For just a few minutes. First time since I found out my mum died. It was really strange. Someone from my village post a photo of another lady from our village, a tiny bit younger than my mum, with a note that her funeral will be on Wednesday. My mum’s funeral is tomorrow, Tuesday and looking at this photo made me think that ‘this will be after mum’s funeral’ so that means my mum’s funeral is real. Does that make sense to you? It does to me.

I was also really sad that that lady had a note on Facebook and my mum didn’t. But I didn’t want to post one myself. I guess people found out anyway, but I didn’t want to post about it if I’m not going and have no control over how the funeral will look like. It will probably be as basic as one can think. The Friend suggested to me that my brother’s motivation could have been getting a funeral payment that is being paid by the government to the person who’s organising funeral. I think it’s 4k PLN. My dad’s funeral was apparently very basic already as it was in lockdown and it cost approximately that amount. Can one make it even cheaper? I guess my brother can. I don’t want to be involved in that, I don’t want to be that person who tells people to go there if, possibly there will be no flowers at all. Or maybe not even a mass?

It hurts.

At the same time I feel like I’m really not in a position to struggle against my brother’s desire to spend, whatever possible, on alcohol and have every real problem deep in his a… That’s just a saying we use in Poland. I can’t do that. I can’t go and struggle against him the entire time to make things a tiny bit nicer. I hope mum would understand. I’m sure she would.

After I had this tiny cry, I actually felt some kind of relief. I want the things to move forward. I mean, I’m kind of glad that there will be another funeral the next day and people forger that I didn’t come. Or maybe they won’t? I find it hard to imagine what they will think. Funerals are an important part of Polish culture, much more important than they seem to be in the UK. They can get quite expensive. Live music is often being played there and there’s loads of flowers. I wouldn’t want music but I’d love flowers. And I wanted my mum to have a nice dress. Something that she wouldn’t buy for herself when she was alive, because she didn’t want to spend money. Strange, isn’t it? Why I didn’t buy her a dress when she was alive? Because she’d moan at me for it and never wear it. I didn’t want her to moan. I wanted her to be cheerful and happy. Instead, I was so tired of anticipating her reaction that I didn’t even want to try to buy her anything. Although, she really liked a fluffy cardigan I bought her a few years ago. She also used to like going away and eating out, so it’s not really like if she didn’t have any fun out of life.

It’s so strange to think that I’d never see her again. I think, I still didn’t really understand it and I may never will. Possibly part of me still believes that I just haven’t spoken to her for a bit longer than normal. And does that really matter? It’s not like she was providing me with any support. And I wasn’t providing her with any. I wanted all of this to look different. I was hoping she will be able to age at home, like everyone else in our village. Why that was not possible? There are other families that have worse problems than ours and they seem to cope better. Or at least that’s how I see it. Possibly there are things in their lives that I’m not aware of? Or maybe they cope better because they don’t drink?