November 27, 2009 – 6:18 pm
Mum’s funeral was, as these things go, not a sombre affair. Temporarily lacking a vicar one of the lay readers, and a friend of Mum’s stood in for the service. He did a great job at keeping things relatively light, and there were no Holy Spigot moments (particularly impressive for an ‘amateur’ doing only his second funeral).
I’m not much for public speaking, but it turns out that the crowd is willing to cut you a lot of slack on such occasions, so I was able to ramble without notes for a few minutes. That means I can’t report exactly what I said, but it went something like this:
When Mum was in hospital there was often something that needed to be done, whether it was a bed change, injection or whatever. Her standard response to being told about these, especially as communication became increasingly difficult for her, was to say “right”. I’m sure that the nurses took that as a pretty normal response, and of course it was. But it meant more than that.
‘Right’ meant that there was something else to be done. That could be as routine as making me breakfast, or doing the ironing, or one of the other hundred things she did to look after me. But it could just as easily mean she had to go to Brownies, or some outing for the old folks, or a PTA event, or any number of other charitable events. ‘Right’ meant that she could stay in her chair by the fire and watch TV, but there was something to be done, and if she didn’t do it then it might not get done.
That was the story for as long as I knew Mum. She was never involved in anything that would change the world, and indeed it’s unlikely she ever turned around the life of a single person. But she made a thousand people’s lives just that little bit better. That seems to me like a pretty good way to have spent a life.
August 10, 2009 – 8:49 pm
My Mum passed away last Friday. We’d originally planned a holiday for the last two weeks, but cancelled that and switched to a week in Derbyshire. We’d go out during the day with the kids (Gulliver’s Kingdom, Alton Towers Water Park, etc.) and then I’d visit her in hospital in the evening. By the Thursday one of the nurses suggested I might want to stay over, so we set up a mattress on the floor of her room and I kipped there (until she got tired of me being so concerned for her comfort and kicked me out). We hadn’t quite allowed for Mum’s tenacity, however, as I spent a further 7 nights sleeping on the floor, allowing myself an hour a day to wander around Ashbourne while someone else sat with her. I can’t honestly say it was an easy passing, but the awesome staff at the excellent St Oswald’s hospital made it as close to one as was possible.
That’s all I have to say about that for now. The funeral is next week, and I’ll be making a speech, so I’ll share what I come up with later.
I was driving with the kids to the local garden centre, listening to a news item on the radio about the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico. It struck me that, as a Stephen King fan from a while back, driving the kids to the local garden centre and hearing about a disease outbreak far away is not a good sign for you or the people around you.
We all went to see Monsters vs Aliens today because, well, it’s called Monsters vs Aliens. What’s not to like? Well it turns out the film is what’s not to like. Great voice work, sadly drowned out by the constant dull thud of dead punchlines, plus animation that at times barely looked one dimensional, let alone the 2 we’d paid for or the three that is available in some places (though at other spots it was truly great), meant that I spent way too much time wondering when I could have my next candy.
The kids loved it though, so I recommend sending the smallest number of parents you can get away with.
An interesting bit of trivia, I think: If you play with the graph here you can show that since Obama came to power the S&P 500 (which I chose because it’s a better indicator than the Dow of the overall market, though still far from perfect) has fallen around 10%. That’s pretty shocking. Not as bad as the previous incumbent, though, who experienced a drop of over 12% in the same timeframe. This doesn’t indicate anything, of course, it’s just a curiosity.