Dear Inner Circle,

It doesn’t matter how hard you squeeze a sweet fruit, it will never yield bitter juice. My dear old Mum didn’t know who we were when we visited last week but she lovingly accepted the attention that appeared to be in her honour. We sang her “happy birthday” and talked a little about the achievement of her 90 years and then we asked her to say a few words. She really struggles to find any words but she said, “The good life comes from being ‘terrible’ in little things and ‘terrible’ in big things”. She clearly wanted the word, “thankful”. The message was clear enough. In some ways, the greatness of this lady is still seen even in a frail 90-year-old with advanced dementia.

All my life Mum filled our home with stray people. She collected the people that no one else wanted to know and she loved them. As kids we knew that Mum’s love for us was never diminished but that we were not the centre of the universe and that it was not going to kill us to make room for her stray people. Ken was one of Mum’s strays. Ken was a gentle man who loved cricket and was a walking encyclopaedia of cricket history but almost impossible to communicate with on any other topic. I met Ken thirty years after he’d been part of our home. All those years later all Ken could talk about was the kindness he’d known in my home. Even his gestures and words were from my home. It became obvious to me that while my brothers and I found it a bit of a chore, when Ken visited our house, Ken came home. Merri was another stray who visited our house often. I loved Merri and she loved me. Dear, intelligent, creative, Merri. Years later when I heard that Merri had taken her own life, I was heartbroken. I knew that in the years when Merri was in the company of my Mum, that she had a Mum. I knew that when she was in our home, she had a home. Some of the people who visited our home were lovable and some were really difficult to love; people who were “problems” wherever they went but “people” in our home. The story of Ken and Merri, and hundreds more is the legacy of this confused 90-year old-woman who is still today, “thankful for little things and thankful for big things”.

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