CAUSE OF DEATH

Thing with dead mothers, you never know when they'll come back and haunt you.
You bury them, and you think, that's it, you'll be doing your own laundry. 

Acute renal failure, they said, kidneys up the creek. Well I'm not so sure about it. My 

brother has an idea she gave up, left it to Jesus, what with the Old Man at it with that 

Latin woman, and both of us knocking up our girlfriends one after the other. And the 

laundry, sure. I don't know though, you don't spend all that time swelling up in pain, 

suffering, to get out of a little washing, not even if you're a Catholic. Catholic as fuck, 

the sisters; mum, the youngest, first one off to heaven. 

Aunty Lillian, The Ward Sister, had rung to say we should come. Middle Aunty Celia

meets us, she's in floods. They held mum's hands, her eyes fluttered and she was gone.

Big Aunty put a blue arm around Middle Aunty's shoulders. Me and him leave them 

grieving.

I think she just died, like people do. Unlucky, so young. At least she never knew
about us, the sex and drugs and all that, the divorces. Well, not the divorces anyway, or
Himself, at it again, and again, but no, I think she died of love, of a broken heart. My 

daughter Sophie, The Teacher, arrived. Same eyes. Same hair. Same name.