Rachael Chadwick's mother died before her 60th birthday. Rachael decided to celebrate the date by going to Paris, where she wrote postcards and left them for people to find. Her mother would have loved the response
The first postcard arrived three days after Rachael Chadwick got back from Paris. She had spent the weekend there with 11 friends to mark what would have been her mother's 60th birthday. She had been dreading the date and decided that to get through the day she must do something different. Her inspiration was to leave 60 postcards dotted around the city – anyone who found one would discover the reason for Rachael's visit to Paris and a plea to get in touch.
The first email response arrived (subject header: "Paris postcard found!") on Rachael's phone as she was on her way home from a night out with her housemate. "I think we squealed a bit and people looked at us, but it was just an incredible feeling," she says. "And then I had to text and ring everyone and say, 'it worked, we got one.'"
This was the moment the grief that had overwhelmed her since Vivienne's death began to lift. We meet in a hotel at St Pancras station, London, where Rachael's journey to Paris had begun, using Eurostar vouchers her mother had bought her as a last birthday present.
Rachael's weekend postcard project turned first into a blog and then into a book, 60 Postcards. In it, she writes that she can't ever remember her mother, a teacher, being ill at all. Then, just before Christmas 2011, Vivienne complained of stomach pains. At first, gallstones were suspected, though tests ruled them out, and in January a colonoscopy revealed bowel cancer that was too advanced for treatment. With a shocking swiftness, Vivienne died just 16 days later.
Rachael, 30, who lives in London, spent her mother's last days at home in Dorset with her father and two younger sisters. It was an unreal period, she says, that felt "like the longest time because all we could do was sit with her. On the other hand it seemed like the quickest thing in the world. She wasn't given a chance to fight."
Although the family had an unsaid rule not to talk about Vivienne's life being at an end, there were conversations during those two weeks that felt like a goodbye. "In her last week she said to me, and I'm sure she said the same to the others, that she was so happy to have had us three girls, to have had time with us and to have married Dad," says Rachael.
Her eyes fill with tears. "She really felt like she had lived a full, happy life but that was difficult to hear because it was just so final and all I could think was, I wanted another 60 years with my mum."
The weeks and months passed in a haze of shock and grief, even though Rachael tried to get back to normal. "I put on a massive front. Mum even advised me when it was happening, 'Let yourself feel whatever you're going to feel.' But I was smiling and saying everything was OK to everyone, but actually I was absolutely broken. I was getting so miserable and I thought, I've got to try something different. That's when I thought on her 60th birthday I wanted to spread the message about her as far as I could."
The idea was to reverse the usual postcard protocol: she would leave them in Paris for local people and tourists to find. "That was the first weekend where I had so much fun at what I thought would be a miserable time. I found myself laughing nonstop, being able to talk about Mum freely and going round scattering these postcards. I knew she would love it and that was bringing me through it, and the excitement of wondering whether anyone would find them."
Did she think they would? "I desperately hoped so but I realised it would be a success anyway because we'd had a great weekend regardless. But then I got the first one."
It came from three American women who had made friends while studying in France, who had found the postcard on a pile of books in a bookshop. "It was kind of bittersweet," says Rachael. "This whole process has been like that because I wanted to call my mum and tell her. I know it's something she would adore so it broke my heart that I couldn't pick up the phone. But there was also complete excitement, and I thought this could be a magical story if I did hear from anyone else."
More emails arrived: from a man who had found a card on the ground at the Gare du Nord, from another who had found one in a bookshop, and one who had found theirs at a cafe. The messages that arrived over Christmas were "a huge thing for me because the first Christmas without Mum was very tough. To check my phone and have an email from someone in Luxembourg who had found my postcard in Paris was unbelievable."
The last email arrived four months later from a couple who had found the postcard Rachael had left, hidden in the apartment in which she and her friends had stayed.
One card, found by a young woman, Stephanie, expanded the postcards project to New York. Stephanie was a ballet dancer – neat, because a love of dance was something Rachael and her mother had had in common – who found the card in a Paris bookshop and took it back to the US, emailing Rachael to say she planned to leave it at a New York bookshop.
That inspired Rachael to go to New York next and leave 59 postcards in cafes, shops, theatres, in Central Park. People started to respond immediately. While she was there, Rachael got an email from a young woman who found a postcard on the subway. She also got to meet Stephanie and watch one of her performances.
She has kept in touch with most of the people who responded – when she went back to Paris for 10 days last year to work on the book, she met up with Amelie, a young Parisian who had found a card at the observation deck at the top of the Rockefeller Centre in New York.
The project changed her life, as well as providing a distraction from her grief. She has left her job working for an energy company and now writes full time. "This project has shown me to really go for stuff and listen to all those cliches because life is too short," she says. "Things are coming together for me, and the only difficult bit is, I feel guilty that it was when my mother left that this all started. I will probably never get over the fact that she can't see what's happening."
The blog Rachael started last year brought her into contact with other people who could relate to her grief. "I think there's scope for getting as many people involved as possible in sharing their stories and I've tried to do that on the blog. Rather than it just being my project, I've got a real drive now for Team 60 Postcards and getting other people involved. I like the idea of postcards being found everywhere." One of the tasks she set her readers was to take photographs of themselves holding a postcard and writing about a person, or thing, that inspires them.
But she also found writing about the project, and her mother, has helped her deal with the loss. Of course, there are still times when she experiences what she describes as "uncontrollable storms" of grief, some of them sneaking up on her from nowhere. She remembers looking in the mirror, her hair wrapped up in a towel, and bursting into tears because her reflection reminded her so much of her mother.
"Because I have been so honest on the blog, I think it has allowed me to be more honest in person as well. When it happened I couldn't think about her in a positive way because all I could see was the mum I had seen in her last few days, and I was having nightmares about that. When people would bring up happy memories I would find it too difficult. This project allowed me to look back and have those happy memories and think about her, and it allowed me to talk about her."
The blog also inspired other people – friends, family, the children Vivienne taught at school – to approach Rachael to talk about her mother. "I'm hearing stories I haven't heard before so it's like I'm getting to know her even though she's gone." She smiles. "As if I'm getting new memories."
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