With my Mum’s death coming just after I moved house in December 2025 (and a week after her brother’s, my uncle) the winter of 25/26 has been a tough one.

Mums funeral on 23rd January 2026, planned to be quite simple, was complicated by the minister not turning up. The funeral director took charge and luckily I had written, and was reading, the eulogy again. As with Dad’s a couple of years ago – and in the absence of many other blog posts – I’ve recreated it here.

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Mum’s life started from humble beginnings. She was the daughter of a plumber in Coulsdon. Tom, her Dad, had been allowed home from world war 2 as her mum, Kath, had polio.

They lived in a council terrace at 267 Chipstead Valley Road, but Mum also spent a lot of time with her Auntie Chris and Uncle Allen as a girl, so her cousins were more like siblings. Evelyn especially and her and my mum were always very close. Mum’s brother John came along when she was 13 so she helped bring him up too. He sadly died recently too, just a week before mum.

Mum was always proud that she’d stayed at school and had a professional career. At Wimbledon commercial school she’d done well. She would often talk about her time there and the words-per-minute she achieved in both shorthand and typing. It was a memory that was fresh for her, even as the rest of her memory was failing.

As a secretary she made friends with Judy who was her bridesmaid, but eventually ended up working as a medical secretary at Leicester Royal Infirmary – working for Mr Moyer in the ENT department. She went from manual typewriters when she started to word processors and computers at the end – so saw a lot of change in her time.

She’d met my Dad on a holiday in Switzerland. They travelled a fair bit around Europe before me and my sister arrived on the scene. Then after we moved away they had a few more adventures to other places too.

I know they went to a once-in-every-10-years Christian festival in a place called Oberammergau. They were funny travellers; once writing to the British embassy in a place they were going to asking for restaurant recommendations.

In her last few years with dementia there wasn’t much of Mum left to visit or spend time with. Sorting out the house in Leicester after Dad died was busy so visits were hard to squeeze in and once their house was gone it was not easy to get to see her.

Visiting loved ones with dementia is hard – there can be little acknowledgment, recollection or glimpse of recognition. I had to mostly content myself with making sure she was well looked after from a distance. She was, I know, happy in the care home we’d ended up finding for her.

Dementia is a cruel disease, it robs the sufferer of their ability to enjoy life and relish time with loved ones, and steals them away from their families and friends long before they succumb to a physical death.

On a positive note, the last time I visited, around her birthday this year, there were a lot of smiles, a few chuckles and she seemed happy to have the company. It was a good visit and so when she fell ill this winter it was easier to remember her how I’d seen her last, rather than as she had become in her twilight days.

I found a quote that I thought summed up visits best:

“I hope you can remember who I was to you even if you can’t remember me.”

One memory I do have of Mum is that I never ever met a person who hadn’t liked spending time with her. The friends she had, the people whose lives she touched. Even the staff in the care home where she’d spent her last years all recalled her smile and good nature.

That happy old lady I saw in October this year was the person I’ll remember as my Mum.

Donations to the Alzheimer’s Society can be made here: https://cardiffhalf26.enthuse.com/pf/piers-wilson