Sometimes, in a crowd – I search for her face. Pretend she is still alive. Look ahead, over there: it’s her. Or rather, it could be her. Similar stance, same small frame. Hair tucked behind an ear. Big round chestnut-hazel eyes.

Over the years, I’ve become an expert. Homing in on people, usually strangers, women; the ones who look the way she did back then. I pick out faces and features – hair, nose, eyes – that most resemble her. Gestures and body language. The way she kept hold of her car keys bunched in her hand. Or stood with slight curvature, especially if she was deep in thought.

Thirty years on, it’s surprising how easily I’m tricked – convinced even – for that one fleeting moment. All I have to do is blur my vision, squeeze my eyes shut, almost to closed and there she is. See that woman with brown, wavy hair, long swaying skirt and canvas espadrilles? The way she grips and turns the can of beans in her hand, the way she’s peering down to read the label, holding on to the trolley absent-mindedly with her other hand.

Imagine. Imagine, against all humanly possible odds, if it really was my mum.

She’d look up. Happy and amazed. She’d gasp as we faced one another in the dried-food aisle, amongst the cans of sweetcorn and peas, and say: Oh, what a lovely surprise! What a coincidence, finding you here of all places – in the supermarket. I wouldn’t waste any time re-introducing myself as the woman I am today. Hugging her. Telling her all the things about my life I know she’d want to hear. We’d talk for hours. Days.

I’d be able to tell her that for all the anniversaries, Christmases and birthdays – for all the milestone moments, even the seemingly less important everyday ones – just how much I’d truly missed her. How my heart had ached.

Or I’ll catch her up, running down the street. Mother and daughter reunited.

“Mum!” I’d call out. “Rosie! It’s me! I’ve been waiting. Right here where you left me.”

She’d stop dead in her tracks – like in the movies – turn around slowly and ask me where on earth have I been all this time, all these years? Did I get lost?

Even though I was only ten years old when my mum died, I know some of her mannerisms because I do them myself. A handbag carried, tucked in at the side, wedged underneath my armpit (always the left), the strap dangling loose. I don’t know why, it’s better like that. I catch myself doing it and smile at the memory, the recall, of how she used to do the exact same thing. Sometimes I ask why? Why is it parts of me are only a memory of her?

Scenarios arise in my head. Conversations.

What would she be doing now? Sewing, shopping. Buying some kind of knick-knack or other. Gardening (she loved to garden). Chatting with neighbors and friends over coffee (the plum shade and contour of her lipstick imprint – I can still see her mug on the countertop waiting to be washed up). Or maybe she’d be at an evening class. Embroidery, needlework or flower arranging.

I use these examples because these are the kinds of things I remember she liked doing. They made up the woman she was. The Mum I knew. And in that moment’s longing, in my deepest desire’s imaginings, she’s right there – just like everyone else.

I talk to her as if she were beside me the room. Ask questions. What she’d do. What she thinks I should do. Sometimes the answers come to me in feelings instead of words. Or signs. Two circling butterflies or a dragonfly out of nowhere, landing on the grass beside my leg. A bird on a fence, chirping. Hard and fast and loud – looking straight at me.

Once, I sat in a canary-yellow corn field on a hot summer’s day – an unhappy young adult – wild grasses brush-stroked my ankles, and the sky was bright with golden haze and I cried out: Mum. Help. Get me out of here. I want to leave. I want to leave this place. And she did, because – even alone – moving to a big city to start a new life suddenly became the easiest thing to do.

She’s my inner guide. My advisor.

The closest I feel to my mother is by her graveside, even though I know she’s with me all the time. A friend once said, “It’s so nice you do that pilgrimage.” And I thought: what else am I supposed to do? What would you do? I never think of the coffin or her body in the coffin. To me, those things are somewhere else. Not here in the earth where she chose to rest.

Over the years I’ve become an expert. Picking and choosing flowers (the ones the rabbits don’t like to eat). Carnations, roses, gypsophila. Arranging and re-arranging the florets, larger blooms and leafy-fawn stems into perfect formation. And while I do, I rummage carefully over the workings of time in my head like a rhyme: if you were here now you’d be turning seventy this year. You’ve been gone over thirty years! Can you believe that Mum?

I imagine the kind of things we’d be doing together. Going to the ballet once a year at Christmas, like we used to when I was growing up. We’d be doing this. Doing that.

We’d have a real life mother-daughter thing going on.

Is speaking to your dead Mum crazy or wrong? I don’t think so. I talk to her all the time and not just at the graveside. Oh Mum, will you look at that. Mum, should I…

My voice trails off into a void but I know she is listening. She can hear me. I feel her. I talk to the black and white photograph I keep of her on my bedroom dresser. Admiring her smile, how pretty she was. I like looking at the background too. The line of people standing far away in the distance on the slopes and curves of dusty sand dunes. The way she’s sitting on a crumpled up old beach towel. Her legs stretched out, long, lean and shapely beside her, like the elongated legs of a springing gazelle.

She only ever smiles back.

These days, now that I’m older and further along the arc of loss, away from the exposed and stinging rawness: I say her name as often as I can.

Hello. My name is Becky. Daughter of Rosemary.

By God, that feels good.

When I was much younger, more willing to play the game, I’d go one step further and imagine being told that it had all been a horrible mistake. We’re sorry. She didn’t really die. We just wanted to test you. See how you coped. I bargained with God. I’d say: take my right arm. Please, take it and give me her back. Take whatever you want. I’ll give you anything. Here, have both my arms because – in my mind – being without arms was better than being motherless. Mum’s pancreatic cancer was the aggressive kind. Nimble, abrupt. Unhesitating. So quick in fact, she didn’t know it was there until it was too late.

And death itself was silent back then too. No one talked about what would happen. What did happen.

Not that the rhetoric has changed much.

Two years ago, at Christmas, the family didn’t meet at my stepmother’s sister’s house – which had been the tradition for many years – because the sister, Gilly, had passed away earlier that year. Instead, we arranged to meet at a different family member’s house. But no one spoke of Gilly. No one said her name. No one discussed the fact that this was the first Christmas without her since we were children, and that they missed her. Or how she might have enjoyed someone else hosting the festivities for a change. Think of all those plates she won’t have to wash. Knives and forks, cups and saucers she won’t have to put away!

And that was in a room of ten adults.

But, I’ll admit: I’m no better. After the get together, my brother asked me if I thought it odd no one mentioned Gilly? Didn’t I notice?

And it was only then, when I had it pointed out to me, that I realized: I too – was in on the act.

It’s not something I would want happening in my wake: to disappear.

I recollect similarities back to when I was a child and my mother was dying. No one made it clear, she wouldn’t be coming back. No one warned me: grief would stay much longer.

Shortly after her death, we children (my brother and I) were expected to live with my father’s partner – the ‘other woman’– in a house where my mother’s name was never willingly or easily spoken. As if hers was a body that suddenly vanished, like a magician’s rabbit. One minute the beautiful white bunny is hopping about on stage. The next, she’s jumped into the magician’s upturned hat. Never to be seen again.

The audience is, of course, astonished and disbelieving. But no one ever figures out where the rabbit went or how.

They never talk about it.

I admit, it’s a treacherous thing – building a loved one’s life in your mind as I have done over the years but when awash in the smallness of my own infantile worries and fears – will I be able to find a new job, what does so-and-so think, what will so-and-so think? – I wonder just what kind of a person it takes to face illness and death alone?

It takes the kind of person my mother was.

When we were children, our parents seemed so old. Like something we’d never be. But as we’ve become adults ourselves, we realize just how incredibly young our mother was.

Too young to die, that’s for sure.

Like the faces in a crowd, I often think of the person I would have been if Mum was still alive. I think of the person she would have been. The family we would have made. I wonder what she’d look like now. My nieces would probably call her Nan or Nanny. Like we did our Nan. She’d come to visit. I’d visit her.

Would we have argued and fallen out like some mothers and daughters do? I expect there may have been times when I’d have wished she was far away – not dead – but in a different universe, space and time.

What does it feel like to wish a mother away?

I’ve only ever longed for one back.

So, let’s be honest. Let me tell you, fair and square. If you ever find yourself searching for faces in a crowd – it’ll be a miracle if you find the one you’re looking for.

They might be there, but only truly in your heart.

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