14 October 2024 Dear Angelika I write to you with the sad news that my mother Mary passed away last month. She had been suffering several conditions and eventually succumbed in hospital. She died quite peacefully on September 25. Mum always enjoyed receiving your letters and cards. She looked forward to hearing all your news, especially about your many cycling and walking adventures in the countryside and along the rivers of your country, news about your cooking, and about your garden and the animals and birds that appeared in it from time to time. Mum’s funeral was held on October 11, and many family and friends attended, including grand- and great-grandchildren, and even a great-great-grandchild. The funeral was held in the St John Bosco’s church in Niddrie, close to her house in West Essendon. It was a sad but nostalgic occasion, because in the 1960s my mother and father had sent us to the parish school next to the church, and both of my parents helped out with parish function
There was a steady, distant hum of traffic on High Street as I entered the funeral parlour. Set well back behind its own car park lined with trees it was a pale square of a building, rendered white walls broken up by black glass. The consultant, neat, efficient, fiftyish, was apologetic. We were sitting at an oblong table in the client room, a kind of reduced boardroom with sympathetic quotes on the walls and a water jug on the table and no ashtrays. Death! The consultant’s laptop had crashed and all the details of the deceased had been lost. She left me to find some ghostly IT person in an office elsewhere in the building, and I gazed out the window at a garden bed humming with flowers. Beyond that, passing vehicles on High Street were blurred wraiths, their soft filtered whine fading in the mid-afternoon air. Fifteen minutes passed. A gold-flecked shaft of sunshine fell on the carpet and crept up the leg of the boardroom table. Then the consultant returned, sombrely exultant at ha