Right at the beginning of this memoir of William Mars-Jones, a distinguished high court judge, Adam Mars-Jones describes moving into his parents’ house at Gray’s Inn, London, to help care for them. At the time, his father was slipping into vagueness rather than dementia. His mother was dying of cancer, “something she did with self-effacing briskness in little more than a month”. He describes how his mother became worried about where her ashes would be stowed while waiting for her husband to join her (the plan was to be interred together in Llansannan, Wales, where Mars-Jones senior was born).
Adam Mars-Jones comes up with a solution – a bit of domestic gallantry. He suggests he keep them in the top of a cupboard, which, one is slightly surprised to hear, closes the matter: “This little piece of symbolic hospitality was enough to bring her peace of mind.” And, once she is gone, he describes the feeling that she has died with “nothing left undone or unexpressed”. He explains: “She seemed absent without being missing, and mourning was beside the point. It didn’t match anything I felt.” His mother (whom he says he most resembles) seems, like her ashes, to be easy to stow as a subject (the relationship is explored at tender and more complicated length in his contribution to the 1997 Virago anthology Sons & Mothers).
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