The roses must’ve bloomed later this year, so the trip to the cemetery for mum’s 25th Anniversary carried no fragrant yellow blossoms, only shop bought synthetic bunches – not the same. But they bloomed this morning, so a wee vase full on the dining room table cheered the house before I left with old fashioned reassurance of childhood, something good.
My mother loved yellow roses. She was full of superstitions. No red and white flowers when visiting a hospital. No lilies – they foreshadowed a funeral. Don’t put shoes on a table. Never put an umbrella on the bed. She didn’t care about ladders but don’t cut your nails on a Sunday. Maybe it was the Irish in her. She had a compulsion never to tempt fate. My mother had had it with fate.
She died at 58 – waiting all her life never to reach pension age. Her sister died at 47, and her mother at 49 – it’s like losing at bingo or picking the losing numbers for the lottery every time at the grave. Don’t tempt fate.
But in May this year I was 60! The first in my direct line of women to escape their fifties for at least four generations. That’s celebration. Not to say I escaped cancer – at 37 I survived. Genetically tested, a link was established – Lynch Syndrome. A propensity for womb, ovarian or bowel cancer that binds us all together. And did one of my female ancestors carry a famine pregnancy? It seems likely – at 12 weeks gestation the girl she was carrying had ovaries forming, ripe for mutation through lack of protein. But she survived, passing on not only a faulty gene, but resilience, courage, tenacity, and a determination to cling to life.
My mum didn’t have the benefit of this medical knowledge though. She only knew she had a precarious hold on life, as did her grandmother, who died young in Ireland, before the First World War, ripping the family apart. And her own mother, who in the 1950’s was hardly allowed to mention the word cancer.
So here we are. I’m 60. I have my own X-Men complex, finding out new treatments would allow those like myself to be screened out, not allowed to be born – but what price perfection? I have a life. I contribute. And if we screen out genetic imperfection, where do we stop?
This year the world caught up. Everyone woke up to the possibility they could catch COVID-19, become seriously ill, or die, and there wasn’t much to be done about it. Welcome to my world. Freeing, in a way – everyone in the same boat – a boat we don’t wish to be on. Realising, as humans, we need each other: to empathise, to care, to find a cure. We can’t live without helping each other.
Vaccinated now, maybe we can go back to semi-normal. So I’m thankful for those who came before me to give me life. Drawing on their strength and wisdom I’ll pass on what has been given to me – their legacy. I’m 60. That’s a fantastic cause for celebration.
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