Celebrities Speak

Amy Jenkins | Lisa Faulkner

The novelist and creator of the TV series This Life talks about her mum

My mother, Charlotte, died in 1970 of Hodgkin's lymphoma, now one of the most curable cancers. I was just five years old when it happened, so don't remember a great deal about it. She'd been ill for about three years, so I was used to her being ill. In fact, I don't even remember going to a funeral or memorial for her. We weren't a religious family, so there wasn't much ritual associated with her death.

I spent lots of time with both my grandmothers, which was great. They were very important figures in my life. They were both divorced, so they had lots of time and attention to devote to me and they made me feel special and loved. At the time I didn't really feel like I'd been deprived of anything and actually had a happy childhood, doing well in school and so on.

The idea back then was you just got on with it and made the best of things. My dad, who remarried about 18 months after my mother's death, was told that any issues I had might surface when I was a teenager. They thought it best not to dwell on things. I didn't ask to talk about my mother as I just wanted to fit in, in an unconscious way. I never visited her grave and there were no photos of her around the house. All that was really left of her was her mother, my grandmother, who I was very close to. But Granny rarely talked to me about my mother's death as I think she didn't want to rock the boat either. She obviously had photos of my mother around at her house, but I wasn't all that interested.

The whole thing was pushed down inside me to the extent that when I heard about someone else losing a parent or member of their family I used to think 'Oh no, how terrible!' without realising that's exactly what had happened to me.

I went to therapy when I was 20 with a feeling of not knowing who I was and found out that my mother's death was central to my confusion. I was in a strange position because I both belonged and didn't belong in my family. I had a different story from my siblings – the children my father had with his second wife. And now I was grown up I was experiencing feelings that felt really big and I could see they weren't appropriate to the situations. So, if I wasn't invited to a party or a holiday with friends, I'd completely over-react. I was attaching something old to what was happening in the present. There was a constant feeling of abandonment that I couldn't explain. That therapy helped me acknowledge that it was sad that my mother had died, and it's taken me the next 20 years to really come to terms with that.

As a mother now, if I was facing up to an incurable illness, I'd do so much more to make sure that my son came to terms with my death as he was growing up and leave things for him to remember me by. I'd write a letter for each of his birthdays up to the age of 18 so that he had one to open every year to remind him how much I loved him. And I now believe it's good to follow the traditional rituals surrounding death, the funerals and the wakes. I think it's important to visit the grave on anniversaries and encourage a child to acknowledge grief as a normal and survivable fact of life.

I don't feel that 'special' to have lost my mother; after all, lots of people have bigger and worse problems to deal with. And, although it sounds strange, you have to look at the positives. For example, I never had a mother trying to control me or disapproving of me and intruding in my life, which gave me a real independence of spirit. I find I'm quite self-reliant these days.

There's no doubt that my father and stepmother did their best but I think the 'let's just carry on' approach they took to my mother's death wasn't the best for me. It's just such a pity when a child isn't encouraged to grieve.

Amy Jenkins | Lisa Faulkner

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