Wearing my mum’s clothes helped me celebrate who she was

Only my mum would insist on buying a designer swimsuit on her deathbed. She had always found solace in clothes and, despite lying in a cancer hospital with no further treatment available for her myeloma, she wanted to buy me a birthday present: a Hunza G swimsuit.

I sent her a bathroom selfie when it arrived. Two days after she wrote “You’re welcome,” she died. We were close in the everyday ways that become impossible to describe after someone is gone. In the months after her death I could not bear to be around her things or visit the flat she shared with her partner, Ian.

When I finally began sorting through her wardrobe it felt mammoth: she loved shopping, savoured bargains and kept items to pass on. Clothes, for her, were a form of joy. Certain items hit harder than others. The last dress she bought, a khaki green gingham Monsoon number she wore to a Passover Seder, went straight into the charity pile after I remembered how swollen her legs had become from lymphoedema.

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