married my dad, Tony, after being in a relationship with him for three years. Mum told me she thought it would just be one of those summer romances, you know, the types you get in movies and whatnot. But she told me it was real; that love was the very reason I was standing on this Earth. And it is the reason I’m here; love is the reason I was born, and it is the reason I’m still alive. Love can bring us together and tear us apart at the best and worst of times, but my mother, too, was put on this Earth by love, and I’ll send her off with more love than I thought I could feel for her. See, my mum and dad made each other complete; they made each other’s day. But when my father fell ill, my mother began to slacken as both a friend and a mum to me. Alas, my father passed on, and the day we buried him, it felt like we buried her, too.

“You can come up here and you can say how amazing she was, and how much she lit up the world, how she made the world a better place, but strictly speaking that’s not quite true. When my father died, she turned to drugs, alcohol and cigarettes to keep her going. She betrayed me and used me for money to pay these drug dealers all the time. I hate to admit that I hated her at times like that. But here comes my love. Towards the end, she was changing. I could feel it in the atmosphere of my house; I could see it in her appearance. She went to rehab three times a week, and was checked up with the local mental health department for regular assessments to be set up twice a month or so to make sure she was doing okay. She was becoming the woman that put me here on this Earth; she was becoming my mother again.

I’ll admit I wasn’t around in her last days, and if I could rewind time and go back to then, I would, and I’d spend all the time I could with her.” Only when I said this did I realise I’d been crying most of my speech; tears dripped down onto my sweaty hands, but I continued anyway.

“To think that she’s gone is hard to believe, but today I won’t cry over the fact she died, but I’ll cry because I’m a selfish human; I want her back. I want to pull her back from oblivion, I want to bring her back to me and give our mother-daughter a second chance. But she’s in eternity now, peaceful and painless with my father, right where she needs to be.

“And so, family and friends of Eleanor Morse, I give you love today. Love brought my mother onto this Earth; love bonded her to my father in order to create me; love tore her apart when my father died, and love tore her life apart as she was struck with grief. Love made me see that she was just a grieving woman all this time; that I had been wrong about her. But love came a little too late this time, and so I’ll send my mother my love now, here, today. I’ll send her the love I never got the chance to give her, alongside a second chance to go with her into the ground,” I turned to the coffin next to me. “I love you, mum, and I’m sorry.”

Finishing my speech, I stepped down from the podium and took my seat at the front row again.

“You did well, princess,” my voice said quietly.

For the rest of the service, I did cry. I cried because during my speech, I realised just how much love I never got the chance to give my mother. I cried because she wasn’t here anymore, and because there was no one else. My Nana and Gramps would head back to Scotland with my aunt and cousins, and the rest of my family were headed somewhere wild like Australia or Russia or something.

I was the final one in the Morse bloodline, I realised. I was the youngest child in the entire family, and I’d never be able to have children of my own and be there for them, because I was in love with a bloodsucker. I was also being hunted by the damned, which was a major set-back in the maternal and possibly life-expectancy department. But it was nothing new; even when I was little I never planned to have children. I just told myself that one day, I might meet the right guy – the one – and love him so much that I want my own family with him.