South Downs, June, 2025

I have a tattoo on my back. A butterfly, the Dingy Skipper to be precise. My mum always dealt in precision. She would say, “Nature is precise: every cell, every hair, every limb moves in concert, yet remains bound by divine uncertainty.”

The head of the skipper rests right between my scapulae. Its furry brown thorax and abdomen take up the length of my spine. Its mottled brown, white, and grey wings sweep wide across my back; sometimes I feel their feathery hind margins tickle my lats. When I move, if you watch closely, you can see thousands of scales lilt, as if each has a breath of its own. My favorite part is the antennae, the light-seeking navigators. Something about the way the filiform stems wave across my back, always in search of the sun, makes me feel as though I will never again be able to get lost. At night, the clubbed ends of the antennae rest above my clavicles, quiet sentinels.

I sometimes catch a glimpse of my back in the light of certain hours, only to find the Dingy Skipper gone. But it is always back in time for evening. I couldn’t tell you where it disappears to. Maybe it’s on nectar-hunting adventures, maybe it’s found a colony nearby. Still, it always returns, perching back in its spot, head between my scapulae, antennae on my clavicles. Mum also had the Dingy Skipper inked on her, in the middle of her chest, wings spread across her heart space.

I know I’m supposed to stand here and share details of Mum’s life: place of birth, place of death, milestones, best moments, her smile and laughter, her funniest lines. All that will come. It’s just that there is this day, a series of days in the spring about a decade ago, that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. It’s the day we almost lost Mum. I think it was the first time I truly encountered the life-death-life cycle. The first time I felt that symbiotic rhythm of nature and began to sense the interconnectedness of everything. Before I start rambling about existence, let me share the memory.

It begins like this. I am eleven years old. It is the warmest spring of my life. Mum is pregnant, Dad is working away, and I receive the devastating news that we will be leaving our home in the rural idyll to live with Grandma Camila in London.

London, Westminster, May 2015

My left ear presses against the ground as I lie on my side, the other facing the sky. In one ear I hear the muted heartbeat of the earth, or perhaps my own, echoing through me. In the other, I hear buzzing, whizzing, flapping, pawing, scurrying - the gentle business of life around me. I lie perfectly still in the middle of an abandoned railway line, colonised by overgrown vegetation, a patchwork of mosaiced habitats humming with activity.

I am lying down as I have done every morning for the past twenty-one days. I stare at a chrysalis, its copper and emerald body dangling from the sepal of a yellow-petaled flower. The flower, a bird’s-foot trefoil, is part of a giant’s fistful of blooms. I remember, in that moment, how the flowers reminded me of Uma Thurman.

Let me explain. See, my mother was obsessed with film, and she had recently shown me Kill Bill, a movie a little too mature for my eyes back then. But as I watched the bunch of yellow flowers breaking through the cracks, I couldn’t help thinking of Uma Thurman as The Bride, punching her way out of a coffin six feet underground. Fist bloody, mind focused -  a beautifully ferocious will to live. That’s how I felt about the flowers pushing through the concrete and metal. That’s how I felt about the dangling chrysalis. That’s how I felt about the Dingy Skipper, choosing to start life in an abandoned railway line, where new life thrived in the midst of desolation.

That May, as some of you may know, my mother lay in a coma after giving birth to my sister, Mariposa. She had been sick throughout the pregnancy, and I had been warned that she might not survive it, let alone give birth. I was both useless and helpless. Still, I searched for little ways to help: prayers and signs, rituals and hope. Then I learned about the Dingy Skipper, and a little about my mother’s past. Somehow, all the signs and patterns aligned, convincing me that once the Dingy Skipper emerged from its cocoon, it would mark the end of my mother’s coma, and she would wake.

The rules of superstition are irrational, and so I became obsessed.

London, Westminster, April, 2015

I hated the move from Seaford. Back home, I could run for five minutes straight until I reached the coast of the English Channel. Mum and I would race often, lungs burning, catching our breath in the salty air. Here, in London, the streets felt hard and gray underfoot. Grandma’s flat was close to Westminster Bridge, I remember always trying to hold my  breath while crossing it, afraid of what I might inhale from the Thames.

I hadn’t been told much about why we moved so suddenly, only that it was urgent. Mum’s pregnancy had turned high-risk, and she needed Grandma’s care. Family drifted in and out with food and prayers, while I was kept at a distance, sidelined in the room Mum had grown up in. I had been left there, forgotten, while everyone fussed over my eight-months-pregnant mother in a separate room. They were particular about letting me in, holding on to this notion that children shouldn’t see pain, or grief, or suffering, or death. And all I wanted was to be close to my mama.

The furniture in Mum's old bedroom carried echoes of her childhood. The wardrobe hung mostly empty, save for a few of Mum’s iconic pieces, including a prom dress that one day would be mine. The walls were bare of her old posters, but the bookshelf was still crowded with her girlhood reads. Left to myself, I snooped like any daughter would, gorging on second-hand nostalgia until one floorboard caught my eye. It seemed to stare back, daring me to pry it up. Beneath it, a shoebox waited: letters, diaries, and a stack of Polaroids that hummed the same dare as the floorboard. One photograph in particular called to me, as if it had been waiting.

At first I thought I was looking at myself, but it was Mum, no older than twelve, crouched in a field at dusk, shadows of broken, giant machinery stretching behind her. Beside her, mid-twirl, was another girl, blurred so I could barely make her out, almost dissolving into the texture of the Polaroid. The movement made it seem as though she was lightly lifted off the ground, her grin bright and unmistakable.

They’re surrounded by flowers that at first seemed dried and lifeless. Then I noticed a flicker - each bloom pulsing with a feathery heartbeat. I squinted to catch it, as Mum does in the photo, and whispered, “Are those moths?” The twirling girl in the picture shook her head no.

The night after discovering the photo was long. I don’t remember what I dreamt that night, but I do remember that the dream woke me and beckoned me to Mum’s room, Polaroid clutched in my hand. Grandma sat in the corner, hiding the sound of my footsteps with her brassy snore.

Mum didn’t fuss as I crept into bed with her. She woke gently, still clinging to sleep, her body fragile beneath my hands.

“Amal darling, can’t you sleep?” She pulled me close, arms that once lifted me easily now weak but stubborn. I showed her the Polaroid. Her gasp stole the air from the room, a wicked lease of life flashing through her eyes, bright with excitement. I remember thinking, there she is. Excited to see a shimmer of my mother return, I asked a barrage of questions.

“Who’s the other girl? Where was this? Why do those flowers look like they’re breathing?”

She didn’t answer. She just laughed, smiled, and said, “You just helped me decide on a name for your sister. Thank you.”

I’m gonna close my eyes as I tell you this bit, I hope you don’t mind. I just need to feel the moment again.

My mum looks at her bump and takes my hand. “Want to feel?” she asks. And of course I do. I place my hand on this mountain of a belly, and my little preteen mind tries to wrap itself around a new life beginning. A collision into a spark, into a ball of cells, into breathing, morphing, thinking, eating, surviving, loving. I try to imagine this baby in the womb, what she must be doing in there, her eventual emergence into the world. I think about my own beginning, how I’m now a five hundred and seventy-four week old kid in bed with her sick, pregnant mother, and how we both started as a collision, then a spark. It all becomes too much for my head.

And then a kick. I feel my little sister in my mother’s womb kick, and I just sob. All I can think to say next to Mum is, “Can I be there? When you give birth? Can I see?”

Mum just laughs and tells me I don’t want to see all that. So we cuddle to sleep, and my questions about the girl in the breathing picture aren’t answered until morning.

I’m getting on now. I could go into more detail, but I realise this speech was supposed to be five minutes, and I’m already ten minutes deep. Here’s what I learnt from what Mother told me next.

The place in the photograph had once been the London Necropolis Railway, a line that carried the dead out of the city to a nearby cemetery. The line became disused and abandoned, then bombed during World War Two. Decades later, Mum discovered the abandoned railway line while exploring their new home in Westminster. It was only days after arriving in London from Columbia. The move had been overwhelming. London a beautiful chaos, yes, but lonely, so stark compared to the endless green she had known back home. That abandoned railway, now a brownfield site, became the first place she felt the surprise of belonging.

Among the rusted machinery and metallic ruins, wildflowers pushed up through the cracks, insects hummed, and birds nested in the beams. Nature had carved a hidden refuge, teeming with life. Mum pointed me to the photograph again, urging me to look closer at the flower heads. . What I had thought were dried husks were alive, trembling with wings. The Dingy Skipper butterfly had made a colony there, its camouflage nearly perfect against the brown stems of dead knapweed.

What Mum told me began my lifelong obsession with butterflies. After discovering the abandoned railway turned creature haven, she returned often to watch the Skipper dart in the sunlight, shards of brown and grey flitting through the air. That not-so-fragile fluttering life became her first friend in the city, a quiet reminder that new life can take root even in the ruins.

From her I learned - and this is actually fact - that butterflies are omens of health, small-winged messengers that tell us whether an ecosystem is in balance. Their absence is a warning; their presence, a blessing. For Mum,  as a lonely twelve-year-old, they were a sign of resilience. With that memory returned to mind, with her beautifully resistant baby girl growing in her womb, and with her eleven year old daughter bringing forward soul deep memory, she named my sister after the memory of the Dingy Skipper: Mariposa. For our non-Spanish-speaking friends here today, that simply means ‘butterfly’. The other girl in the picture was also called Mariposa. Mum could never remember if she was an old friend or an imaginary one, only that she loved her deeply.

***

I think it was two days after that Mum slipped into a coma. I remember trying to peek through the hospital doors into the room where she lay, but, as usual, Grandma stopped me, keeping me from seeing the worst. We lost Mariposa. I was never allowed to see her either. So there I was, helpless, robbed of a sister, with a mother on the brink of death. I became hell-bent on seeing the Skipper, the good omen. If I saw it, surely Mum would wake and be okay.

The ruins of the London Necropolis Railway weren’t hard to find. A twenty-minute walk from Grandma’s flat, across the bridge, past the Gothic spires of Westminster Abbey catching the early light, through stone arches beneath a red brick building with a faded sign embossed ‘LONDON NECROPOLIS RAILWAY STATION’, past ‘Do Not Enter’ signs and fences. I slipped inside carefully and saw it for myself. A mosaic of habitats, unexpected in the heart of London, stretched before me: cracks filled with grasses and wildflowers, tiny shrubs and humming insects, little mammals scurrying out of sight. And there, among the Birds-foot trefoil I knew the Skipper loved, life persisted. I visited the ruins every day while Mum lay in that coma.

So there I was, lying on the floor, watching this cocoon, listening to my breath. At times I thought I heard my mother’s breath too, faint, but steady, as if the cocoon and her lungs were tuned to the same hidden metronome. I lay there, thoughts spinning, grieving, trying to make sense of the inevitability of death and the certainty of life.

I can still picture that morning, twenty-one days in, when the cocoon began to crack like a dropped bead of glass. Out came the Dingy Skipper, its crumpled wings confidently unfurling in the May sun. I watched until the brown blur darted into the air, and I swear, in that exact moment, my phone buzzed in my pocket.

It was Grandma, her voice breaking: “She’s opening her eyes. She’s waking up.”

South Downs, June, 2025

I know I sound a little nuts, going on about a butterfly at a funeral. But that’s why we’re here today, and not in a church or a cemetery. It was Mum’s wish to have her service as a nature walk through the South Downs, so here we are. Not quite an abandoned railway, but the magic persists.

We’re here to mourn, yes, but also to notice the world she loved. You may see a Skipper darting across the chalk downland, but there is so much more life here to admire and protect. So as you leave today, take your time. Listen. Look closely. Death is inevitable, but life, in our absence, can remain sacred, cherished, and safe.

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