On Wednesday my mother clocked up 100 years of life.
It’s not something she ever considered achieving, not an ambition in any way, and so she’s a little incredulous when I remind her that she is the oldest person ever in her maternal and paternal line.
But she should not be hugely surprised, when all her female elders lived into their eighties and nineties and the very oldest bowed out not long before her 100th. Her two sisters are both in their late 90s and none of the three has a non-communicable health condition. Her brother made it to his eighties.
In truth, my mother may be 100 and have shrunk in height from her perfectly proportioned four foot eight to four foot six, but she is as she was all along – formidable.
I always joked with her that the Almighty knew what he was doing when he packed her into that tiny frame. She really is ten feet tall. As a child I feared her fierceness, but we were well bonded after sharing my near-death birthing, me coming in at ten pounds, and from the age of about 11 I feared her less and began to fall in love with her strength in the face of great adversity, her brave heart, sharp intelligence, integrity, tenacity, generosity, sense of justice, fair play and her liberal views that allowed others to live their lives, although she stuck to her own considered opinions and modus operandi.
By my twenties, we were good friends, enjoying many holidays together.
We decided to retire back in Trinidad from different parts of the world. Her retirement (mine never really happened) has been some of the happiest years of both our lives. We did everything together, provided she was keen.
Living alongside my mother is a great privilege. It has been an enlightening experience to witness the human cycle of life into the twilight years, to see how someone who grasped life and lived it as fully as she could, came to accept retirement with such ease, slipping from being at the top of her profession into days with no agenda. Except, of course, days were never lazy.
The effortless transition from super-busy to healthily busy was encouraging to notice. Then came, at 91, the very difficult giving-up of her independence. when she stopped driving and travelling abroad on her own for summer sojourns to visit relatives abroad.
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She would not allow me to sell her car, and could only rationalise the situation by allowing her much younger best friend to purchase it as a favour. Therefore, there was no loss, but an exercise of control.
Also aged 91, she learned to use an iPad with little difficulty after I translated the flat screen into a 3-D office, with icons representing a phone, a stamp, an in-tray, a postbox etc. It was the only way we could communicate while I was away in China for several weeks.
That’s when I observed that her extraordinary professional skills had become redundant. Someone of her age would recognise nothing in a modern workspace or understand its new ethos. Their experience would have no
