My mother was an unusual woman. Brilliant, don't get me wrong, but unusual. Like her name, which was Philberta. Philberta Lovegood. She told me what it meant once, something about wisdom or intelligence. I suppose she got teased a bit when she married Dad, but he got it much worse. I've heard all the jokes too – "Hey Luna, how good is your love?" and "Is your love good or loony?" and "I've heard you love good." People aren't all that creative when it comes to nicknames.
My mother loved to experiment when she was alive. I loved watching her – she would put her hair up in a messy bun and wear her "testing robes" as she called them. They were the baggiest, oldest, gunk splattered robes in the house, which she used for nearly everything – decorating, foraging, fishing in the river, and her experimenting. She was wearing them the day she died, I remember. I remember everything about that day. It is branded into my memory.
We were in the kitchen, and she was brewing a potion to prevent cancer. "See, Luna, now we add the powdered bezoar and let it stew until it's a pale orange colour," she told me.
"Mummy, how do you know all this clever things?" I asked her in awe.
She laughed; a beautiful tinkling laugh like china bells on the breeze. "I don't know, silly! I'm making an educated guess. It's called experimenting." She glanced over at the cauldron, which had turned the colour she wanted. She grabbed a teaspoon and extracted her wand from her hair. "And now for the final step! Sanandas Cancrum." She scribbled the incantation on a sheet of parchment and dipped the teaspoon into the potion. "Stand back now, Luna, I don't know what this is going to do to me and it could affect you too." She placed the potion-coated spoon in her mouth.
And she keeled over backwards, stiff as a board. I ran over to her. "Mummy?" I shook her shoulder and when she didn't respond I started sobbing and screaming her name. After that it is all a bit blurry; my father told me afterwards that I used my accidental magic to Apparate myself upstairs to my father, and back down again taking him with me. I do remember my mother clearly though – her warm, calm smile, her electric blue eyes identical to mine, her dirty-blonde hair falling out of its bun, skin tanned but ice-cold to the touch.
And I think that even as I saw her fall I knew that this was what they had told me about, back when my cat Abernathy drowned in the stream near our house. That my Mummy was never coming back, never going to take me fishing again, never going to sing me to sleep again, never going to experiment again. A Healer at St Mungo's explained it to me and my father after the post-mortem; he told us that the spell she'd used was for curing cancer rather than preventing it, and because she had no cancer cells in her body the magic had worked against her and killed her instantly. He explained that her death was painless but my heart was breaking because all I could think was that she'd died trying to save others from pain. She would have had much longer if she hadn't started on that experiment; she was one of those extraordinary witches that manage to live past a hundred without so much as an anti-ageing potion.
When my father and I got back home he took me down to the stream and sat me on his lap under one of the willow trees by the bank. We sat there for hours, reminiscing about my mother, swapping stories and anecdotes, with tears streaming down our faces the whole time. My father was so lost in his grief he kept referring to her as Philly rather than Mummy, and I wrapped myself in her testing robes and refused to take them off for a week, even in bed.
And from that day on, we referred to that day as The Experiment.
