At home, my mother still lived beside me.

I wore clothes she had washed, ate with cutlery she had once made aeroplane into my mouth, and walked on floors which her size 4 heels used to clack over, her hands had cleaned, and were left coated in a quantity of dust she would never have tolerated. In Cambridge, I now share my days and nights with friends she never met, kiss men she has never passed judgement on, and walk through cobbled streets her heels had never known. To continue to live a life absent of my mother was one thing; to move into a new phase of that same life without her, I have found, is something entirely apart.

Novel and painfully adult experiences serve as a stark reminder of my loss - now that I know she will not meet my first boyfriend, it feels all the more real that she will never cheer as I graduate, nor wipe her tears with the same hand that holds a parsimoniously filled glass of champagne at my wedding dress fitting. Whether or not these happen outside of coming-of-age films will have to be something my friends discover for me. Although I knew she could never have walked through the front door at home, it is embarrassing to admit that the fact she would not even know which door upon which to knock at university has brought me such anguish.

“During nights spent doubled over laughing ... an uninvited guest sits quietly in the corner”

Alongside this, university life is washed with a subtle undertone of guilt. During nights spent doubled over laughing, or fuzzy evenings punctuated by a smashed wine glass and survived by a coating of sticky residue on the JCR floor, an uninvited guest sits quietly in the corner, watching me with a tempered, knowing disdain. Mostly, the gate-crasher goes unnoticed, but now and then their whispers of afternoons sat in a sterile hospital room, nights passed sleepless, and mornings marred by dread remind me that while I find myself lifted by effervescent joy, I leave behind someone in the earth below. Other times, I am acutely aware that in my absence, our family at home of three has shrunk to two (or four if you were to count the cats, and the fact that I normally do is telling in itself). When my brother flies the nest next year, my dad’s wry jokes about rattling around an empty home will ring unpleasantly true.

There is of course no doubt that my mother would want me to live the life I find myself lucky enough to be leading, yet I cannot help but feel each joyous, stressful, wonderfully Cambridge minute that passes without her in my thoughts wrests her from my grasp. Her face is beginning to blur at the edges, and her voice comes and goes, her vocabulary shrinking as mine is forcibly increased by erudite supervisors - and my never ending Spanish Quizlets.

“A term spent joyously and freely, unshackled by any self-imposed obligation to preserve her, her space, and the daughter she knew”

Most noticeably, upon my arrival in college her death was known only to me, leaving me with the conundrum of how, and when, to announce it. Seemingly simple,those who have had to inform hapless friends of a family tragedy will be aware of the intricate choices I found myself making in my body language, lexicon, and timing - the latter sometimes comedic, if I was in a mood to embarrass others and indulge myself. Following the lead of friends announcing a new boyfriend online, I went for the ‘soft-launch’. Emulating the subtle art of increasingly obvious Instagram stories, I led with the past tense, then responded to questions about my parents with a pointed ‘my dad...’, and finally, sealing the deal like a change of Facebook relationship status, dropped whichever euphemism I had settled on that day.

Although painful and paradoxical, to keep my mother alive at university has been to announce her dead. She hated tattoos, so even a tasteful physical testament to her life is off the cards, and, existing in Cambridge only in the colour of my hair, the way I laugh, and my memory, there are few testaments I can offer her. A life well lived. Her legacy and words shared, not hidden. Most counterintuitively of all, a term spent joyously and freely, unshackled by any self-imposed obligation to preserve her, her space, and the daughter she knew.