Striking the right note

I was at a funeral the other day at which the music was so inspiring that I struggled to feel sad. That’s fair enough, you may think — but the person in the coffin was my own mother.

This is a difficult point to explain in cold print, but there are reasons why I wasn’t grief-stricken at the death of the person who meant most to me in the world.

My mother Pamela loved my sister and me with a passion; she radiated holiness, but in an unobtrusively English way.

She was also a very private person, sometimes driven to distraction by her attention-seeking son. She never sought — and never received — any official recognition of her decades of service to the Catholic Church. Well into her eighties, she spent day after day taking the Blessed Sacrament (and her joyful smile) to Catholics lying seriously ill in hospital. Later, one of those patients was able to perform the same service for her.