'Fifteen Ways to Grieve your Mother' by Lee Irving

Fifteen Ways to Grieve your Mother 

(after Paul Simon)

1. Learn to cook the Mother Of All Roasts, complete with high-rise Yorkshire puddings, and gravy from the gods.
2. Steer clear of herbal and fruit infusions: they are not tea.
3. Refuse to stop for pedestrians waiting at a Zebra Crossing but get irate when drivers fail to stop when you are the pedestrian waiting at a Zebra Crossing.
4. Stockpile enough spare tins of beans, vegetables, soup, and prunes to get you through a nuclear winter.
5. Cultivate the Art of Malapropism, coining such classics as: ‘He’s just a wolf in cheap clothing,’ and, ‘As happy as Cary [Grant].’
6. Blame the recession on the last Labour government/the EU/foreigners-in-general. 
7. Do say, ‘Thank you for the present. I do hope you kept the receipt.’ 
8. Don’t say, ‘There’s no rush for you to find a husband, and plenty of time for you to have children.’
9. Only expect men to hold open the door for you, but grumble when a woman doesn’t do so.
10. Deride those who wax lyrical about their wonderful grandchildren all the time, while waxing lyrical all the time about your own wonderful grandchildren.
11. Refuse to wear suncream because, ‘We won the war without it, you know.’
12. Be stoical in the face of adversity, even when you have a serious brush with skin cancer.
13. Remember that her own mother was no good at showing her affection.
14. Focus instead on the one time she did tell you that she was proud of you.
15. Never forget it was you she wanted to hold her hand at the very end…

… and set yourself free.

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Lee Irving writes to try to make sense of the world by exploring what it means to be human, and his work includes everything from micro-fiction to novels. He has won competitions with Writing Magazine and Tortive Lit's #FlashFiction101. You can see more of his published stories at: https://leeirvingwriter.wixsite.com/lee-irving