“In Memorandum”

By Tony Lee

So, I’m writing this on Thursday 28th of September. And you might be thinking ‘so what’ as you read that, but to me it’s an incredibly important day. You see, three years ago today my mother passed away.

Now, she was as the doctors say diagnosed as ‘riddled with cancer’ three years earlier, and we went in successive stages from ‘she has a thirty percent chance of surving this operation’ to ‘she has up to three weeks’ to ‘three months’ to ‘a year’, and in the end she lasted a solid three and a half years before old man Reaper finally convinced her to come and look at his etchings. Granted, a lot of that time she was in varying stages of pain, discomfort and stress, never knowing from one week to the next what the following one would bring, but she was a tough old bird. She could give the Hulk a run for his money.

Do I miss her? Of course I do. Everyone who knew her misses her. But she was more than my mother. She was my editor, also.

All my life, I would write stuff. Usually it was rotten as hell, cliché-riddled bollocks, but my Mum would patiently read through it and politely tell me where I went wrong. She was my sternest critic, yet at the same time she was my staunchest fan. In the final years I would sit beside her, reading large chunks of whatever fantasy novel I was writing at the time out to her. She would always get irritated when I hit the end, partly because I always ended on a cliffhanger, but also because she knew that with the way I was, flitting from novel to novel, she would never hear the end. I would give her cliff notes on what would be happening next, that sort of thing.

The proudest moment of my life was in February 2004, when I was able to show her a comic I had written – X-Men Unlimited #1, it was only half a comic to be honest, but it didn’t matter. It was Marvel. It was the X-Men. She’d heard of them. Throughout the years before, the years of writing two-bit sketches on radio and television shows, of writing adverts, features and articles for magazines and papers, I had never written something that enabled me to call myself a ‘proper’ writer. I know, all of that was proper writing, but it’s like being a writer or a novelist. And suddenly I could go ‘look mum, a story I wrote. In this comic.’

The one thing I never managed to do in time was get a book out in a bookstore. Mum was a prolific reader, a voracious one who visited the library once a week, and not once was she able to pick up one of my books. But she knew that it was coming. And she saw preview art. She, more than any other had faith in me.

I sit here today and I wish that she could see me now. I wish even more that she could see me in another three years time. Not because it would have given her more time, but because I would have felt that I had actually made a difference; that I had proven myself. In my family, I have two brothers, both twelve, thirteen years older than me. One is an Astrophysics Master who in his time has been involved in the development of many of the British advances in space exploration over the last twenty years, has lobbied the government on many occasions and is now Sales and Marketing manager for a Spacecraft software company. The other is currently one of the guiding forces in touch screen technology. And then there’s me. The guy who makes the funny books. But never once have they mocked me for following my dream, and there’s even a bit of pride in their eyes when they hear about my latest project. This keeps me going. Even my father, who’s never been the best of readers, will plough through my work, even though secretly? He’s waiting for the movie adaptation.

But it’s still my Mum, my dear old departed mother who I miss the most.