“Goodbye darling. I love you.”

My little red legs are running to keep up with her as we scurry along, on that misty, cold morning. It’s a grey and brooding Victorian stone-built school and I’m feeling bad as we make our way through the crowd of bigger children and their parents. We walk up the steps, where a blonde, cheery woman speaks with my mother, sharing encouraging, sympathetic words. As she touches my mother’s arm, one last time, I look up at that face I love and she smiles a nervous smile and turns and leaves through the half-glazed door. I’m rooted to the floor in disbelief. My new red St James’ blazer is stained with bitter tears. “Come along Reggie, let’s hang your coat up here.” It’s hung with the red bag with my name sewn in it on a hook much higher than I can reach and she holds my hand as she leads me into the classroom. I join other bewildered children. Some are crying; some are laughing false laughs. I want mother back. I think of her all morning. Through the teacher talking. Through the little glass milk bottles that rattle in their metal crates as they are brought in for our break. I think of her as I gradually say a sort of hello to those boys and girls seated around me. I miss her and want her back and I cannot – simply cannot – understand what I have done for her to desert me in the cold dark place, with strangers. She has told me she will see me at dinnertime, but I want her now. Right now. We do fun things and boring things that morning, as I think back to it. Images of that day flicker in my mind, but some things I clearly recall. Even now, I have a painful ache deep in my insides of the upset I felt that morning, so long ago. The morning she left me and walked away.

“Goodbye darling. I love you.”

She’s stolen him from me. I know it now and I cry. He’s left me and I am bereft. I am lost. I am emptied. I’ve known it would happen, even though I told myself it might not. But his years away at the University grew on him. He went off and enjoyed himself all those miles away without me and now, at last, I know he’s never coming back. He closes the door and I hear them laugh as they walk down the path to their car. It’s not about me they laugh, of course, for I am instantly forgotten in their eyes, which are only for each other. One of the others, the youngest, puts his arm round me to ease my pain, but he never can. For my first-born has gone and left me, forever and my life has ended. Even though there are the other four at home and around me. They need me just as much as he ever did, but I cannot care in this moment. I cannot see anything but those tail-lights disappearing. He has gone. I know this is healthy and I know this is right and still the harsh, warm tears billow as the little one tries to console me. But he knows he never will. My boy was mine. All and only mine for so long. For so many sleepless night and damaged days. He was all mine and now he has left me and no-one can make this better. I have been ripped apart inside. “Have some tea,” my husband says, but I brush him away. “I think I’ll go to bed,” Is all I can manage and when I get there I hug and squeeze my pillow as I sob and wet it through. As if I were still hugging my little boy. And I never will again. I know it is over and my life will be in the grip of a vice for ever.

“Goodbye darling. I love you.”

With that, her eyes close for one final time as he looks at her. He feels little. He feels relief that she has finally gone from him and this life to another place where she will be easier with herself and he can move on without the deep encumbrance of her distant presence. He looks at her small, frail body. Skin wrinkled. Half a smile as a gesture to the relief from pain and hurt in her life. To the weary joys she experienced in the good times and the wasted years of yearning. He talks to her with small, soft words that he should say, even though he feels like he is acting a part. Behaving as the bereaved should behave. He sees himself doing the things that are expected of someone in this state as if it is not his body taking part, more someone else’s. Not his mouth shaping the words. They are not his lips playing the role. One that he has been playing for all of his conscious life.  As her soul slips away, she looks down on him with only reverence and love and a sense that they will be together again soon, in the measure of how time works in the ethereal world into which she is now passing. She is young again and her pain has passed and the vibrance of her youth is back. The joy that brought, despite the tribulations of the poverty and the chaos and the bitter, bitter pain of that life. There was joy, in their way. She liked herself in those days and feels now easier with herself after all the years. He sees the age drop from her face and recalls an old grainy black and white of the two of them together. Him in a thick woolly coat and she with a knotted scarf. There is such joy in their eyes in the cold and frosty moment. When they were both young.

“Goodbye.”