End of an era

In this episode, we explore an example of a change that marks the end of an era for me…

My mother died this morning.

A shock, of course - it always is - though by no means a surprise. She was, after all, just a few weeks short of her hundredth birthday. And she’d been in a hospice for the past year, slowly losing her ability to stay connected with the world. No pain, I’m very glad to say, but in the past few months her weight had gone down to less than 25kg (55lbs), and it was clear that she couldn’t remain for much longer.

For our family, the end of an era.

---

My father died more than forty years ago, so she’d been a long time alone. She’d met him in medical-school in London, during the worst of the Blitz. After the end of the war, they worked together as GPs (family-doctors), first up in the north of England, then eventually moving south to a rural practice at Writtle, a small village some thirty miles north-east of London.

A lot of stories, but I’ll leave those for some other time.

---

Right up until the last few years, there was always a dog. Or dogs, in this case.

A committed Quaker, in her later life she learnt how to do tapestry, as part of the shared work on creating the 77 panels in the Quaker Tapestry, a visual, tangible history of the worldwide Quaker movement. Here she’s working on the panel created by her local Meeting - I forget which panel this is, but they’re all in a style that resembles the classic Bayeux Tapestry.

Throughout most of the decade-and-more that I stayed at her final house in Colchester, as her live-in carer, she’d often be sitting in her armchair, beside her beloved books, working on yet another tapestry of her own. Which is why I have these two framed tapestries of hers up on the wall, to remind me of her on this quiet, reflective day.

Go well, and thank you for being my mother.

End of an era. That’s perhaps all that I can say for now.

---