My Mum always worked in professions that helped people. She started as a cardiac nurse training in Blackburn hospital in the 70s. Then when me and my sister were born she took a break to raise us until we were about 10 or so, then decided one day that she was bored being a housewife and went and got a Health and Social Studies degree from Man Met Uni when she was around 40. Which sounds normal now but back in the 90s was a bit odd. She was the eldest in her degree class by about 20 years. She had to learn statistics modules and things like that which were tough for her, as she explained, because when she was a kid in the early 60s then girls didn't really do much maths outside of "household maths". I'm sure that's false technically, Mum loved to spin a yarn, but I know there was a gender divide there for a lot of years and perhaps her school was conservative.
She came from a massive family, 13 of them altogether and all the boys were in the military and several of the girls married soldiers. The matriarch was my Nan, a four foot nothing Roman Catholic demon of a women who used to hide behind the entrance of the front door whenever a young man was coming to see one of her girls and hit them with an umbrella. She was a social worker on the Racecourse estate in Sale so she knew every scoundrel, every criminal, and every kid and eventually their kids too. She rode her pushbike round that estate until she died aged 93 and everyone let on to her. Any time I ever made friends there, my Nan knew their Dad who had been in the nick or their Mum who was a single Mum who she used to take a bit of stew round for or whatever. My Mum learned growing up that everybody was broke, both financially and the other kind, that looking after your neighbours and community is the highest achievement you can have. This is a value that I still hold. I contribute my tech skills to the City fan community but I also coach young offenders and I'm involved in the local foodbank and various other things. I'm not saying don't give to Oxfam or whatever, but I was always taught that you have to give to your own neighbourhood or town first.
During her degree, her specific area of study for her dissertation was about the discrimination faced by gay people in the NHS due to the AIDS epidemic. Back then, some nurses refused to treat gay people who even had a sprained wrist because they didn't want to get AIDS. There's still massive inequalities in this area but MUCH less so than Manchester in the 1990s. Due to this, some of my strongest memories of her are her inviting various characters round to our house and her interviewing them with her little Dictaphone at the dining room table. Wide range of characters. Cross dressers, trans people, gay people, lesbian couples, 60 year old straight laced accountants who had secret BDSM laden gay flings on the side. It was mindblowing as a kid who had never seen this side of Manchester. And I've got to be honest, as a kid I was a bigot. My old man was a working class engineer who drank in clubland and he had never seen such things so declared them "freaks" which I copied. My Mum rebelled against this by telling me to stay up and sit at the table during these interviews, she wanted me and my sister to hear these human beings, listen and understand their struggles and find common ground. On her interview Dictaphone tapes, which I found years later, there's my squeaky kid voice asking a trans person why they like dresses or a lesbian which one is the man. I remember when Boy George's autobiography came out called "Take I Like A Man" and my Mum gave it to me to read. I don't think I was even a teenager yet and it detailed sex, drugs and rock and roll in a fairly hardcore and unedited way. But also the inner thoughts and feelings and struggles of George O'Dowd. She always stressed that everybody is a human being, that everybody deserves compassion and understanding and humour. Don't presume to know anyone and their struggles. Learn about them and try to see where they are coming from. And then you can better take the piss out of them. Her most valued currency was always a good natured but somewhat personal craic. She despised people who took themselves too seriously, ironically like my Dad used to be before they split, and used to laugh at the absurd parts of life even if they were sensitive because absurdity is funny. I remember before she was ill, I started losing my hair in my 20s or so and I was properly self conscious about it. My missus clued my Mum into this and that she shouldn't mention it. So she constantly cracked jokes about it until the day she died. I once had a cut across my eye from an errant stud in a footy game that scraped down my face and as soon as I walked in her house, she said "fuck me, it's Dr Evil". When I saw her getting more ill in terms of the dementia; you can sort of see it developing over time, I used to tell her she needed to get tested and she used to say "settle down Kojak". She always knew the thing you were most sensitive about and she always knew how to make it something that you laugh at, which made you feel better about it.
She actually ran a mental health institute for a charity for years after she graduated. It was this halfway house in the gorgeous little village of Summerseat just outside Bury. It was a house for schizophrenics but also people diagnosed with schizophrenia who had committed some crime and were sentenced but it wasn't serious enough for full jail or they'd been to full jail and needed a step program. I was older now, probably GCSE years. Listen, if you ever want a properly interesting conversation about the world then go and have a cig with a guy with schizophrenia. Fucking hell. As a teenager this was an eye opening experience for me and taught me that you can have all the data in the world but still you can't make the correct conclusions. We used to do a lot of BBQs and things at that house, a lot of the staff brought their family and intermingled with the residents. Again, got to be honest but I saw some of these guys and I told Mum that they were off their fucking heads. She asked me why that makes me better than them. That's how she was.
I remember the first time I noticed her dementia. It was actually something simple. Mum used to live on tea, she liked that more than heroin addicts love a cheeky bit of heroin. She had type 1 diabetes her whole life which caused the nerves in her extremities to stop working including her optic nerve so she went blind. Once she was declared legally blind, she said it was because she had to look at the light bouncing off my bald head so much and gifted me the wig (a shoulder length blonde affair with bangs) she used after the chemo from double mastectomy so as to not cause further damage to the rest of my family. So when she made a brew she had this thing you put in a cup and beeps when it's at the right amount of water then beeps again when it has brewed for a minute or whatever, So she made herself a brew and went and sat down to listen to her stories on the radio (the Blind society send USB drives with audiobooks on them for free), She heard the second beep signalling and she asked what it was. That's when I knew we had to get her to the GP.
Over the years, and it was years, I watched this fearless, rebellious, shining light of a woman become a husk. Like a zombie you see in a film, it's something that looks human but has no "soul" to it. And it was gradual, she didn't go from 0 to 100%, dementia is the worst way to die because it steals pieces of you bit by bit by bit until the only thing left are the basic human functions. She remember Keegan, she remembered her Topic, she remembered I was bald even if she didn't know why that was important. But within that, there's something more profound. It means that we're not our biology. It means that who we are are made up from our experiences, our memories, our actions and inactions. That our default state is the zombie but the brilliance of humanity is based on how we interact with each other and the world and that's what makes every person a unique person who is interesting and is worth listening to. She taught me how to be a better man my entire life and but this was her last lesson and the most important one.
The world is cruel. And absurd. And great. And infuriating. And everything inbetween of all of those states. But if you stop laughing at it then you've lost. Find the thing you're most sensitive about, the thing that hurts you the most, and just take the piss with it because it makes it feel better.
Sorry for the blog post, I've not really had chance to talk much about her since she died. Bit of catharsis going on here. I appreciate it's probably inappropriate to some.
