Sticking Together

Families should stick together - I’ve always believed that.

Look after your own. When father passed over to wherever

that is, we took mother in after a  bowel operation left her

rather incommoded. We didn’t expect her to last  long.

How little we knew how tough these old Lancashire cotton 

mill girls could be.

She wouldn’t give up. Not on your Nelly! For fifteen more 

years she sat watching her telly, until she was 109 and had 

a stack of identical Xmas cards from the Queen and made it 

into the top ten oldest women in Britain.

Of course there were benefits for us too. We get a free TV 

license because she’s over 75. I say ‘get’ in the present 

tense because… well why does anyone have to know she’s 

passed over?  So we had her embalmed in her favorite 

wheelchair and carried on as normal. Well I certainly wasn’t 

going to scatter her ashes with father’s on top of Ben Nevis. 

Not with my RA. That reminds me, his ashes are still in the 

urn in her wardrobe and some of our roses need a bit of 

phosphate.

Mother still seems to enjoy watching Corrie and Emmerdale 

but of course doesn’t answer the questions on the quiz 

shows like she used to. She loves Ann Robinson and I’m 

sure I still hear that insane cackle of hers. We still take her 

shopping to meet her friends and move her head backwards 

and forwards manually so they think she’s nodding at them. 

They all comment on how well she looks and say such nice 

things. I’m sure mother can hear them. Our electricity bill 

has gone down hugely too as we have to keep her 

reasonably cool to stop any gases building up. Wouldn’t 

want her exploding - we’d never hear the end of it.  Our food 

bill is also less now she doesn’t indulge in all those cream 

cakes, pastries and chocolate she knew would be the death 

of her. And it’s so nice to have a proper staircase again 

instead of that funicular railway that groaned it’s way up and 

down at snail speed every day. I could never understand 

why they couldn’t make them quicker. I suppose it’s so they 

don’t fly off at the top and land in the bath.

All in all, we like to think she’s still having a damn good life 

or rather death and wonder why more people don’t preserve 

their loved ones in this way.