Mrs Spelling

I knew Mrs Spelling for the last ten years of her life. Next week I will take her funeral but she deserves an obituary of sorts on a medium she never grasped.

She was always Mrs Spelling to me, never Edith. It was strange to see her in hospital or the home (such a misnomer) and to hear her called Edith or Edie.

Even ten years ago she was odd. She had an obsession with money - not so much with hoarding it, though she was always careful, as with the exact cost of everything. It made no difference that the next time she told me what something had cost the figure was different, it was always exact to the penny.

She had a sweet tooth. I remember her stuffing chocolate cake into her mouth at a meal; and she ate biscuits one after the other. Yet we had to move her to a home when she had almost come to a complete stop, having forgotten to eat.

The home was good to her. She was fed and rehydrated: 'What's the food like?' I'd ask, regularly. 'Alright,' she'd say, and then would laugh at the the unbelievable behaviour of some people: 'sometimes it's soup, you know.' I remember her oblivious incontinence and her little smile.

She'd been a headteacher and was proud of her B Ed. gained through distance learning decades earlier, though where the school was and which University had awarded her degree used to vary. She was also proud of winning a swimming competition as a schoolgirl nearly seventy years ago. I know she learnt to dance in her sixties and once, before that, had a husband, but these were things she hardly mentioned. The rest of her life is entirely opaque to me.

Her children came to see her as regularly as they could, but lived away and it wasn't easy for them to get up regularly. She was always proud of them, of what she could remember they'd told her of their lives, and even at the end she knew they'd been, and there would be fresh flowers.

But the last ten years at least have been difficult and sad. She has taken a long time dying, her world shrinking by inches, and death for her was just a small final step.