Saving Home and Hearth

Hello All,

Thanks for taking the time to read my story.

Until December 2023 (last year), I was full-time carer for my mother. She was a remarkable woman, not just my mum, but my best friend and confidant. She supported, protected and loved me from the beginning. I lived in the family home with her, we shared and cared for each other for nearly 10 years.

When I became seriously ill with mental health issues, and had to leave my work, I was embraced and cared for by mum, she helped me recover and rebuild myself.

Whenever she was unwell, I cared for her. As she became less able to manage for herself, I gradually took over doing everything for her. We were happy regardless of our situations.

Mums great love was her garden! Between us we had created a wildlife garden over 22 years. It's full of wild flowers, trees, shrubs, scent and bloom. It attracts an infinite number of wonderful animals and birds.

In 2019 came the blow to our modest paradise! Mum was diagnosed with dementia, the most cruel disease. Caring for her intensified to ensure she was comfortable and happy.

Through nights and days of memory fluctuation and hallucination and infections and confinement to bed we carried on loving and laughing with each other. Somehow, I lived through the first moments when she told me in confidence, she didn’t know who I was, was I her Daddy? It was as if nothing was real anymore. Repetition of thought, conversation, hallucinations of the bee, conversations with long dead relatives relentless calls for her mum to rescue her. My heart ached.

As she drew to her close, we held hands as I sat by her bed, window open to let the air from her garden in, by then her voice had gone so, smiling eyes were all she had, they spoke volumes of love. Suddenly she was gone.

The thing about caring is your focus is so intensely on your loved one, that nothing else matters. We chatted about many things and she often said she’d like me to stay in the house when she’d gone, but you don’t write dreams down, you hug and hold hands and those conversations evaporate in to the mist.

When she died so much ended, my life ended, and reality hard and cold hit me.

Our home of love and joy, the place where her spirt is, where we said good bye had become an 'asset' not a home, become 'money' not a sanctuary for love, nature, heart and soul, just a thing to be sold. All the executors except me agreed to sell. For me it is a second bereavement.

So why am I telling you my story? I've thought long and hard about setting up GO FUND ME. I just didn’t feel worthy! But with encouragement from friends and having explored for months ways I might buy out the other executors, every route leaves me short of the amount it would take to make the house my home once more.

So here I am, asking you for help to raise a lifeline to help buy my home. So I can live in it for the rest of my life. For me the house is not 'money', nor an 'asset', it is where I live, where I feel right, where the heart beats meaning you are safe. Where the garden is my soul and my mother’s spirit walks among the trees and flowers.

This amount is a start and I hope I can raise enough through other means to buy out the others. When I eventually join my mum the house will be sold and the proceeds divided between 6 charities that reflect our great loves: The Egypt Exploration Society/ PDSA/ The Sussex Wildlife Trust/ Dementia Research UK/ Cancer UK/ British Orchid Society

Thank you eternally from my hearts depths if you can donate, or if you know who might and can forward this to them.

Love Ax