How to run it.

Thursday Book Club is back. Join us on Thursday 5 February.

Dear Friends

School is back, the sun is screaming down, the water is warm and, in my morning swims, there are fish everywhere. It’s a good place to be, in the sea water, looking down on the rocks and the seaweed and, if I’m lucky, a turtle or an octopus. The giant stingrays sometimes give me pause, as does the enormous woebegone who, on more than one occasion, has been, until the very last minute, nothing more than a mottled rock on the sea floor.

My mornings in the ocean slow my breathing, empty my head and wake up my still sleepy body. It isn’t exactly meditation, but it’s close.

It is a stillness I have needed more this summer, for this is the summer my mother died. She was 82 years old, the same age as my father on his death, eight years before her. My father died in winter, on a weekend when the rates of pneumonia skyrocked and the hospitals were stretched. In a room shared with three other patients, my family and I kept vigil over my wonderful father who died as he had lived, with grace, with dignity, with forbearance.

My mother was not in hospital when she died. She was in the one-bedroom unit that had been her home for just over a year, in Montefiore, a Jewish aged care facility who welcomed my mother and cared for her so very well.

Framed photos graced my mother’s unit at Montefiore, amongst them a black and white picture taken on the day she married my father. Through her life, my mother’s love for our father was wide and loyal and unwavering.

As my mother grew frailer, so did her memory and there were times when she struggled to name close friends or members of our family. When I arrived at Montefiore one morning to take her out for the day, Mum was holding her framed wedding photo. ‘Look,’ she said ‘delighted.’

I smiled. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked her.

‘That’s me,’ she replied.

‘And who’s that?’ I asked, pointing to my father.

For a moment she hesitated then she said softly, ‘that’s the other part of me.’

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Thursday Book Club is back this week and it will be lovely to see you all again and hear what you’ve been reading over the summer. You can join by clicking the button below.

Suzanne xx