For Maggie May

I've not been well, you know. It was definitely something more than a cold, which struck me down so ferociously just before Christmas. It was more of a devastating mystery illness. I was so tired that I could not stay awake and I was stricken by a depression which seemed endless.

I didn't see my doctor. What do these youngsters know anyway? My doctor is not much older than my youngest son. What could he have learned in his 5 years at medical school to compare with my lifetime's experience of illness?? He would not have known what was wrong with me. I knew that I had something terminal. I acknowledged that I would be lucky to last until Christmas!

I was most grateful for the sympathy and support I received from my family throughout the period of my suffering, however.

On one occasion, as I lay on the sofa, weak and sweating profusely, my middle son murmured sympathetically 'Mom, could you iron this shirt, ready for tomorrow, please?'

A few days later, as I lay prostrate on the kitchen floor, where I had collapsed on my way to the kettle, my eldest son stepped over me, on his way to the cereal cupboard. 'Have we really run out of cereal?' he asked in a voice full of tenderness and concern.

A few seconds after my son's kind enquiry, I struggled to make myself a cup of tea and dragged myself back across the living room carpet, on one elbow, in the general direction of my temporary invalid's retreat. Clutching the remains of my tea in my trembling hand, I lowered my ravaged body to the refuge of the sofa's soft and all-enveloping embrace. 'They'll miss me when I'm gone' I muttered darkly, as I ruefully surveyed the telling trail of tea stains I had left in my wake, on the neutral-coloured carpet.