Three years ago today, after a week of laughter and memory, of seeing family members I haven’t seen for years, after saying my final goodbyes to the woman who shaped me, for better or worse, my mother was given a sedative, taken off the oxygen she was dependent upon, and wheeled over to hospice.
She was a stubborn woman. It took her more than 24 hours to die.
Whenever I remember that time, I don’t remember the sorrow. Well, there was that one time the afternoon of the 12th when I sorta kinda… well, really, lost it. But before that, my mom and I spent meaningful time together - talking about her life and my life, asking questions we had been too afraid to ask, offering apologies.
I was a baby dyke. My mother wanted to make me into a girly girl. I’m sure you can imagine the feelings of anger, grief, and inadequacy this caused in both of us as I was growing up.
My mother asked me if I forgave her. A question that surprised me, since our relationship had been repaired years before - when I finally gave her girly girls for grandchildren, when she saw me as an accomplished adult, and a better mother than she had been.
“Oh, mom, I forgave you a long time ago.” She nodded. Teared up. Grabbed my hand. And oh my was that grip strong, even as she was dying.
My mom was 21 when she had me, not much younger than Queen Elizabeth was when she had her firstborn, at 23.
I don’t know all of the emotions Charles is going through right now. We know from so many iterations of history that his relationship with his mother was fraught. I hope in the last months, or years, they have reconciled, forgiven each other. I hope he understands that his mother, like mine, did the best she could under the circumstances of who she was and the times she lived in.
In these days after Queen Elizabeth’s death, people from all over the world have expressed shock and sorrow. She has been a constant in our lives. Someone who was just there, that we took for granted was part of our world. Like democracy. Or sunshine.
Great Britain changed in the 70 years since she became a reluctant queen. The world changed. And she - sometimes kicking and screaming - changed with it.
What I saw in both Queen Elizabeth and my mother was a tremendous capacity for growth, a wickedly dry sense of humor, stubbornness beyond belief, and the capacity to admit when they were wrong. Perhaps reluctantly, but still.
Which is why I think I have been so bothered the last few days by people who are like, “Oh, she was a colonialist pig and we shouldn’t mourn too much for her passing.”
Colonialism is a stain on the last few hundred years of global history. Mostly, the Dutch and the British have done lasting damage that will have implications for centuries. What British troops did in the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya in the 1950s is akin to the genocide against native peoples Andrew Jackson perpetrated in the U.S. in the 1830s. It is all part of the same white supremacist hegemony.
It’s disgusting. And we all have much to answer for. Most of us are, after all, living on those stolen native lands.
But how culpable was the Queen? She inherited the world she was born into. By the time she took the crown, the same year the Mau Mau Uprising started, she had little perspective other than the colonial one she had been raised in. During World War II she was lauded as “the princess of the people,” but history has shown she really had no idea how “her people” lived. Or died. Or were tortured.
She was nothing more than a symbol. While I agree that as a symbol, she could have and should have spoken out against atrocities her government was involved in, she had no decision-making power. Especially as a woman in the 20th century.
The Elizabeth I am interested in, and mourn for, was the personal one. She had fraught relationships with her children. Especially the older ones. She clung deeply to propriety, and less to listening and love. She forbid her son to marry the woman he loved, and set off a chain of events that ended with the death of the person he did marry.
And then he married his first love. With his mother’s full support.
I have written before about my mother not signing a petition to support the Equal Rights Amendment. I know that at that moment she was a woman of her time, and I was a baby dyke of mine. She would have signed it later in her life. Hell, she would have knocked on doors asking other people for signatures later in her life.
I have no doubt Queen Elizabeth had regrets as she grew older. The world has regrets about what she did or didn’t do - even symbolically. But I also hope she reconciled with herself that she did the best she could, that she ended her life knowing far more than when she entered it. I’m not going to attack a human being who tried her best and grew and changed as her life went forward. That is all we can ask for in this world - of ourselves and others.
Long live the Queen. May the world grow and change. May we keep both democracy and sunshine.
Wonderful and thought-provoking insights as always. Thank you