Thread by @arkfrancis

A little personal reflection.

A trigger warning: cancer, end of life.

I'm sitting in my mother's nursing home room. She is gently fading away with pancreatic cancer. It's now 28 days since she ate anything, so my visits have become silent affairs as she sleeps.

She is fortunate in many ways. No pain to speak of, and she is ready to die.

Still, it's hard to see her like this, so thin except for her distended abdomen. Small, prostrate, weak, and no longer able to apply her sharp mind.

My mother had been a remarkable woman; let me share a few details.

Picture her in the late 1950s. She was 6 foot tall. A medical student in London. She drove a convertible MG TC.

She wasn't normal, in almost any respect.

In the mid 1960s, with two other women, she left England in a Landrover and *drove to Australia*.

Yes.

They put the car on a boat in Pakistan, puff I remember the story rightly.

They camped in the tent she sewed herself, through Iran, Kurdistan, Iraq.

(That was "if" I remember...)

That's a lot of courage.

She and her friends drove around Australia, before they went their separate ways. She met my father while working as a medical locum in Quorn, outback South Australia.

It's hard to imagine that time and life.

There's more to tell of her childhood and parents that flavor the story - some real tales! - but I'll save them for another day.

For now, time for me to leave her to sleep and head home to my own kids.

Time for some more tales of my mother's, as I'm back sitting by her bed and she sleeps on morphine.

I might start with her birth and childhood, and hopefully get to something that will prick the ears of the evolutionary biologists.

Her father, Robert Gibbings, was an artist and writer, and her mother's pregnancy was a surprise, given she was 18 and unmarried. Her mother, Elizabeth Empson, was the youngest of several sisters.

You can read a bit about her father here: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gi…

Oh and Gibbings was still married to his first wife.

I understand things were pretty bohemian. Gibbings worked extensively with Eric Gill in their printing press (you know of Gill through the Gill sans font). Apparently RG was a founder of the British nudist society....

I just realised I haven't told you my mother's name. It was Vahine Gibbings. Vahine, unusual name for 1930s England, you say.

While it's always been pronounced "var-nee", it's derived from Pacific Island languages from the word wahini which I'm told means woman.

The connection to the south Pacific is that my grandfather spent a long time down here writing books and engraving illustrations. I don't think he came to Australia but did visit NZ, and there's some of his work in Dunedin at the @otago library.

During the war, my mother, her sister, and their mother went to Canada, as they lived close to London.

When they came back after the war, my grandfather was living with my great aunt Pae, my grandmother's sister. Phew, that must have been some return.

I got to know Pae quite well, she was great. But it made my mother's mother very bitter, as you can imagine, and she retained a sarcastic edge all her life.

My mother left home as soon as possible and moved to London to study medicine.

Because home life was toxic, she spent a lot of those years in the home of a dear friend Mary Hamilton (later Bliss). Her family was more a family than her own home, and I guess she was lucky to find it.

When I was a child my parents took my brother and I to England for a visit.

We went round in a motor caravan, and one place we visited was Mary's brother Bill, who now worked at Oxford. I remember going into an ancient hall and eating a meal there with him. I don't remember him much, but, I was 9 ☺.

Much later, when I started working in the mathematics of evolution, I learned about a bloke called Bill Hamilton who was a bit of a god of the field.

Same guy.

Anyway that brings me back to where I started the thread, my six foot tall, sports car driving, medical student mother, who is now breathing heavily and sleeping her last, morphined, days on this earth.

/end for now

Time to just close this off by letting you all know that Mum died in the early hours of yesterday morning.

Here is a picture of here at age 50, in 1984.

RIP Vahine Francis.