My mum had a phrase for most things, but one of her favourites was:
“Least said, soonest mended.”
It was usually deployed when something had gone wrong, somebody had said something they shouldn’t have, or a situation had reached the point where further discussion was unlikely to improve it.
In other words: stop talking about it, get on with things, and it’ll probably be fine.
There is something wonderfully economical about it. Four words which can bring an entire argument to a halt. I suspect generations of Scottish family diplomacy have been built on considerably less.
But since my mum died, I’ve thought about those four words rather more than I ever did when she was here.
Because it turns out that grief doesn’t pay much attention to family sayings.
Least said, soonest mended.
I’m not sure about that one, Mum.
The strange thing about losing someone is that the enormous things aren’t always the things that get you. You prepare yourself, as much as anyone possibly can, for the funeral. You know the first birthday, Christmas and anniversary will be difficult. You expect the obvious moments.
It’s the ordinary ones that ambush you.
Something happens and you think, “I’ll tell Mum that.”
You remember something ridiculous she once said.
You see something she’d have liked, or something she’d have absolutely hated and would have told you about at considerable length.
And then, for a fraction of a second, everything is normal.
Until you remember.
That’s the peculiar cruelty of grief. The person can be gone for weeks or months, but some part of your brain hasn’t received the memo. It still occasionally behaves as though they’re just somewhere else.
And perhaps that’s because, in a sense, they are.
My mum is still there in the phrases I use, the things I find funny, the stories I tell and probably in a hundred little habits I don’t even realise came from her.
Including, of course, “least said, soonest mended.”
I’ve wondered whether she was right.
Perhaps there are things in life where saying less really is the wisest course. Arguments. Petty disagreements. The things we say in anger and would be better allowing to disappear rather than examining them endlessly.
But grief isn’t an argument to be resolved.
There isn’t a clever thing you can say that fixes it. There isn’t a point at which you’ve thought about somebody enough and can put them neatly away. And I’m increasingly unconvinced that “mending” is even the right ambition.
Because to mend something is to try to return it to how it was before.
This can’t be.
My mum died, and the world is therefore permanently different from the world in which my mum was alive. That’s not melodrama. It’s simply a fact.
So perhaps the job isn’t to mend.
Perhaps it’s to learn how to carry the difference.
To talk about her when I want to talk about her. To laugh at the things that were funny. To remember the things that weren’t. To occasionally hear her voice in my head telling me what she would have made of whatever nonsense I’m currently involved in.
And sometimes to say nothing at all.
Not because saying less will make the grief disappear sooner, but because silence can be a form of remembering too.
I still like her phrase.
I’ll probably keep using it.
But on this one, Mum, I think you might have been wrong.
Some things aren’t meant to be mended.
Some people mattered far too much for that.
And perhaps grief is simply the price of having had someone in your life whose absence is worth noticing.
Although I can already imagine what she’d say about me writing all of this.
“Least said, soonest mended.”
Fair enough, Mum.