Diary Update, My Mother's 90th Birth Anniversary

One of those nice mornings as I lay in bed before getting up where I feel as normal as I took for granted feeling for 62 years. 

OK, it does change a bit when I do actually get up, and feel the ache behind the knee, and have to wash my face one handed as I do each morning now while the right arm shakes like a leaf, but I am not complaining. 

My arm feels freer, and I slept well after another First Light thinking spree. No headaches…. A working left arm…. It would be ungrateful to whinge. Oh, and Julie’s suggestion as to using cider vinegar seems to having a good anti-itching effect on the Clexane injection areas! But I better touch wood – I don’t want to tempt fate.

Our Mum would have been 90 today.

It’s just three months to the day since Mum passed away. Today is her birthday – the first time in our lives my sisters, Jan and Lyn and I share this day without seeing or being able to phone her. On her last birthday, she was bright and cheery and talking about the event. In the last months of her life, she allowed her mind to settle in a happier and more distant era where she was comfortable, and the griefs of the current world did not trouble her.

She had vowed all her life that she would never be a trouble to her children when she got old, or not if she could help it. She lived almost to the end in her unit not far from Jan’s, though as Lyn and Terry had done when Mum lived near her years before, and Kay and John when Mum was sick in Melbourne, her ‘independence’ was carefully and lovingly tended by Jan and Ken. But it was amazing what she could do for herself until quite close to going into high level care in the end. She watched every news broadcast and all her beloved arts and gardening programs on the ABC, a deeply thoughtful and trenchant critic of the world’s power brokers and misery-makers.  And she read book after book, tending the library at the village where she lived for most of her last years. Artist, writer, teacher, librarian, philanthropist, farmer, wife and mother. She was all of these and more.

Under ‘Additional Information’ on the right side of this page, I posted my tribute to my mother at her Memorial Service. It’s called ‘Tribute to Joan Wright’. There’s a story in it that exemplifies her spirit. It’s there, anyway, as part of my archive.