This is My Mum.. She’s the one on the left. Next to her (the dark-haired toddler, is her sister Olive, who lived with us for many years) …

This is My Mum, a photograph taken in her early teens …

This is My Mum –  The girl on the left …

This is My Mum, elegantly posed in her late teens…

This is My Mum in her Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) uniform during the war…

This is My Mum – on her wedding Day to Dad. Sitting in a car in a photographer’s studio with a pretend background …

This is My Mum – with my sister and me – I’m the grumpy-looking blond one…

This is My Mum in her forties outside the house she lived in until 2014 …

This is My Mum in her sixties, enjoying the sun in the garden …

This is My Mum -aged eighty, at our son’s wedding …

This is My Mum …

This is My Mum …

I will give her some dignity so I won’t show her as she is now;  a small frail figure huddled under the bedclothes. She  sleeps most of the time, only speaks the odd disconnected word, she’s doubly incontinent and can’t feed herself, 

My Mum would not have wanted to live like this. I do not want her to have to to live like this. I wouldn’t want to live like this  What I should say is … ‘exist like this.’

 You’ve seen the photographs of my mum as she was. That’s how I want to remember her.  In a similar way, that’s how I want my children to remember me.

This why I wanted to write this post.