My mother hinted at the different paths her life could have taken while she lay dying in 1999.

In North America, the flower sellers are out, and the business is brisk in my city because it is Mother's Day. I haven't celebrated it in twenty-five years because that is how long my Mum has been dead come this July.

So much time and experiences have transpired since she was alive that I have a hard time remembering how her voice sounded. Yet my thoughts are drawn most days to recalling her for a moment or two. Recollections of the time when she was alive have the feel of sun light at dusk in springtime. There is still warm before the crispness of approaching nightfall. There was much love within my mother but there was also melancholy and an anger for the many things that had been denied being born a woman in 1928.

To me, the life- my mother lived is like a painting that I stare at in an attempt to decipher her. Sometimes I think I get to the truth of who she was, while other times, she is a profound, impenetrable mystery. She didn't live long enough for me to mature into someone who saw her as an individual outside of being my mother.

Two weeks before my mother died in 1999, I went to visit her, not knowing death was so close at hand.

It was mid-morning; outside, birds sang in the trees while a June sun stretched through the window like a cat after waking from a nap. She was lying on her bed, a paperback of Virginia Woolf's The Waves folded against her chest.

 “I am just a bit tired and need to rest.”

I stood near her, but my thoughts were miles away. I needed to be off because I was late for a work meeting. That day, I was emotionally unsettled and thinking about myself because my longstanding girlfriend had dumped me a month earlier.

I wanted to leave. I thought just tell her- “See you later.” But Mum began to talk about things other than the weather. It seemed she wanted to say something important to me. I hushed my urge to leave and lingered near my mother's bedside- almost like a child again waiting to be dismissed so I could go and play.

"You will always wonder what happened to them and ask. "Did their lives go well?"

At that moment, I thought she was talking about my ruined love affair.  Scratched from misunderstanding my mother's words- sadness and shame welled up in my throat like acid reflux. I tossed away her last sentences with pretend stoicism.

But my mother continued.

 “I am glad I could give your father the love he needed to survive.”

At first, I thought she was rebuking my former lover, but it was not.

It was an enigmatic deathbed confession. I think it was my Mum's way of leaving a clue for me to later decipher the intricacies of her marriage and relationship with my father. A means, perhaps so I could find a part of her personality hidden for decades by the shade of suburban normality that she both despised and craved.

When my parents married in Hamburg on August 16th, 1947, Europe was in a heatwave. The greatest war fought by the greatest generation was only two years done, and the world was still licking its wounds from that brutal conflict between good and evil.

My Mum was an 18-year-old German woman, and my dad was a 23-year-old lad from Yorkshire stationed in the city as part of Britain’s occupation force following the war. They both suffered from traumas caused by the war but also what they had experienced growing up as children.

My parents, like most young people, stumbled into their love affair by chance. My dad noticed my mother bartering away prized family possessions at a black market. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he lusted after her. So, he pursued her, and eventually, they became lovers. My mum did not have as strong a feeling for my dad as he had for her when they were first lovers.

Life was short, and my mother was young. She wanted to taste as many pleasures as possible because Europe- throughout her adolescence had been a charnel house thanks to Nazism.

Over time, My father won over my mother to his marriage proposal. My dad's devotion and endless ability to help my mother and her family cope in an unforgiving post-war world probably helped seal the deal. It also gave her a false impression of the actual lifestyle awaiting her in Britain, married to a working-class man who had grown up in doss houses.

Married life in the provincial, glum Yorkshire mill town of Halifax was an experience my mother hadn't bargained for when she married my Dad.

A year after they were wed, my mother left my father to return to Hamburg. She had no plans of returning to either my father or England. She married in haste and repented in leisure by spending her time searching for her dad, who had disappeared in Berlin during the last months of the war.

On her travels across post-war Germany, she fell in love with another man who was an Iranian university student. It was a deep and passionate affair. It ended not so much because my mother loved my father more but because she believed she had a greater responsibility to him. She knew my father was the most fragile of humans because of the economic and emotional abuse he had endured as a boy. To return to my father was both an act of love but also done due to her concept of responsibility towards others. 

When my mother resumed her marriage with my father, it was under the condition they emigrated to Canada and began a life as equals with no past- only a present and future.

Over time, my mother fell in love with my father again. Her life with my father was happy and loving. But in all relationships, love is not equally divided.

In a different era- one such- as today, I think my mother would not have returned to my father. Instead, I think she might have stayed with her Iranian lover or done something else. Judging by the writing she left after her death, I think she would have been a brilliant author. Society in 1949 didn't allow most women to follow their hearts and my mother although brave still craved legitimacy and feared scandal.

My father in dark moments, after my mother died worried that she had ultimately made the wrong choice by staying with him. I don’t know if my mother had similar dark moments when alive about her choice to return to my dad after their marriage broke down. My mother’s opinions on that matter and all matters are now mingled amongst her ashes.

I do know, she would have been very proud of me for staying with my dad and making those last years of his life both purposeful and full of love and laughter. I am glad he did not die thinking all of the living had been a waste. I really hope my mother didn’t think that of her existence when dying because it was one beautiful ride to be part of for my first 35 years. And in my memories my mother is still part of my journey until I am no more.

It has stuck with me that my mother on her deathbed allowed her thoughts to drift to a long-ago love affair. I realise now, she was bequeathing me something. It was a fragment, a shard of the other possibilities and roads her life could have taken had the world been a different place for women of her generation.

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