Regarding the passing of my mother, which occurred this Friday night just past, I have fretted over how best to refer to it here - a place I have enjoyed making friends, sharing a common obsession and simply passing a fair deal of amused-enthused freetime this past year - and the following seems to me to fathom the truth of it.
My mother passed from this clumsy world with a grace that it could not compete with.
Having fought with bright bravery and compelling spirit against the undue cancer which all-too recently ambushed her and my father, indeed the entire family and the many good people who loved her, my mother slipped into peace at a hospice this past Friday evening. With my sister and I assuring her of loving truths about the great good she had wrought in her life and which would continue beyond its end, my father and I held her hands as she entered that great dream we might all be lucky enough to join.
It had been a profound privilege the preceeding weeks to every day be integral to caring for my mother at the home she was so intensely proud of having made exactly that - a home for a family that, while I and my brother and sister had long since moved from, remained the hub of a loving life. (You will note that I remembered at all time to remove my "mucky boots" even when they were clean shoes every time I entered, and expect no change in this and other acknowledgements to her enormous house-pride.)
Indeed, of that privilege it was all the moreso for me since it was, so very painfully, something that I can never repeat for her. However, there came the point that providing her with sufficient comfort demanded that she retreat to a hospice for her final days. There, my father remained perpetually at her side, day and night, and I and my sister would spend several hours a day. Of the medical care and unflinching compassion provided by the Garden House Hospice of Letchworth, I am only too intent here upon gratefully describing it as positively angelic (and therefore quite the welcome opposite of the crippling confusion of the garbled, under-informed approach of the local District Nursing team, though now is not the time to rant angrily).
I do appreciate that this is not pleasant news for any of you to read, to find it posted here, to be presented with the news of the passing of a loved one amongst our number. Yet, upon the posting of the above, I felt it would be an agreeable thing to ask the following:
Should any of you of a kindly bent who might get it into your heads that Christmas seems a fitful time to make a charitable donation... yet don't already patronise a specific charity, and hats off to you in such cases... Would you please steer any such spare creds towards a charity such as MacMillan or any local hospices near your own homes?
Thankyou all.
My mother passed from this clumsy world with a grace that it could not compete with.
Having fought with bright bravery and compelling spirit against the undue cancer which all-too recently ambushed her and my father, indeed the entire family and the many good people who loved her, my mother slipped into peace at a hospice this past Friday evening. With my sister and I assuring her of loving truths about the great good she had wrought in her life and which would continue beyond its end, my father and I held her hands as she entered that great dream we might all be lucky enough to join.
It had been a profound privilege the preceeding weeks to every day be integral to caring for my mother at the home she was so intensely proud of having made exactly that - a home for a family that, while I and my brother and sister had long since moved from, remained the hub of a loving life. (You will note that I remembered at all time to remove my "mucky boots" even when they were clean shoes every time I entered, and expect no change in this and other acknowledgements to her enormous house-pride.)
Indeed, of that privilege it was all the moreso for me since it was, so very painfully, something that I can never repeat for her. However, there came the point that providing her with sufficient comfort demanded that she retreat to a hospice for her final days. There, my father remained perpetually at her side, day and night, and I and my sister would spend several hours a day. Of the medical care and unflinching compassion provided by the Garden House Hospice of Letchworth, I am only too intent here upon gratefully describing it as positively angelic (and therefore quite the welcome opposite of the crippling confusion of the garbled, under-informed approach of the local District Nursing team, though now is not the time to rant angrily).
I do appreciate that this is not pleasant news for any of you to read, to find it posted here, to be presented with the news of the passing of a loved one amongst our number. Yet, upon the posting of the above, I felt it would be an agreeable thing to ask the following:
Should any of you of a kindly bent who might get it into your heads that Christmas seems a fitful time to make a charitable donation... yet don't already patronise a specific charity, and hats off to you in such cases... Would you please steer any such spare creds towards a charity such as MacMillan or any local hospices near your own homes?
Thankyou all.