The Sunday Times Magazine • 37the heart muscle pumped to the body and
the stronger side pumped to the lungs.
There was also a hole between the two sides
of her heart and she had a narrowing of one
of the coronary arteries. They carried out an
emergency operation. When my mother
saw her baby afterwards, she had shrunk to
skin and bone. My parents left the hospital
with a cocktail of drugs including digoxin
to regulate the heart. Life changed
immediately. The Foreign Office accepted
that my parents needed to be within
relatively easy reach of Great Ormond
Street, so for the next few years their
postings were all in northern Europe, first
in Luxembourg and then in Paris, where my
brother and sister were born.T
here were scares. One day Leila
began to turn blue and they
were told to fly back urgently.
They were met by an ambulance
at the airport and she was
rushed to Great Ormond Street
for an emergency operation and
a blood transfusion.
She had two more major
surgeries, one at six months
and one at two and a half years.
But she was a happy child. My mother
remembered her waking from a nine-hour
operation. “I feel Smurfy,” she said. Leila
was small for her age, and couldn’t do a lot
of physical activity, but she liked stories and
listening to cassettes of songs and she loved
poetry, just as my father does. She could be
a little monkey, my mother recalled. She
once found her, aged five, rummaging
inside a cupboard with her two-year-old
brother. They were looking for Narnia,
Leila announced.
It was shortly after my sister was born,
when my parents were living in Paris, that
Leila began to cough up blood.
My mother brought her back to London,
my father staying on to help at home. They
weren’t anticipating that they would hear
the worst. So Mum was alone when doctors
explained that Leila’s lungs could not take
the pressure that the defective heart was
putting on it. Nothing more could be done.
She left the hospital in a daze, she said. My
father rushed back and the Foreign Office
quickly gave him a London posting so they
could be here among family and friends.
The next few months were hard. Leila
was frequently on oxygen. My brother, an
energetic three-year-old, raced around their
flat and my mother had a babe in arms. Leila
received every gift on her Christmas list
that year including a bubblegum machine,
which my parents loathed. Everyone came
to visit; they wanted to say goodbye. Leila
died in her sleep one night in March.
“This is your sister’s story,” my mother
wrote. She had realised that she and my
father were the only ones who knew it
and wanted to know that Leila’s memory
wouldn’t end with them. “Perhaps youcould put it together one day,” she said.
And so I have.
I don’t think anything can really prepare
you for the terrible rollercoaster of grief. But
in a way that is very typical of my mother, she
had provided me with a blueprint to help
me through mine. She developed a strong
Christian faith after Leila died and kept it
to the end, despite gentle ribbing from her
children. Beyond that, the most important
thing for her was gratitude; not to let the
grief of having lost someone eclipse the joy
you felt when they were alive. “We were the
lucky ones,” she wrote to me that day, and
I know that she meant it. I feel that way too.
It’s inevitable that those of us who loved my
mother wish we could have had longer, but
I am profoundly grateful that we had the
time we did. I’m thankful for many things,
even all those years of unsolicited advice,
because she has embedded her voice in my
head. There will never be a moment when
I can’t conjure her and know exactly what
she would have said.
And now, when I look back at those years
of discord, it makes me smile because we
were as stubborn as each other and because,
in some ways, I think we were both right.
There is no right way of living and no
guaranteed route to happiness. I can’t be
any more certain of my choices now than
I was back then. But I do know that, in
this moment, my children are my greatest
source of comfort. Their chatter is a
distraction, their needs eclipse my own,
and every so often I get a glimpse of a
miracle; sometimes, usually when they are
misbehaving, I get to see her in them nThe Ballast Seed: A Story of Motherhood,
of Growing Up and Growing Plants by
Rosie Kinchen is published on Thursday
by Weidenfeld & NicolsonRosie with her
parents, Cheryl and
Richard, and their
two grandsons.
Her mother died
recently, aged 73THE HARDEST
THING FOR ME IS
THE THOUGHT THAT
MY SONS MAY NOT
REMEMBER HER. MY
MIND WILL NOT LET
ME DWELL ON IT
COURTESY OF ROSIE KINCHEN