103 years in five minutes

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My mother died on Sunday at the age of 103 (not far short of 104). I am pleased to say that she did not have a lingering illness and suffered no pain and very little discomfort during her final days. She spent her last couple of months in a care home - having been living in her own flat until shortly before then - and when visiting her it was clear that some of her fellow residents (all of them younger than her) were finding old age to be much more of a struggle than she was. I shall be going down south tomorrow to help my sister with sorting things out - starting to clear Mother's flat and talking to her bank manager, for example. My sister and I are the executors of Mother's will, so we need to get the process started on sorting that out. The funeral is set for Wednesday 19th May - cremation followed by a Thanksgiving service at the church she knew all her life (High St Methodist, Poole). She was christened there, married there, and sat in the same pew at services for the best part of a century! My job will be to summarise her life in five minutes - not an easy thing to do! Her earliest memory was of seeing the troops come home after World War One. She also had a vivid memory of seeing planes and ships leaving from Poole for the invasion of Europe exactly (to the day) 75 years ago. A few weeks ago I passed on an enquiry from a cousin about her Uncle Sidney, who had died when she was a teenager - did she remember him? Of course she did! She even remembered where he had lived and the fact that he was completely bald! My own memories were of someone who spent her whole life caring for others - not professionally, but as a wife, mother and carer. Not only did she bring up her family but she and my father and sister also had to give up their family home to move into that of her elderly parents-in-law, which also became the home of her bachelor brother-in-law. She had tragedies in her own life - a brother who died in his 20s, her own parents did not have particularly long lives, and she suffered two miscarriages after my sister was born which meant that she could have no more children - which was why I was adopted into the family at the age of 13 months. I remember that she cared for a baby girl from Sierra Leone while the girl's parents were training to be doctors in London, and she also fostered a boy from Ghana for four years - this was Bob who became the closest I ever had to a brother. Hers was an ordinary life in many respects, but an extraordinary one in others. Everyone who knew her loved her and she will be much missed. Thank you, Dot Welford, for being who you were.