Cheers Mum – and thanks!

MY mum is dead.

Aged 86. She was born in 1920. Nothing was made of plastic then; television hadn’t been invented; in the street where she was born, in the suburbs of London, the muffin man walked with a tray of muffins balanced on his head, ringing a bell to advertise his wares.

There were no high-rise buildings; children played in the streets with hoops and tops and if you wanted music you made it yourself, with a piano, or on a fiddle or flute.

Men hadn’t walked on the moon. Indeed, the men who invented powered flight (Orville and Frank Wright) were still alive and arguing over the patent.

Incidentally, she was born one month before two men on the far side of her world set up a small air service for the bushlands of Australia. It was called Queensland and Northern Territory Aviation Services (QANTAS). Its 103rd anniversary was yesterday… the day she died.

She was over here two weeks ago. She came in a wheelchair and we pushed her nearly everywhere. The days when she could manage the walk from her bedroom to her chair in the lounge, she was very pleased with herself.

You may remember I wrote about her here on November 4.

I said: “You haven’t seen a hero until you’ve watched my mum cope with life. She’s not alone, I know, but she’s mine, and when I watch the implacable fortitude with which she struggles through every day to achieve what most of us achieve in 30 seconds, I begin to understand the extraordinary power of the human will to survive.”

But I think she lost it sometime in past three days.

I spoke to her on the phone three days ago. She was worried about her deteriorating ability to walk, and how she’d cope when couldn’t get to the lavatory without help. She said she was tired. She said she was going to the doctor to see if he could help.

He couldn’t.

Apparently she was waiting there for a taxi home (she lives alone, with my brother and sister just up the road) and one of the nurses thought she’d fallen asleep in the chair – except that most people still breathe when they’re asleep.

She was in a coma for 24 hours. According to my brother, who was at her bedside, her pulse just slowed and slowed and slowed… until it simply wasn’t there any more.

I remember when she flew out from here. I watched the plane until it was the faintest vestige of a speck against the blue of the sky… until I wasn’t sure if I could see it or not… until I realised she really had gone.

I guess my brother must have felt a bit like that.

Mum has an old backpack. An army backpack. It contains every letter she wrote to Dad while he was serving in Germany during World War II. And every letter he wrote back. It’s bloody heavy.

She told us a long, long time ago that when they were both gone the letters should be destroyed, unread by anyone else.

I’m not sure we have what it takes to destroy them. Dad died ten years ago. She’ll be buried with him. I guess we’ll send the letters with her. Heaven knows what secrets are in there. But secrets they’ll remain. My parents gave me the best upbringing a man could have. I trusted them then and I trust them now. If they want to have secrets, that’s fine with me.

Anyway… you didn’t know her, I know, unless you read the rude things I said about her (in fun) here in these columns; but I’d be honoured if you’d fill a glass wherever you are tonight and spend a moment or two watching her world soar into the sky, becoming just the faintest vestige of a speck, before it disappears.