And a photocopy of a death notice from 2014, with my mother’s name on it, from a local paper that folded in 2019.
There is a pencil mark next to it. A tick.
That is all. One tick, in pencil, in the margin, next to my mother’s name in a newspaper.
I sat in a car park for about forty minutes with that page and I could not work out what I was feeling, and I have since decided it was being on a list.
Somebody had gone through a very great many of those notices for fourteen years, and my mother had received a tick, and eleven years later so had I.
She picked me off the hospice volunteer list eleven weeks before we ever met.
I have the date she requested the list. It is in that file, because Ferris put it there, because he wanted me to be able to check every single thing he was about to tell me.
Eleven weeks. She waited eleven weeks for a Thursday where I would be on the rota for her wing.
She could have asked for me. That is the thing.
A patient in that building can request a particular volunteer and it is written on a form and it takes about four days.
She did not, because a request goes on a file, and a file gets read by a manager, and a manager would have asked why.
So a woman with months left chose to spend eleven weeks of them waiting for a rota to do it on its own.
That is either extraordinary patience or it is a person who has spent forty years making sure nothing about her can ever be traced back, and it is obviously the second one, and the second one is not admirable — it is a habit.
She could not stop doing it even when the thing she was hiding was a kindness.
Here is why.
Eleven years ago my mother passed. It was quick and it was in the January and we were not ready in any sense of the word, including financially.
My father had been gone four years. There were three of us and none of us had anything.
We could not pay for the funeral. I want to say that plainly, because it is the single most shameful week of my family’s life and we have never once discussed it out loud since.
And then a small trust covered every penny of it.
The funeral director told us it was handled. No name. No letter. Nobody ever made contact, and I rang twice in the February to try and thank somebody and got nowhere both times.
For eleven years I have assumed it was a church charity.
It was her.
One woman, running one fund, for fourteen years, for women she never met, out of a two-bedroom flat with a rented television in it.
Eleven of them, in total. I have the list. The earliest is 2010.
They are all women and they are all in the same three postcodes and eight of the eleven had children under sixteen.
That is the pattern and it took me about four minutes to see it, and about a year to understand what it meant.
She was not picking people at random from a newspaper.
