KEY POINTS:
Mum sat on the edge of the bed while the last of the doctors, an overbearing anaesthetist, outlined what would happen.
"Do you have any questions?" he finished.
"No", she replied, "I think I'm in the hands of experts." And they wheeled her away.
We walked beside her
as far as we could. She did not look frightened, she looked resolute. I was frightened; open heart surgery might be routine now but you would have to be terminally ill to face it with equanimity.
Mum wasn't terminal, she was enervated and short of breath from her heart's increasing struggle to force blood through a constricted valve. Her condition had worsened over the past six months or more but it rated low on public health priorities. She was 79 and could still walk to her gate.
Faced with a six-month wait and no guarantee that, at the end of that time, she would not still be waiting, she and my father decided it was time to spend their health fund. They had self-insured for just such a contingency.
The private hospital was comfortable and quiet. At the door of the surgical suite, Mum gave us a grim, brave smile and slipped her wedding ring on to Dad's little finger.
I don't believe she had any inkling of what would happen. Nor did her doctors. None of the tests they had run on her before the operation warned of her body's response to the machine that would pump and oxygenate her blood while they replaced the valve.
Three hours later, the surgeon phoned to say it had gone very well. Four hours later, we saw her in the intensive care unit and their worries were beginning.
She never regained consciousness. For the best part of two days, they worked to counter the massive leak of fluid from her bloodstream into her organs and cavities. We kept vigil from the room where she should have been recovering like all the other patients who came back while we waited.
At times, the surgeon was hopeful, especially after he had opened her a second time, right there in intensive care to release fluid constricting her repaired heart.
At other times, we took false hope by signs of life that we learned were really symptoms of the damage the adrenalin and other drugs were starting to do - brain activity triggered by a dangerous build up of acids in the bloodstream.
In the hours before dawn last Saturday, we were called to the bedside. We talked to her, prayed, wept as one by one the last syringes ran out and lines on screens flattened. Nothing prepares you for the finality of it. Our mother.
Thank God for a big family, thank God for some faith in a spiritual existence where she might be reunited with the teenage son she lost 35 years ago. Thank God for people who are not afraid to call when there is nothing really to say.
I would need a calmer week than this to compose a proper tribute to her. The best I could do for the funeral on Tuesday was to remember the discussions we had when I was growing up.
We both relished them. She had a rare insight to human nature, an acute sense of people's motives and needs that could cast a social issue or someone's particular problem into clearer light.
She listened to what others said and took them seriously, sometimes too seriously. She simply had to understand why someone thought differently to her.
She was the last generation of women who were not educated for a career beyond marriage and raising a family and she was in her forties before feminism freed her.
She trained to become a relationships counsellor, a job that was not only ideal for her talents but gave her immense personal growth.
She had a fiercely compassionate sense of justice; a Christian of conscience more than compliance.
She became a spokeswoman for Catholics who challenged the patriarchy and, as one of them observed this week, her public statements were invariably tactful, firm and kind, never hurtful.
She left a journal that contained the hymns and biblical readings she would like at her funeral. It fell to me to read from St Paul's first letter to the Corinthians:
"If I have all the eloquence of men or of angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing ...
"If I have the gift of prophecy, understanding all the mysteries there are and knowing everything, and if I have faith in all its fullness to move mountains, but without love then I am nothing at all ...
"Love is always patient and kind, never jealous, boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it doesn't take offence and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes ... "
Thanks, Mum.
