Describe the last difficult “goodbye” you said.
My last difficult “goodbye” was to my late mother, seeing her coffin with a single yellow rose (her favourite flower) atop. This was about a year ago. She died on 23rd February 2022, the day before Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
My mother once told me that, as an 11 year old child, she believed she had caused the Second World War. Asked by her mother in September 1939 to pray that there would not be a war. She thought a war might be exciting and prayed that there would be one. Sure enough, the next day Neville Chamberlain came on the radio.
Imagine the guilt of a young girl at that time. It was several months before she admitted to her mother what she thought she had done.
I sometimes wonder if my Mum, aged 93, decided to go before she caused another war.
My Mum was a stoic. She used to push my sister and I in/on the pram three miles to town and walk the length of the high street comparing prices before walking back again to buy groceries at the cheapest price, then push us all home again.
She was a “dinner lady” at the local school for so many years that she was minding the children of pupils she had minded before.
She grew almost all of the family’s vegetable needs in the back garden, which she tended from 1953 until 1998.
After my first marriage broke up, she cared for my two children during the day while I had to work. When she married my Dad, she took on a step-son aged 5. Dad was crippled by arthritis in every joint in 1963 and she cared for him until he died in 1975.
A wonderful lady. Goodbye Mum and thank you for everything.
General Whiskers' semi-historical wanderings 