Posts by Emma Hart
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My goodness, I should hope so. I cry when thwarted. Be warned!
I don't think there's a single one I've met who hasn't turned out to be quieter and more reserved in real life. Well, okay, Megan. And Jo. Okay, the boys are lovely.
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God knows I’m going to be doing a lot of judicious scrolling between now and November…
And can we all just try, from a moderation point of view, to keep this in mind? That we're going to have a very long election campaign, tempers are going to be tested, and just try to remember to be careful about both what we write, and how we read and react to what others have written? We don't want to end up with people simply avoiding discussions.
Sorry, I know I'm sounding like a cross between a hippy and a Matron. Eat your fucking vegetables, man.
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You all just let him go without so much as a 'oh, that's a shame'. Nice to know where we stand.
Yeah, not only did he not tell us he was leaving, but you don't actually know what's been said to Ian behind the scenes. Perhaps it would be nice not to leap to judgement quite so quickly?
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Oh Rex, I'm so sorry.
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Sure those MPs can and do sympathise with the poor. Just as the liberals on Public Address do.But you’re not living that situation and giving 10 dollars isn’t going to make such people smile.
Oo, I LOVE it when people lecture me about not understanding poverty! I assume most people who raise two kids on an invalid's benefit grow up to be conservatives...
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Up Front: Giving Me Grief, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Wow, Joe, that is quite a different perspective. Everyone just assumed that Mum would have pall-bearers, I thought it was pretty much universal. With Mum that might partially have been because she had three six-foot-plus sons. She'd said, "Well I have three sons and a son-in-law," and there was still... something of a "discussion", and we ended up with six, including my son and a cousin of my brother's. I found it a bit odd that she'd been such a traditionalist about it, given how delighted she was when I asked her to give me away at my wedding, but in retrospect pernaps she was just giving the men something to do.
My daughter and I went up with them. I put Mum's 80 year old teddy bear on her coffin, Rhiana placed and lit a candle in front of it. (My partner apparently spent the entire service watching to see Bear didn't catch fire.) At the end we took the candle and the bear and walked out with the boys behind us carrying the coffin. Then we girls stood by the hearse with baskets of flowers from Mum's garden so people could put a flower on the coffin and take a moment to say goodbye. It was good.
Beautiful. Quite the elegant epitaph, in fact.
I really should thank Roger Hall for writing all those wonderful parts my mother played. She was in Middle Aged Spread, Social Climbers, The Share Club, Market Forces, Prisoners of Mother England... At the end of Dirty Weekends, her character died, and went to Heaven on a ride-on lawn-mower.
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Thank you, everyone, for your very kind words.
Im glad you were able even to just sit with her as death approached. And prepare in some way for the inevitable.
This was the up side of the cancer (not, possibly, a sentence that's been used very often). Mum had time to come to terms with her approaching death and start to prepare, and so did we. She'd been up to the hospice while she was still well and decided that she was perfectly happy to go up there when the time came. That was immense for us, because by the time we got to there... my mother was largely gone. She started to go mentally. She was very easily confused, panicky, occasionally she lashed out. From that point, things were very simple for me. Not so much for one of my brothers.
But then we had a couple of weeks where she would get a little better, and we started to think about how long this could drag on, this up and down. We've been having huge problems with our daughter, and I was trying to be a mother and a daughter at the same time, in two different cities. So, yeah, it was difficult, too.
And yes. She'd outlived her parents, her sister, two husbands, the rest of her generation. She took her last curtain call in October, in Who Wants to Be a Hundred? I'm grateful she didn't live too long after she could no longer learn her lines, because that wasn't a life she would have wanted to live.
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People have been asking to see the infamous Swimsuit Photo. So here it is.
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I so, so love this.
Purple suede spike-heeled boots. So awesome. The funeral director is supposed to be sending me a copy of the dvd, and when they do I'll upload the tribute video. It was great. People were laughing so hard, and then behind me my cousin's daughter started crying and I was thinking, "gods, no, I have to get up and speak in a minute, don't you go, or I will..."
The funeral director asked me to get clothes for Mum, and she couldn't quite believe it when I passed her knee-high cuban-heeled black leather boots.
Also, I appear to have broken myself writing this. I haven't cried this hard at all.
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Up Front: Giving Me Grief, in reply to Russell Brown,
And I just spent five minutes weeping helplessly at my desk. Touché, Brown.