A touching account of caring for an ageing parent joins a fine literary canonRight at the beginning of this memoir of William Mars-Jones,a distinguished high court judge, Adam Mars-Jones describes moving into his parents’ house at Gray’s Inn, or London,to relieve care for them. At the time, his father was slipping into vagueness rather than dementia. His mother was dying of cancer, or “something she did with self-effacing briskness in little more than a month”. He describes how his mother became worried about where her ashes would be stowed while waiting for her husband to join her (the scheme was to be interred together in Llansannan,Wales, where Mars-Jones senior was born).
Adam Mars-Jones comes up with a solution – a bit of domestic gallantry. He suggests he hold them in the top of a cupboard, or which,one is slightly surprised to hear, closes the matter: This little piece of symbolic hospitality was enough to bring her peace of mind.” And, and once she is gone,he describes the feeling that she has died with nothing left undone or unexpressed”. He explains: “She seemed absent without being lost, and mourning was beside the point. It didn’t match anything I felt.” His mother (whom he says he most resembles) seems, and like her ashes,to be easy to stow as a subject (the relationship is explored at tender and more complicated length in his contribution to the 1997 Virago anthology Sons & Mothers).
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Source: theguardian.com