On Wednesday we went to a funeral far away in Carmarthenshire. It was the funeral of a friend of my mother’s, a very good friend; she died last Thursday from complications following a fall on Boxing Day.

Morna, my mum, and Marjory always joked that they had some kind of telepathic communication. If one phoned the other always swore that she had her hand on the phone ready to dial the other’s number. Dates for visits or jaunts pencilled in diaries were often similarly mirrored. Far too many incidences to just be coincidences, I remember them saying!

Our families met and became firm friends when we all lived in Singapore. We children, their four sons and I, shared summer and Christmas holiday together. During those years we had enormous fun, and, as we teetered on the brink of childhood and adolescence, the spark of an innocent romance blossomed between me and one of the boys, an experience both sweetly delicious and excruciatingly embarrassing.  Eventually we all left Singapore, grew up and drifted apart, our lives taking different direction. But we still kept up with occasional news of each other through our mothers, whose friendship and contact continued.

I shouldn’t, therefore, have been too surprised when I received a call from David, one of Marjory’s sons, last Friday. Shattered, he told me of Marjory’s fall and subsequent death. The timing and similarity to my mother’s was hard to miss – just another of those coincidences.

Morna isn’t doing well at the moment. She’s all but given up eating, disappearing into her own vivid memory world. It seems our interruptions, when trying to persuade her to eat or drink, to change her and to move her or to encourage her to walk, painfully shock her into an unwelcome waking nightmare, bringing her face to face with her distorted, wrecked body. When she escapes she is – I think, I believe – once again happy, active and healthy, she can’t see what all the fuss is about. And I am in both her worlds – she knows me, her eyes seek mine, she talks to me and of me. But she’s diminishing in front of my eyes. This is so hard…

And so we went to the funeral to celebrate the long friendship of these two women, one still teetering on the brink of life, to share joint memories and to renew old friendships. Out of our combined bewilderment and heartache we reunited and found the warmth and fun we shared as children, almost forty years on.

my oak says it all