The dust is settling.

It has been a very busy time over the last few weeks, but now it seems the dust is beginning to settle. Last week we saw my Mum off on her last trip. It was a warm one too.

The build up to the funeral was peppered with deciding on hymns and readings etc. She had left little guidance but we liked the way that mu Dad's had gone so we replicated that. It was a trip to the crematorium followed by a church service and the wake.

At the crematorium we were ushered in to the sound of 'Sailing By' which is the theme tune to the nightly shipping forecast after midnight. My Mum seemed to always go to sleep with this blasting out due to her deafness, (Which she never acknowledged). It has many other memories for me as I remember being wedged in many a wheelhouse with the heat blasting out and the chart table light dimmed right down waiting to hear whether you were going to be able to stay in your bunk off watch or rolled out on to the deck. The music we left to was 'Now is the Hour'. We tried to find a version that had the original Maori version and then English too. In the end we settled on the Vera Lynne version with it's war time connotations. My Mum and Dad lived in New Zealand for several years and this is an emotional song. It also has very many other memories for me as it was often sung when far away from home in saloons and bars afloat and ashore by homesick matelots after a few drinks. I thought if I was going to breakdown any time it would be then.

My Mum, Betty in 2015.

We then went to our local church St. Augustine's and held a service there with a couple of hymns. My younger brother read a poem out by Joyce Grenfell that was very good, and appropriate.

Then my oldest brother gave a potted life history of our Mum who was a typical Yorkshire woman but took great pride in her five sons. I'm not sure what she would have said if she had known the night she died we had robbed her purse and all went out for an Indian meal! It was the gathering of the clan and perhaps the hardest thing of all was when those living away were taking their mementos of my Mum and Dad probably not ever seeing the house again.

My Mum was almost 30 when she had me so I have no memory of her at all like the above picture taken when she was 17 in 1943. She was quite a catch I would say.

She was as tough as old boots and only took to her bed on the final day as she physically couldn't get out of it. She wanted to stay at home and so she did and luckily she had no pain and fell asleep with plenty of us there to see her on her way. The last episode of  'Call the Midwife' had me weeping like a baby as I had been to see my Mum at the undertakers as my wife wanted her to have her best shoes with her, as she was always particular about her shoes.

I'm not sure how I will feel when the house clearers arrive and the house goes on the market but it is certainly the end of an era. Don't often write anything personal on my blog but just felt I wanted to share this, not for sympathy, please don't add comments like that, but for just marking her passing in a public way, but private to me.