The Last Thing I Could Do for My Mother

Today marks fourteen years since my mother died. Even now, saying the words my mother died still affects me deeply. Some losses never entirely settle. They return quietly, often without warning, and suddenly the whole day feels different.

She was in Bangalore, India, when it happened, in the old house on Cunningham Road, where the familiar routines of family life were still carrying on much as they always had.

My father had already passed on, and my brother and his family were living with her then, caring for her in the everyday way families do when parents begin slowing down but are still very much themselves.

Yet even at ninety-three, my mother did not seem made for decline. She was feisty and sharp, still unmistakably herself, with a quick mind and a spirit that resisted diminishment. Age had slowed her body, but it had not dimmed her presence. When I saw her six months before she died, she still felt stubbornly alive to me.

The night before she passed, she watched television, ate her dinner as usual, and spoke with the family in the ordinary, unremarkable way that later becomes almost unbearable to remember. Nothing in the evening announced itself as a farewell. The next morning, she said she felt tired and wanted to stay in bed, asking that her breakfast be brought upstairs instead. Sometime after that, she fell asleep and did not wake again.

There is a strange comfort in imagining that final surrender. She slipped away quietly, without struggle or fear, after an ordinary evening with the family she loved. I hope there was peace in that passing. I hope she grew tired and let go gently, as though she had been carried out of the world with kindness.

In the last five years of her life, I flew back from Australia again and again, crossing oceans as if repeated arrivals could somehow bargain with time. My passport records eight trips.

I still remember the ache of leaving, her figure standing at the door, and the foolish hope that there would always be one more visit.

In Australia, the day began like any other. It felt completely ordinary. Nothing seemed unusual or out of place. I had no idea that, on the other side of the world, my life had already divided itself into before and after.

That morning, I had been on shift with Lifeline, speaking to people struggling with loneliness, despair, and personal crisis. It had been emotionally heavy work, and by the end of the shift, I felt drained in the way that comes from carrying other people’s pain for several hours.

Later that afternoon, I went to the library where I often read my children’s books to young audiences. That day, I was reading Liam Shark Boy, one of my bestselling stories. I can still picture the children sitting cross-legged on the floor, their little faces completely absorbed in the story, eyes widening at certain parts, small bursts of laughter filling the room. After the morning’s emotional weight, their excitement lifted my spirits.

While I sat there reading to them, completely unaware, my own world was quietly changing on the other side of the world.

My phone was away that day, being transferred to a new handset by the IT man, and I gave the inconvenience no thought at all. It seemed trivial, the sort of small annoyance that would normally be forgotten by evening. I had no idea how much could vanish in a few unreachable hours.

That evening, I came home and opened an email from my sister-in-law. I still remember the room’s strange stillness, the screen’s cold light, and the confusion of reading words that refused to make sense at first. I read the message again and felt, before sorrow, a sudden sharp anger — an email. My mother is gone, and the news was delivered in such an ordinary way, as if a life could be reduced to a few typed lines.

When I finally got my new phone back, there were six missed calls from my brother waiting for me. Six attempts to reach me while I had been sitting among children and stories, completely unaware that my family had already crossed into a reality I had not yet entered.

I remember staring at those missed calls, feeling confusion first, then dread rising so quickly through me that I could hardly breathe. Somewhere between the email and those unanswered calls, I knew my life had changed in a way that could never be undone.

Until that moment, the day had still felt ordinary. Suddenly, it no longer did. The house around me looked the same, yet everything felt altered, as though the world had quietly shifted while I wasn’t looking.

After that, everything became motion. Flights had to be found. Decisions had to be made. Money had to be spent without hesitation. I packed almost automatically, moving through practical tasks while my mind struggled to catch up with what had happened. I boarded the plane carrying the unbearable knowledge that I was flying not toward my mother, but toward her absence. The funeral would wait for me.

Forty-eight hours later, exhausted and emotionally numb, I arrived in Bangalore, pulled across continents by love, duty, grief, and that ancient instinct which makes us return home when death enters the family.

I arrived again at the old house on Cunningham Road, that familiar family address spoken over the years almost as though it were a person in its own right. Yet for me, the house had never entirely held the easy warmth people mean by home. My belonging there had always been complicated, shaped by departures and brief returns, by suitcases opened and closed, by love stretched across countries and years.

And still, standing there again, I felt something inside me quietly collapse. The house seemed filled not only with memories of what had once happened there, but with the unbearable knowledge that my mother would never again walk through those rooms. More than anything else, it was the stillness that told me she was truly gone.

Love between mothers and daughters is not always gentle. There were sharp edges between us, old clashes of temperament and tone, moments when she hurt me with a look or a remark, and moments when I answered with all the pride and sensitivity of a daughter certain of her own hurt.

For years, I carried those small wounds more heavily than I should have. I replayed conversations in my mind. I held onto certain words. Sometimes I kept emotional distance when kindness would have served us both better.

But grief has a way of burning away what no longer matters.

What remains for me now is not the sting of those moments, but the waste: the wasted chances, the conversations shortened by impatience, the afternoons that could have been softer and kinder. I loved her deeply. I know she loved me too, in the fervent, demanding way some mothers do, wanting always what they believe is best for their children, even when love arrives dressed as criticism.

She was always a beautifully presented woman. Even in old age, she belonged to a generation that wore dignity outwardly as well as inwardly. Her hair was always set. Her eyebrows were carefully pencilled. Her clothes were chosen with care and worn properly. Often, there were pearl studs in her ears, small points of light against her skin. It was never vanity. It was discipline, self-respect, and the way she chose to meet the world.

On my last visit, she said something that returned to me later with almost unbearable force.

“Now remember, Steffie girl,” she said, “do not send me away looking untidy. Make sure I look presentable to meet my Maker.”

Then, with the simple faith that was so entirely hers, she added that she wished to land at the feet of Jesus.

She said it lightly, almost conversationally, but beneath the remark was a whole philosophy of living and dying. She wanted to leave this world as she had lived in it: composed, dignified, and answerable at last to God.

Before the funeral, her refrigerated coffin was brought into the house so that I could say goodbye to her alone. They left me there with her. The room was cold in the unnatural way funeral rooms often are.

She was wearing an old nightdress. Her hair was untidy. Her mouth had fallen open.

For a few moments, I stood there staring at her. The shock of seeing my mother like that hit me with a force I was completely unprepared for. She looked so unlike the carefully presented woman she had always been in life that I immediately felt distressed.

Then I heard her voice in my mind as clearly as if she were standing beside me.

“Don’t send me away looking untidy, Steffie girl.”

“Where are her things?” I asked my brother.

He didn’t know.

So I found her handbag myself. Inside were the familiar things she always carried: her lipstick, eyebrow pencil, and the small personal items she used every day. Holding them in my hands suddenly undid me more than anything else had. They were such ordinary objects, yet they still carried something of her presence.

With slow, careful hands, I gave her back what death had taken too quickly: a little colour to her mouth, the gentle line of her brows, the order she had always insisted upon. Her naturally curly hair yielded to a little water and the touch of my fingers, settling once again into soft curls around her face.

I had never touched a dead body before. But she was still my mother, and all I wanted in that moment was to make her look like herself again.

Her body had grown too cold for me to dress her myself, so I asked the attendants to remove the nightdress and place over her the white salwar kameez she had worn for her seventieth wedding anniversary. Then I folded her hands, placed her rosary between them, and gently closed her mouth.

It was the last act of care I could offer her.

When I look back now, I do not see a neat story of mother and daughter, but something far more human and therefore harder to hold. I see distance and return. Misunderstanding and loyalty. Pride, tenderness, injury, duty. I see all the ways a life can be shared imperfectly and remain bound together by love.

The older I grow, the less interested I am in judging either of us. What I feel now is not the old impatience, but a sorrowful gratitude. In her final years, we slowly found our way back to one another through small, ordinary moments that matter to me more with every passing year.

My mother wished to rest at the feet of Jesus. I hope she does. Those words remained with me long after her death, so much so that I had them engraved upon the tombstone she now shares with my father:

May you rest in peace at the feet of Jesus.

Even now, when I think of her, I return to that image of faith, surrender, and final rest.

As for me, I carry what remains: not only grief, though there is that, and not only love, though there is that too, but the enduring imprint of being her daughter.

She is gone from the physical rooms of the earth. Her voice no longer rises down a hallway. Her footsteps no longer sound in the passage.

And yet she has not vanished.

Fourteen years have passed, and still I find her where loss so often leaves the dead: not in the visible world, but in the deepest chambers of the heart, where absence and presence somehow learn to live side by side.

Written on Mother’s Day in Australia, with love and remembrance for my mother, whose presence continues to live quietly within my heart.

Love the people in your life while there is still time to soften old hurts, forgive small failings, and say the things that matter 💛.

Thank you for reading, dear friends ღ.

© Stephanie Roberts