Opinion: She was ill this year, and I thought of myself as on call. We lived five minutes apart by car. There were spells in hospital, a pain crisis where I sat by her waiting for the ambulance; there were dramas and periods of calm. She remained stoical, good-humoured, extraordinarily sharp.
All through it, my father looked after her devotedly, assiduously. He rubbed her back and brought her food. He got up in the night and made her tea. They read together. They lay side by side and remembered together. They received visitors, even talking through masks on the deck when they’d both caught Covid.
All through it, the thought that could bring me to shattering tears was the story of them, through so many decades: they had such style, humour and courage, and a faith so strong it seemed pure and even naive, in the importance of ideas, of books and art and intellectual rigour. My parents: sometimes they seemed to me fierce and poignant and ridiculously young.
Dubai at midnight was 39°C and surreal; it was so strange I imagined I was Kay, travelling through a lost place. I’d swapped on-call duties with my sister; she had come back to Auckland and I had flown out. In the short space before we swapped back, our mother died. I think she’d held out, waiting to see my sister one last time.
We’d arranged helpers for the day, but she died in the night. I was in a foreign city when I got the call. My father said, “It’s Kay, she’s dead, I can’t bear it.” He had said to her, “I’ll just read the paper,” and they’d both fallen asleep. When he woke up, she had died.
Beside myself not to be there, I rang my daughter Madeleine, who got out of bed and drove straight over. From midnight, after the emergency services had gone, my father lay on one couch and Madeleine lay on the other, and they saw out the night together, not leaving Kay alone. And then we were all in a blur of grief, flying home.
After I’d written a memoir about our relationship, I found most people had understood: I wrote about my mother because I loved her.
In 2018, pictures were taken at a party of me and Kay and my sister. It was well before I’d written the memoir. These pictures so struck me I put them on Facebook with the caption, “Mind the gap.” You can see the gap in these photos, and you can also see in them that I loved her.
If I’d told Kay how I felt in Dubai, in the hot desert night, she would have understood. She was acutely sensitive. She was imaginative. I used to specialise in making her laugh. Very often, she’d be in stitches with mirth.
Her grandchildren loved her. When we visited her in hospital, my husband brought her a slim book on Russian history. He whispered to me, “I think it’s a bit once-over-lightly for Kay.” She was briskly well through the book the next day, and ready with incisive comments.
Before I flew out, she and I hugged, and she gave me her treasured gold ring, the one I most associate with her.
She was strong-willed, she was complicated, she was courageous to the end. I tried to capture her complexity and of course I never could. It would take a million words, and why should she let me?
The sky in Dubai was hot, black, alien, strange. I was travelling home to her one last time, to farewell her, to salute her.
