Barbara Scully

I miss her every single day.

But she was, she had suffered, she had a lot of ill health.

She died at 86 in 2022 and she had a lot of ill health for the years before that.

At the very beginning of COVID, my mother became very ill and it looked like she had COVID and she was taken into hospital and they kept testing her and it wasn't COVID.

She said she only had commoner, Gardner pneumonia, but she was in hospital for about six weeks and she never really got back to where she'd been before she went in, if you like, after that.

So we were very lucky because she was, myself and my brothers knew she was heading for hospital.

She was living more or less on her own.

My uncle lived with her, but like, I mean, he wasn't going to be a carer.

So she was heading towards a place where we were thinking, how much longer can she stay in the house on her own?

And she always said she never wanted to go into a nursing home and she would have hated that.

So we were very grateful that we were spared a lot of things that I see other women of my age and friends going through with their elderly parents, you know, who for years were

Have no quality of life, but are being kept alive in nursing homes.

But anyway, that's another thing.

Not everybody, but I think there is there is quite a bit of that.

I'm very grateful that that she was spared that and we were spared that, you know, and she died at home.

Well, she died in hospital, but and I was with her when she died, which I consider to be a huge privilege.

And she's around.

She's always with me.

she's always around I can hear her in her in my head all the time like you know so yeah she was great and she was a great grandmother as well my kids and her other grandchildren all absolutely adored her because she was mad as a box of frogs and great and one of the best things she gave me and I've hopefully given on to my kids is a love of animals she absolutely loved animals which is another reason why she never wanted to go into nursing home she had cats

And she was like, her cats were everything.