Sadly, during my holiday in Croatia & Slovenia, my mother passed away. My sister contacted me to say that Mum was close to the end, and I was able to talk via speakerphone to Mum about an hour or so before she passed. Given that she had survived being knocked over by a car on her way to work at the age of 60, leukaemia twice in her mid to late 60s, and losing her already limited vision at 67, she did amazingly well to live to the age of 89. Despite all of this, she looked after my father who had Parkinson’s, until his death in 2012.
As you may have picked up from previous posts, Mum spent her last 18 months away from what had been the family home since a move in 1973, in a nursing home, where the staff could not have treated her with any more respect and dignity than they did.
As well as being a strong, resilient character, Mum was a very creative person while she could still see, and regularly wrote humorous poems for departing colleagues and also made hundreds of Christmas crackers every year for various school fairs.
From previous posts, you may also have picked up on the fact that our house constantly had music playing. Not necessarily music that I liked, but there was always a radio, record player or cassette player pumping out something around the house. Mum always loved to sing along to tunes that she heard (whereas my father preferred playing items of cutlery on the kitchen worktops) and this was the way that in the nursing home, the staff were able to connect with her
I’ll leave you with what became Mum’s signature song in the nursing home and much as I want to write some more blog posts, as I promised 10 days ago, please bear with me as there is quite a bit of sorting out to be done right now.
In memory of Elizabeth Vera – 1935-2024.
TGG
Wasting time in the study 
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