Mum
Doreen: May 24th 1921 - Sept 14th 2007 Fifteen years ago today my mother died. It was a Friday. Mum had been in a residential home for just over a year at that point. At the age of eighty six, she was going downhill and her death was not unexpected. We had visited her the weekend before but she could no longer hold a proper conversation and the strings that connected her to real life were either broken or frayed. At around ten o'clock that Friday morning, the residential home phoned my workplace with an important message. I needed to get over to the home in Beverley, East Yorkshire as soon as possible as the end was clearly nigh. The only trouble is that I did not receive that message until four o'clock in the afternoon and by that time Mum had gone to join the angels. The woman on the school reception desk had failed to pass the message on to me. She said she had called the English office phone but nobody answered. I explained that I had been teaching a class at...
