We staged what amounted to an impromptu wake, before her death, much to my mother’s delight. While she lay dying upstairs we sat down round the dining room table and remembered her life, and drank to her memory even though she was not yet dead, and ate supper cooked by my wife-to-be Kate. I had only met Kate – to my mother’s joy, after the trauma of the end of my first marriage – a few months earlier. Kate had been slightly surprised to find herself cooking supper for seventeen people when earlier in the day I had hesitantly asked her if she might cook supper for five.
