“Mum’s diaries help me connect with her even after she’s gone”

Years after Mum died, my dad moved out of the family home we all shared. He had to get rid of loads of old things, and he came round to my house with six boxes full of notebooks. They were all Mum’s. She had written in a notebook virtually every day since she was a teenager, and she kept them all.

At first, I found it difficult to even open them. I couldn’t have thrown them away, or maybe I could’ve, but at the time that didn’t feel right. A lot of herself was in those things. But I thought to myself: here’s a great opportunity to keep getting to know Mum even after her death.

After rummaging through the large plastic boxes, I saw her diaries had everything from the banal – “I’ve got a dentist appointment at 2 o’clock” – to poetry. She was a poet and was born in Brazil, so she wrote a lot in Portuguese and English. Her writing has an interesting mix of notes about her day-to-day life as well as the dreams she had each night.

She didn’t write every single day, and that was a bit of a lesson. Sometimes I would read things and think Mum was really depressed all the time, but I realised she used writing to process the bad times. If you’re having an amazing day you don’t tend to sit down and write how amazing it was.

Around the same time I opened those boxes, I signed up for an etching course at the Royal Drawing School in London. I had been curious about etching already, but I found it to be really healing while dealing with grief.

During printmaking you scratch into metal, or you make deep lines into it using acid. There is something about taking an intangible thing – like a dream my mum had in 1992 – and turning it into an image. Etching is very physical; you pull hard on the press and have to turn your whole body into it. It’s a long process to create the image, but it suited the topic of my mum’s diaries.

Each time I went to class I would open one of the boxes at random and pick out one of the books. Sometimes it might be from 1992, another time from 2015. It was like creating images to “talk” to her, get to know her.

I’ve got two young children and motherhood is intense. I lost Mum when my first child was eight months old, so he came a lot to the hospice. Our experience as a family with Marie Curie was as positive as it could have been. Dad – being the key carer – was pretty much at breaking point by the end and having Marie Curie gave us all a bit of space. It was such an intense time, but it felt like a good place to be, to die there with all the care she needed.

Becoming a mum and losing my mum all happened at the same time for me, so it’s all jumbled up. In fact, I only decided to try and get pregnant when Mum had her diagnosis. Something was growing inside her, some destructive thing. And while it’s not logical at all, but I wanted to balance the universe and grow new life to give her some hope. We knew that she was going to die, so I wanted to give her something to enjoy in the time she had left.

I’m still discovering things about becoming a mum. I picked up a notebook from 1989 – when I would have been three, the age of my youngest now. Mum never got to meet my youngest. I picked it up thinking how I’d read my mum’s thoughts when she was in the same position.

Instead, I experienced grief a second time when I realised that she didn’t write about me. She didn’t write about what it was like being a mother at all. At first, I was cross. But I realised it was just another lesson from beyond the grave. She didn’t subsume her own identity in becoming a mother and that’s a good thing. After all of this, I’m still learning from her.

The hospice care Mum got was really needed. We had no experience of supporting a dying person. We felt quite supported during the two weeks that she was there. The staff were so caring and knowledgeable. I went in with my young baby, there was counselling available for Dad – it felt like we were all being welcomed as a family, which made such a difference. Since then, we’ve donated and raised money for Marie Curie.

Even the aftercare was great. About a year later, we attended an event where we shared stories about Mum with other families who had lost someone. It felt like a joint funeral, very moving and lovely to hear about others' experiences. Like connecting with Mum through her writing, it made my grief feel more shared and less lonely.