All About Mother

Among the stories I'm juggling at the moment, the one I want to focus on is titled 'The Scent'. Again it's a short story with a supernatural element and based closely on an experience I had.

To explain...

My mother died in February 2009 after a long battle with cancer. Her health had been declining for the last few years and I remember while we were on holiday in Cornwall late 2008 how drained and frail she looked - it shocked me. Also that year, she suddenly started discussing funeral arrangements with us - something that we didn't want to hear, but was important to her. I guess she kind of knew then (subconsciously perhaps) that she didn't have much longer to live.

Then during January of 2009, she took a turn for the worse and was admitted into The Churchill hospital in Oxford. I rushed across from Cardiff to visit her and to help out Dad who needed support. The doctors at the Churchill couldn't really help her and, when persisted by us about her condition, all they could say was "she is very unwell". I suppose they didn't want to alarm us by bluntly stating "she is dying", but I knew that's what they meant.

Mercifully she didn't live much longer after being admitted - it was so distressing to see her deteriorate rapidly the few days she was there and last day I visited she could barely communicate. The news of her death hit us all hard, even though we were expecting it. At the same time it was a relief to know that she was no longer suffering. I take comfort in the last coherent thing she said to me: "Don't worry about me, I've had a good life". And she had.

Anyway...

'The Scent' is about Alice, a woman in her late 30s, who goes into her deceased mother's bedroom and senses a presence there, the unmistakeable scent of her mother. (It's something I experienced a few days after mum had died - there was a real sense of her there, her bodily aroma, as if she were in the very room with me.) Alice addresses the darkness of her mother's room, speaking about the how the family is coping and asking for forgiveness for the times she was, as she sees it, a 'bad daughter'. (I didn't do that, by the way.)

This story is more of a character driven piece than 'Shadow', but the supernatural element is there, in the form of the presence of the deceased mother (or is Alice just imagining this, using the situation to clear her guilty conscience? Ah ha...) I have used my own family as inspiration for Alice and her siblings, and the mother's character is practically based on my own. (Sorry mum, hope you don't mind me doing this.) By the way, Alice isn't supposed to be me, but a composite of myself with other personalities within the family.

It's also proving more difficult to write, not only emotionally but also at a technical level - I read through a rough draft of it yesterday and was appalled at how clunky it sounded. It is going to need a fair bit of work on it before I can even consider it halfway acceptable. But I believe it's worth spending the time on. And if it gets too much, I can always take a break and do some more work on yet another supernatural creation, the twisted love-triangle story I've provisionally titled 'The Boy Of My Dreams'. This one is necessarily much lighter and (hopefully) funnier.

On a final note, 'The Scent' isn't intended to be about the afterlife! I'm not a religious person (certainly not any organised form of religion), but I have a fascination with spirituality, the supernatural, the unseen... I like to think there's more going on around us than we can perceive with our five senses!

Right, I've put on 'Riceboy Sleeps' by Jónsi & Alex to get me into a sufficiently chilled mood - time to get down to some serious typing.