Paul's tears I MISS MUM EVERY DAY

AN EMOTIONAL PAUL TALKS ABOUT HIS FINAL DAYS WITH DEAR MUM OLIVE

Mum has been dead for almost four years now. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about her. She was my best friend, greatest cheerleader and illustrator. She would have loved scribbling her bizarre illustrations for this book and as usual she would be so proud of me.

In the months leading up to my mother’s death, she had grown increasingly weak. Her old frame was fighting multiple threats and it was proving impossible to balance her medications. In the weeks before her death, she had to be moved to a new rest home in South Auckland that was better equipped to help her, and she was spending more time at Auckland Hospital. She was constantly hallucinating and disturbed.

I was called to the hospital about two weeks before Mum’s death. My mother had little time left. Bella was with her, and other very close family arrived. She was in a bad state and I was told it could easily go either way. She was slipping between the world we were inhabiting and the special world of nightmarish wonder only accessible to her. Despite her little strength, she had us in stitches. “Look at me. S*** I’m a wreck. I’ll never get a boyfriend in this state.”

That night, Bella and close family stayed with her, amused at times by her chirpy outbursts throughout her sleep. She started to improve and was moved from intensive care to a ward. She was not so much in pain as in constant discomfort, and her mind was betraying her. A lot of the time she had little idea what was going on around her or where she was.