My mother is dead.
She went out hill-walking on Wednesday morning in Edinburgh's Pentlands (not unusual for her - she loved the place, and was in the habit of hill-walking by herself). And she fell.
This wasn't the first time; she'd had a fall a few months ago, and her elder brothers are also prone to occasional falls. And while I hope that it was quick and merciful - that she blanked out, fell, and never regained consciousness - I know it could have been much worse.
In the last few months she'd had the occasional memory loss, and feared that she'd end up perfectly healthy (she survived bowel cancer five years ago, and was still hill-walking at nearly 71!), but with an ever-dwindling mind. For a conversationalist like my mother, whose objection to people's opinions was usually that they didn't defend them with a decent enough argument, dementia was a particular terror.
On the other hand, maybe she wasn't all that healthy - some friends had noticed that she'd almost stopped eating, and maybe the bowel cancer was on its way back. She had a living will that refused anything but palliative treatment, but still: a relapse of bowel cancer, by popular consensus, isn't pretty.
Cleodhna and I went over to her flat yesterday and started cleaning things up, watering the plants, checking the fridge, working out what we needed to do. Happily she was organised and had all her bank statements and insurance certificates neatly filed away, every bill on direct debit, accounts set to top up other accounts up automatically if they ever looked like emptying. We found the will. We went over to a close friend of hers, joined later by a third, and had a meal and a healthy amount of wine, shared our memories of her but then ended up talking about a whole load of other things as well, which was exactly the sort of conversation she would have loved.
I've gradually been calling up people from her old beaten up address book that she'd had as long as I can ever remember, which is the worst part of it - phoning people you haven't spoken to for years, and certainly weren't in the habit of phoning out of the blue. It's particularly hard when I have to introduce myself, and they respond with a note of pleasant surprise.
We're back in Glasgow, and I've been going through her email, filtering out the obvious spam, and then trying to guess, without looking at a message, if it's a genuine email from soneone whose name I never knew, or an impersonation trying to sell me Viagra or penny stocks.
I expect I'll have to go through the mailing lists she's on and unsubscribe. Welcome to the 21st century. At least I knew her password.
There is a very rare bug in Apple's Mail that causes it to mis-date some emails, so they appear as if they were sent today (or when Mail most recently opened). There are four such emails from Margaret, constantly right at the bottom of the list where new mail would be.
