Eccentric, artist and storyteller: in memory of my mother Doreen Sanders

‘I love you’ became just ‘love’, and that was the last word Mum was able to say to me. Her children had been in and out for days, she had met her great-grandson from America for the first time and messages flooded in on the phone, from all around Kenya and from her grandchildren in Europe. Then one evening the two of us were alone together in her bedroom, surrounded by family photos and all her memories of India, Arabia and great-grandson. She was in my arms and it became so quiet I decided to play Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ on my phone, since it might remind her of her years of war service in Burma, when she was still a teenager. As the song ended — ‘some sunny day’ — she opened her eyes, looking so beautiful, and then Mummy died. She would have been 96 next month. Suddenly at my side were her carers, Mercy and Anne, weeping because they had loved Mum so much. I slept at her feet that night.

In the morning I helped lift Mum’s body into her coffin and a van drove off, with us following, towards the Hindu crematorium in Nairobi’s old district of Kariokor. Flocks of sacred ibises wandered about the gardens and there were statues of deities and open pyres where you can have a great send-off with timber and ghee. We had chosen the modern oven method — which uses 40 litres of diesel to consume a body — though under the X-rays, Mummy’s bones had become like thin shadows, so I reckon she used up much less fuel than usual. After a respectful, short Christian service attended by several of us, off she went, the kindly Hindu priest guiding the box forwards as if directing traffic, while all of us cried.