The Most Creative Woman I Have Ever Known

"The most creative act is not painting a picture or writing a poem. It is deciding, after loss, after heartbreak, after being left, to keep making life beautiful anyway"

Faith Agugu

My mother died on Thursday.

By the time this newsletter reaches you, it will have been exactly one week. And I find I cannot write about creativity, about art, about joyful living, about women blooming in the second half of their lives, without writing about her. Because she was all of those things. She was the reason I believe in all of those things.

She came from a village. She married a man twenty years her senior. She was illiterate, and then, at fifty-one, the same year I went to university to study psychotherapy, she learned to read and write. We were students together, she and I. Starting over, at the same time, in completely different worlds. I have thought about that parallel many times since. I think about it even more now.

When my father returned to Nigeria and left her in the UK, she didn't crumble. She worked nights. She worked so that we would not miss a single school outing. Not one.

Food was her love language and her art form, dishes infused with patience and tenderness and a quality of attention that I have never tasted anywhere else in the world. I know now I will never taste it again, and that is a grief that lives in a place words can barely reach. But she didn't stop at feeding us. She blossomed.

At fifty, she came alive in ways that took your breath away. She travelled. She dressed like an absolute queen. Her creativity wasn't confined to the kitchen — it was in how she moved through the world, how she made every room feel held, how she gave advice so wise that even during the years when she and I were not close, when I was carrying old anger, and we barely spoke, my friends would seek her out. She became their person. She was a legend, quietly, consistently, all the way through.

She is the reason Silver Sirens exists.

When I kept hearing that narrative, that women over fifty become less relevant, lose their value, fade. I would look at my mother and feel something close to laughter. Not because it was funny, but because she was living proof of how entirely wrong it was. She was the counterargument. She was the evidence. She was the whole case.

I had been planning her ninetieth birthday, which would have been in October. Every time I asked her what she wanted, she would laugh, that particular laugh of hers, and say, "I don't think I will be there." She knew. She always knew things before the rest of us caught up.

And right to the very end, she was creative. Even in dying.

On her deathbed, she gathered my siblings' hands. She held them. She squeezed them, gently, and then she placed their hands, her children's hands, onto her heart. And then she took her last breath.

She lost four children in her lifetime. Four. And she did not break. She made beauty anyway. She made food and warmth and laughter and wisdom and a kind of stubborn, magnificent life anyway.

That is creativity. Not just paint and canvas and pretty things — though she had those too, in the way she dressed, the way she arranged a table, the way she told a story. Real creativity is the act of making something from what you have been given, especially when what you have been given is hard. It is the refusal to let difficulty have the last word. It is the capacity to keep pouring love into the world when the world has taken so much from you.

She was illiterate until she was fifty-one. She learned to read. She went on to become the most eloquent person I have ever known.

She was a village girl. She became a queen.

She is gone now. And I am sitting with that, with the silence where her voice was, with the empty space where her cooking lived, with the particular ache of knowing I cannot call her. But I can honour her. I can build the thing she inspired. I can keep telling the truth she embodied: that women do not diminish with age. They deepen. They expand. They become.

This month, we are talking about creativity, art, and joyful living. I can think of no better guide than the woman who taught me, by example, what all three of those things truly mean.

Rest, Mama. You made something beautiful.

With love,

Faith. Xxx

If you have a woman in your life, a mother, a grandmother, a mentor, whose creativity and resilience have shaped you, we would love to hear about her. Send an email to admin@silversirens.org and tell us her story.

Go gently all, Big Hugs,Faith & The Silver Sirens Team