Eulogy for Mum

Dear Mum

‘Can you hear the hills calling’ Mum would say on a beautiful day at the cottage.
‘Blencathra’s calling’ or ‘Causey’s calling’ if we were driving into Keswick, and a little while ago she copied out the first few lines of a poem into one of her letters to me.

Out out out from the cosy house
Beyond the sofa and armchair aims of comfort
Out out out to the hills…...
Out to the wind, out to live
To wake again for life’s sake – out!

And I think that’s what many of us will remember about Mum, her love of the hills, and the way she made us all love them too. I pinned that page of her letter to the photoboard on my study wall, but the reason I did was because underneath those lines she wrote. ‘My changes to the first two lines’.

Out out out from the cosy cottage
Out from the cleaning, baking, writing, chores
Out to the hills

And I want now to say thank you for all those things, for all those wonderful meals, for all that home baking, for all that endless endless house keeping. But most of all I want to say thank you for the writing, for the letters.

Because wherever I was, whether it was school in London, or poste restante in Kabul or Kathmandu, or here at home in New Zealand, she sent me letters. Almost more than anything I have dreaded over the years has been the stopping of those letters, that familiar handwriting, that endless generous sharing of her life and her time, especially as I was such a hopeless correspondent in return.
But she let go gently, slowing quietly down, until she couldn’t write any more. I worked out the other day that she probably wrote me over three thousand letters, and almost all of them were long, and often included photos and clippings. An extraordinary commitment, and as I struggle to write this, I realize what an extraordinary act of love.
A good Mum gives you gifts and she gives you love. My Mum gave me among countless other smaller gifts the gift of the hills and the love of reading, and she gave me a demonstrable and unconditional love. Which made her a great Mum.
I’d like to end with another poetry quote from her letters, this time when I was nineteen in Kabul, and which I have never forgotten.

Life is mostly froth and bubble
Two things stand out as stone
Kindness in another’s trouble
Courage in your own.

Thank you, from Douglas .