This is Hilda, my Mum, aged 18 and giving Adolf Hitler one of her warning looks. Hilda died three days ago, conceding victory to a very aggressive brain tumour. Many of you have sent their prayers and good wishes as I've charted her decline. I'd like you to know she died very well, in her own bed, the sun just set and the last of the swallows hoovering up insects in the sky outside her terrace doors. I don't know where she went in those first moments of freedom - she loved to travel - but she didn't hang around. Her absence was immediately palpable.

In the aftermath there have been some interludes of high comedy: the doctor who was supposed to come and evaluate her for the loan of a bed hoist finally found time to call; there was little stand-off between Raisa, the Russian, who helped me nurse my mother and the mortuary assistant who had performed Last Offices on Hilda's body. Raisa had put a scarf in the bag of burial clothes, to be tied babushska-style around her head. The mortuary attendant, rightly judging my mother to have been an elegant English woman, had draped the scarf around her throat.
And then there was the man doing the funeral flowers who will go to his own grave telling the story of the strange foreigners who didn't want a ten foot high MAMA.

For those of you who didn't know her, here is a digest of my eulogy notes.
A frost-blossom baby. When she was born her father was already a grandfather. She was orphaned at 16, married at 20, widowed at 49.
Two words that recur in every tribute I've received: 'courage' and 'energy'.
A grandmother and a great-grandmother without equal. Her grandchildren were her favourite and frequent travel companions. She was always their friend and sometimes their refuge.
Her love affair with India, where her father had been a soldier. Her solo journeys there that astonished and scandalised her friends. Her neatly packed travel bag whose contents covered every eventuality. Sink, Kitchen would be filed between Rennie Antacid Tablets and Tea Bags.
Stalwart, indomitable, with a powerful sense of duty. In her eighties still shopping for sick neighbours, still delivering Christian Aid envelopes. Still making beds with the sheet corners mitred tight enough to break your legs.
A shy, shade-seeking plant, the perfect foil for my funny, extrovert father.
The eyes of a hawk, the memory of an elephant, the heart of a lioness. That was my Mum.