Last month would have been my mother’s 62nd birthday.

September 20th.

The same time last year, all four of her daughters were with her in our family home, in Soltvadkert, Hungary. The weather turned from late August’s unbearably, searingly hot days and nights to eerily, almost prophetically cold – gradually at first, then almost suddenly, overnight.

By then, my mother could no longer get out of bed. The colon cancer she had lived with for more than six years had spread through her body, and an enormous tumour filled her abdomen. She looked seven months pregnant.

I remember looking at that swollen stomach and thinking about the obscenity of the resemblance.

My mother’s body had made four daughters. Now it seemed to be carrying something again, only this time it was carrying her death.

There are indignities to dying that we don’t like to talk about. We prefer death once it has become abstract… candles, flowers, music, poetry, a photograph chosen from when the person was still recognisably themselves.

Dying is different. Dying has a body.

My sisters and I took turns caring for our mother’s.

We fed her, gave her water and medicine, dampened her lips when she could no longer swallow anything, not even liquids, turned her in bed, cleaned her. We dealt with the things bodies do when the person who inhabits them can no longer command them. We watched, waited, and slept around the rhythms of her illness in pockets of stolen time in between her moans of pain and our own exhausted deliriousness.

Four daughters orbiting one bed.

Somewhere in those final weeks, something happened between my mother and me that I had wanted, in different forms, throughout most of my life.

I stopped being frightened of her.

Perhaps I had stopped years before. Fear changes as you grow older. The enormous adults of childhood become ordinary-sized people and then, if we are lucky enough to live long enough, they become smaller than us.

But this was different. I could touch her, I could care for her, I could hold this woman who had once seemed so powerful that the mere hint of her displeasure could instantly turn the atmosphere of a room.

And I have never felt closer to her.

It had taken us more than forty years to get there.

She had a little over a month left.

During that traumatising time of my life, I thought about the ending of a human life more than I ever had before.

About dying, about what happens to the body, or to the people left standing around it.

And despite how harrowing and heartbreaking those months were, I also felt an enormous sense of privilege in being able to care for my mother at the end of her life earthside.

It brought us sisters closer, and, somehow, it brought Mum and me closer too.

There is something profoundly intimate about caring for the body of the person who once grew you, carried you, fed you, washed you, kept you alive.

Perhaps that is why, somewhere inside all of that grief and exhaustion, I also became obsessed with everything surrounding the end of human life.

These are the things nobody likes to talk about, as if the mere mention of them would bring that final, almost universally feared day closer

Things such as what happens before and after someone passes. What needs doing, and who might be able to help. Where you go when your brain is barely capable of making a cup of tea, never mind navigating the bureaucratic machinery and all sorts of written and unwritten customs that suddenly appear around death.

That is where RiteRest came from, although I have been researching it for over two years now.

I have been building it to help people navigate life before, during and after a loss.

It is still in beta, and I would love you to test it:

https://riterest.com

You do not need to be grieving or caring for somebody right now. Test it hypothetically.

Follow the journeys, look for what you would need, and tell me where it fails you – I’d love to have feedback on all the positive and not quite so positive aspects of this project.

One day, all of us will need to know what comes next.

With love and gratitude,

Zsike 🫶🏼