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6 hours ago
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Only my mum would insist on buying a designer swimsuit on her deathbed. She had always found emotional solace in clothes, but shopping for herself had become futile by that point. She was, after all, lying in a cancer hospital having been told there was no further treatment available for her relentless myeloma; she had exhausted all available options in the 11 years since her diagnosis. But my 37th birthday was coming up and there was no way terminal blood cancer was going to stop Rhona from buying me a present. She loved showering her family with gifts. I would reprimand her for spoiling us. “I can’t spend it when I’m dead, can I?” she used to respond.
Of course, there was only one thing I truly wanted that birthday, but I was being forced to come to terms with that being a deluded fantasy. Despite my protestations that I needed nothing, my mum insisted: “Something nice for your holidays, perhaps?”
“Holiday clothes” was one of her favourite oeuvres. (I know of no one else who described a dress as a “going-down-to-breakfast” dress). So I relented and mentioned I’d always liked the look of those Hunza G swimsuits that supposedly suit any body shape, mostly because I thought she would find that idea interesting to discuss. We enjoyed discussing clothes. We enjoyed discussing everything. “Brilliant! Pass me my phone.” I did what I was told. On reflection, this was probably one of her last acts of joy. Perhaps the last. I sent her a bathroom selfie in the costume when it arrived. “Lovely and soft, thanks Mama.” “You’re welcome,” she replied for the last time. She died two days later.
As I grew up, when people would occasionally ask, “Are you close with your mum?”, I was always thrown. Being close to my mum was as obvious and natural as breathing. Something that, I’ve since learned, is not a given. This is not to brag, but to try to convey the size of the loss in my life. It has been four years since she died and I am still staggered by the absurd notion that I am living life without her here. She would listen to every inane and innocuous thought that ran through my head and be truly interested. Or at least feign interest with admirable skill. I miss our everyday, not-much-to-report chats that I have since realised filled the crevices of my existence. With her gone, I will always feel a little broken.
In the immediate aftermath of her death, when the pain was suffocating, I found it impossible to be around any of her stuff. I couldn’t visit the flat she had shared with her partner, Ian. Walking down our village high street in south Manchester felt precarious, lest I be pelted with people or places that, in my mind, belonged to her. It took months before I felt even remotely ready to start sorting through her clothes.
It was a mammoth task. My mum’s wardrobe was on the generous side. To be clear, she was no Mariah Carey. It wasn’t that she was splurging all the time. It was more a combination of a penchant for shopping, especially in sales or at outlet stores (her dream day out), and an inability to throw anything away. She was a thoughtful, sharp and wise woman, adored by everyone who knew her. She just so happened to really like clothes. Talking about them, looking at them, shopping for them, savouring them, wearing them, holding on to them to pass down. They gave her joy. Some people have art. Some people have stamps. Some people have clothes. Judge them if you must, but know you are making the world a little less pleasant when you do.
I’ve now been sorting these clothes for the past four years. It is often a sidelined element of grief – what to do with the things a loved one leaves behind – but it has been seismic for me, in ways I could never have predicted. It has felt both draining and affirming. It has nudged me closer to confronting my new life without her in it, but it has also helped me celebrate everything about who she was.
Eight months after she died, Ian gently asked if I was ready to come over to their flat to start going through Mum’s clothes. I thought I was. I was wrong. On the back of the bedroom door hung the last dress she bought. It was a khaki green gingham “floaty number” as she called it, from Monsoon. In the very late stages of her disease, Mum suffered from lymphoedema, which meant her legs became swollen up like “bloody tree trunks” (her turn of phrase will always soundtrack my memories). She couldn’t pull any of her trousers over her inflated calves and she was keen to hide her legs whenever possible. She wore that dress to Passover Seder night, at my house. It was the last time she would ever go out, which we weren’t to know at the time, but the feeling in my stomach as I snatched glimpses of her at the end of our long table might have been a forewarning.
As she prepared to leave, she realised she couldn’t move her legs enough to take the two shallow steps out of my front door. Glimpsing that dress in her room, I had a flashback to her panicked face in my door frame, once my brother had lifted her on to my drive, turning to me and asking: “How am I ever going to come to your house like this?” I remembered trying to contain my own fear and offering some attempt at reassurance as my heart pounded. I put that dress in the charity pile. I never wanted to see it again.
I thought I was making good headway, but then I spotted the plaited brown leather belt that she wore with her jeans, and I crumpled. The dresses she wore on special occasions brought back memories, but the sight of this ordinary, nothing to write home about, just-popping-in-to-drop- something-off-on-the-way-back-from-the-supermarket belt took my breath away. I craved seeing her on my couch, wearing that belt, holding one of my babies and telling me that Kettle Chips were on offer in Tesco. I still do. I was floored by the magnitude of never having that again. That night I came down with a gastric bug that wiped me out for the next few days. I didn’t think it was a coincidence. I couldn’t face going back to her flat to carry on after that.
Ian understood, as he always does, and over the next year would bring over some of my mum’s clothes, bit by bit, a suitcase at a time for me to sort. Going through them in bite-size chunks, away from her flat, made the process more bearable. It wasn’t simply a matter of picking out the odd thing to remember her by and then bagging up the rest for charity. My mum was only 66 when she died and, as established, really into clothes. She was known for her style and her ability to spy a bargain. Plus, she was roughly my height, albeit a slightly different body shape. I had witnessed how much care she took over her wardrobe my entire life. I had sat front row on her bed watching her try on pieces she loved, seen how they made her feel good – and been the recipient of those that no longer fitted but she couldn’t quite bring herself to fully part with. So after she died, I started to wear her clothes. A lot. I felt that would have pleased her, as though her careful curation was being put to good use. Plus, I was in my late-30s and it was time to upgrade the tops I’d bought at uni from Forever 21 and Miss Selfridge.
If I ever had to give an outfit some thought, I would always consult my mum. She was my favourite shopping partner. I used to joke that she was my stylist – I have never found anyone who could be as brutally honest with me as her (who else can tell you that a pair of trousers makes you look like you’ve soiled yourself?). And if I ever stumbled across a bargain, she was my first call. One of my favourite items I’ve inherited are stupidly high Gucci heels that were reduced from £480 to £45. I know this because she kept the price tag in the box – she cherished the discount as much as the shoes themselves.
I want to discuss everything with her, but I really want to discuss clothes, to the point that I sometimes find myself talking to her out loud as I get dressed. These “chats” can shatter me. Last spring, I caught a nasty virus, and as the delightful accompanying rash played havoc with my thighs, only certain things were comfortable to wear. I was drawn to an orange modal dress, which felt like soothing, silky cotton, that I know my mum would have worn out and about on a sunny day, probably paired with some yellow-gold jewellery and her sparkly chunky sandals. As I reached for it, I heard her say, “That’s too good for schlumping around the house,” and I heard myself respond aloud, “I know, Mum, but it’s the only thing I want to wear right now.” I know she would have agreed that was more important – anything to feel better.
In that moment I remembered the time I was living in London and had a throat infection so severe I hallucinated I had swallowed the Shard, and my mum raced from Manchester to look after me, with actual homemade chicken soup because she was never one not to live up to her stereotype. I was 27. The memory slapped me in the face so fiercely, I audibly gasped.
I could feel myself getting a little weird about my mum’s clothes. I sensed an unhealthy attachment forming. I silently lamented washing them and losing her smell. I watched my then six-year-old use some of my mum’s old scarves in an improvised dance routine and felt my body tense up at the idea that they could be ripped in the process. It was around this time I came across the clothing designer Sophie Lewis.
Lewis heads up the Reincarnation Club, a service where she cleverly and sensitively reworks clothes belonging to a deceased loved one into something new. I was intrigued by this concept – the only reworking I had had done on my mum’s clothes were slight alterations to fit. I gave Sophie a call. Within a few minutes of chatting, she fully validated my mum’s love of clothes – she loves them, too. “Clothes really tell stories of the people who own them; they’re the emotional story of a person.”
Lewis, 52, a former creative director in advertising agencies, from London, started volunteering at her local Crisis charity shop as Covid restrictions eased in 2021 and found herself deeply moved by those donating their loved ones’ clothes. She began to recognise certain phrases – “There are some lovely things in there” – that would hint at certain donations being more than just a result of a clearout. “They would start off very specifically, like, ‘Well, it’s a couple of jackets,’ and I would start looking at them and then they would say, ‘They belonged to my mum,’” she says. Lewis began to recognise these interactions as a gateway for talking about grief, “and there’s not much outlet for that in our world. They would say things like, ‘She really loved this because … ’ and it was like stories of that person falling out of the pockets.”
Soon after, grief hit Lewis’s own family, when her father-in-law died. Her mother-in-law couldn’t face parting with a few items that felt so intrinsic to her husband, including the jacket from his time as captain of a golf club. Lewis had the idea to rework it into something her mother-in-law might actually wear, shortening it, giving it different sleeves and a peplum. Her friends remarked how amazing she looked in it, and it became a piece that was very much part of her own style. Lewis had taken something cherished and reincarnated it into something that made a widow feel, well, good. Hearing this story validated the multitude of feelings I’d had while sorting through my mum’s wardrobe. Clothes have power.
Not long after our phone conversation, I found myself in Lewis’s studio at the bottom of her garden, showing her a black Betsey Johnson cocktail dress my mum used to wear for various “dos”. It was black stretch-lace shot through with silver thread, and all the wrong shape for me – too long, too busty. It was a dress that conjured happy memories of sitting on my mum’s bed watching her do her makeup and put rollers in her hair before an evening out, but not something I would ever wear.
Lewis was keen to meet face to face before she took her scissors to the dress. “Meeting the person is really important,” she explained to me, as I settled in among the rolls of fabric and inspo-walls of her studio. “Although I have my own aesthetic, I would never shove you into something you would never wear, so it’s about understanding the story of who the thing originally belonged to and then the story of the person who’s come in with it.” Lewis was taught to sew by her grandmother on an old Singer machine with a handle and has been making clothes for herself since she was 10, learning by trial and error. I am struck by her thoughtfulness in designing for those grieving a loved one; her father-in-law was a fan of shirts that were not her husband’s style, so she used the fabric to line the pockets of his jeans instead.
I ended up talking about my mum for hours. I told Lewis how I’d described my mum as a “titan” in the eulogy I gave. How everything about the way she lived life was … big. She topped up our worlds with generous measures of joy, even when it felt as if it was in scarce supply. And the only way I have found to tackle my grief is to try to live life the way she did, scouting for joy, even if on some days it feels like sifting through scraps. That dress, I told Lewis, was a “getting dolled up and going out on a Saturday night” piece and that’s how I like to remember her. It was the polar opposite of a dress to hide legs that were stopping her from living life at the scale she wanted.
Lewis listened – really listened – and then did two things. First, she told me my mum would have probably loved watching her granddaughter attempt interpretive dance with her scarves, even if they ended up torn. She was right, of course. Then she showed me designs she had already been working on. Her plan was to make me a party outfit, but one I would actually wear. Over the next four days, Lewis created an amazingly flattering pair of cream duchess satin, wide-leg trousers, with the material of mum’s dress running down the side – a go-faster stripe that feels perfectly fitting for my mum’s legacy. She also made a matching swing-shape, sleeveless top with a contrast back panel, again using the dress material. The first time I wore it was on my 40th birthday. There is something about an all-cream outfit that is elevating – for anyone who isn’t Gwyneth Paltrow, it implies “making an effort” from the off. Add in the co-ord element, the highlighting sheen of the fabric and the comfort of the shape, and wearing it that night made me feel exactly the way a good “dolled-up” outfit should. And then, every time I was complimented on it, I got to share the story of its origin. “You see this part? This belonged to a dress of my mum’s … ” It is unmistakably an outfit for – and of – joy. It feels so very me, but also gives real Rhona vibes. She would have loved it.
I now wear my mum’s clothes most of the time. Her Marks & Spencer cashmere tracksuit keeps me warm on working from home days. When I go into the office, I usually wear something of hers – and more often than not I receive compliments. To which I respond, every time: “Thanks, it was my mum’s.” My colleagues now expect anything I wear that is vaguely chic to have belonged to her. This would have thrilled her.
I still cannot fathom Mum not being here. The world without her is infinitely darker. So I try to conjure flickers of Rhona. I play my children California Dreamin’ and tell them how it was one of their grandma’s favourites. How cold, sunny days always cheered her. About her instruction to always salute and whistle at a solo magpie. And I wear her clothes. I wear them to feel confident at work, warm at home and “done up for a good do”.
It is just a jumper. Just a blouse. Just an orange sundress. I am not too addled by grief to fail to recognise the distinction between belongings and a person. But when I wear her clothes, I feel I am not only keeping her closer, but also telling her story. I’m holding on to her, if only by the threads.
