Mum…

Pocket rocket, our little gurkha – always doing things at a fast pace, because never leave till tomorrow what you can do today. My mum may well have been the living embodiment of ‘live each day to the max’. Until she became infirm two years ago, she used every hour of the day to make a home, create, cook and garden – things that mattered to her and gave her such pleasure…

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And even when she became disabled with her sight and her seriously damaged shoulders and knees, she made beds, cooked and cleaned until the very last day of her life. She was quite an inspiration!

Her Amazonian qualities are legend. Pulling up dinghies onto davits. Cleaning out septic tanks by actually being knee deep in the slush and bucketing it out. Catching flounder in the middle of the night, fishing with Dad in their tinnie down the Mercury Passage. Painting houses. And cleaning, always cleaning, because a house that sparkled was implicit to her nature.

Then the intrepid traveller – traipsing over South East Asia, Hong Kong and China annually with Dad, loving her trips to 5 star hotels and shopping so fast that Dad could never keep up with her.

Her friends knew her as loyal and steadfast. She was always ready with cakes, casseroles, love and care should they need it. She never gossiped or said unkind things out side of the family about anyone  and she was renowned for being the very model of a glass-half-full person who never ever believed that she was superior to anyone else. If anything, the complete reverse…

She had no self-belief, never ever saw herself as her friends and admirers did – an elegant woman with innate dress sense and natural beauty. She never ever believed she was strong and yet she nursed Dad through a year of bowel cancer and much later through five years of chronic emphysema. After his death, we all worried that the end of such a powerful partnership would crush her. Instead, she learned to take charge of her life and manage, and manage it she did. As well as being an hilarious matriarch who often, through a slip of the tongue, had the family in stitches.

Orford was her ‘healing place’, her most loved place of all, and most of the best memories that we all have of her are situated on the east coast. She was so very grateful that her son bought a half share in the coast house so that she could keep it in the family. And it’s so close to House, that we could be by her side in two minutes on a pushbike.

So conscious was she of the meaning of Orford to her and others, that with no confidence at all she stood up in front of an Appeals Tribunal in a court and explained (no – told) them why they should, on no account, allow developers to build two enormous jetties across a small piece of public river beach. She was impassioned and wonderful. We won the case!

Every one of our friends has commented in the last day about seeing her gardening at Sunways swimming with them all on the Front Beach in a pair of slick, form-fitting red bathers and putting women twenty years younger to shame with her beautiful figure, doing jigsaw after jigsaw at the big dining table and making the best ‘pavs’ in the business.

Even now, our friends talk about her ability to laugh amongst them all and are still in awe that this little old woman would pick up a beer and drink it with the best of them.

She loved her cars – her little brown Ford Prefect, her Renault which consistently broke down on 200 mile trips, always somewhere on a dirt road, and then of course her blue mini and finally her white mini. She drove like the Stig, zapping round everywhere but never ever had a speeding fine which was more by good luck than good management. Driving was freedom and when her sight deteriorated to the point where she knew her road days were numbered, her heart broke just that little bit more, because she hated being reliant on others to get to Orford and back, and she was nothing if not independent.

She loved her family.

Her love for her husband went to infinity and back and her love for her children was prodigious. She would never ever have admitted it out loud but when her son moved back from Sydney a few years ago, it rounded out her life. And to have him living with her was more than she could ask for. She was so proud of his film work – when she found he had filmed in the midst of the Gulf War, jumping borders between countries, she was visibly shocked (it was kept secret till he returned safely). She was terrified when he filmed amongst the Tamil guerillas in Sri Lanka. She hated him hanging out of helicopters to get that remarkable shot and loathed him diving with sharks but she was so proud. And when he bought into a local post-production house as part owner and director, she was content.

When we moved back here from Melbourne, she immediately adopted the role of constant grand-mum rather than just a visiting one – telling the grandkids stories and cooking their favourite foods. She watched me moulding myself into a wife and mum that she could be proud of and always wondered how to explain to her friends that ‘Prue is a writer of some success overseas. It’s a lovely hobby for her.’ (!!!)  As for my husband – her words were ‘he is a diamond.’ She adored him.

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Her grandchildren were her delights. She needed to know what they were doing and how they were succeeding every day until her illness began to dominate her life and then she relied on them to take her far from her pain. She loved sharing stories and recipes with them and was proud of them beyond belief. But Mum being Mum being Mum, she never bragged or bored people about all of this.

If she has been glad of anything in the last two painfully difficult years of her life, it is that she had her family around her again. She said she was blessed. In the Emergency Triage the other day, she said to me, ‘I just want my family here, not these people’ and in fact, that is what happened. She always had someone with her (and here we all are, still).

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She would never consider that she left a legacy for her offspring but she has. To live life to the absolute fullest, to never let things beat you down, to be courageous and stoic and never ever give in.

Everyone who has looked after her in the last two difficult years from the top eye specialist to the carers who showered her every day have made a point of letting the family know what a gentle, sweet, brave and wonderful lady she was and that she would always be remembered by them.

Legacy? Unique?

Oh my gosh, without doubt…