Resting Place

In memory of Diane Gray (1938-2023)

My mother-in-law died yesterday morning. She was 85 and had Alzheimer’s.

My wife Tina must have sensed something as she woke early, at 5.30am, the same time her mother died. When the call came from the nursing home we were making tea in the kitchen. Tina let out a deep, doleful howl and her legs buckled beneath her.

She had knelt beside her mother’s bed late the evening before and, witnessing the final flicker of recognition fade from her eyes and the onset of strained, rasping breath, had accepted the inevitable. Nevertheless, when the moment came, the weight of loss was unbearable.

We stepped outside and embraced as Tina sobbed. Light from the rising sun shone through pale yellow hollyhock petals. The cloud-mottled sky was white-gold and the air was still and quiet, as if the world had paused momentarily.

At the nursing home, just a few minutes’ drive away in Ketton, Diane lay peacefully in her curtained room, a Tiffany lamp casting a pool of light across a framed photograph of her grandchildren.

Her eyes were open, gazing upwards, beyond the ceiling. Her mouth formed an O-shape, as if her final breath had just been exhaled with a long sigh.

“I knew she was going, but this is still so surreal,” whispered Tina, caressing her mother’s hands, the last of her warmth ebbing away through wrinkled but still beautiful olive skin. “It’s such a mystery.”

On top of the wardrobe perched the small suitcase Diane moved in with eight years ago, as if ready to be used for a holiday, or the return journey home. But this was home and we all knew this is where she would remain when she moved up from Sussex in 2015.

She had visited a few times before and loved Rutland. When she moved into the home, I used to take her on Sunday drives around the hedge-lined lanes and honey-coloured stone villages, before bringing her to our house for Sunday roast. She adored the landscape and each week repeated the same exclamations in the same locations, the Alzheimer’s stealing her memory, but not the perpetual delight of rediscovering Rutland’s prettiest scenes.

She had a contented final few years here, lovingly looked after by care home staff, some of whom sobbed as we left. They loved her smile and her joy expressed in musical la-la-las when she could no longer speak.

Just the day before, Tina and her cousin Hilly had spent some time singing to Diane, including a favourite family song, Cynthia Such, that brought a twitch to an eyebrow.

Born in North London in 1938, Diane Marchant – daughter of Minnie Violet Vooght and Charles Alec Marchant – grew up in a music-loving family. During the war she tap-danced on the steel Morrison ‘table’ shelter inside the house.

She was the youngest of four children and 18 years younger than her eldest brother, Richard, a Lancaster bomber pilot. She went to Mountview Theatre School where she sang and danced, also learning to play the piano. The piano became a lifelong passion and, for a while, a profession, as a teacher.

But she thought secretarial college might offer a sensible career path and she worked for various organisations and companies, including Tommy Tickler’s Jams in Grimsby.

Diane was a beautiful, vivacious woman, with doe eyes, Mediterranean skin and rich, long hair, always immaculately tied.

She eyed me with deliberate curiosity when Tina first brought me home to meet her. But any suspicion she might have had was short lived when she complimented me for putting the toilet seat down after I had used the bathroom.

It’s fair to say Diane could be eccentric, in that very English way. After Tina and I were married, she presented us with a homemade pot of elderberry cordial, decorated with a beautiful hand-drawn label.

The cordial was delicious and greatly appreciated over several months, until I washed up the pot and discovered, when the label peeled off, it had previously contained slug pellets.

Like us all, Diane was not without her troubles. But as Alzheimer’s took hold, so a simple contentment set in, with regular visits from a loving daughter and family.

Diane came and watched our four children in their various musical productions: Holly tapdancing in Bugsy Malone, William singing in Wind in the Willows and Jack playing Jeremy Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The musical gene had passed down the line.

Another of Diane’s passions was trees. In Sussex, she had been a tree warden, a voluntary role protecting trees in our home village of Lindfield, a place named after a field of lime trees. So, it’s fitting that Diane will be laid to rest at a natural burial site at a woodland in Rutland.   

Not so much putting her roots down in Rutland, but being put under the roots. Precisely where she would wish to be.

As we drove the short distance home, we reminisced. Tina leant forward in the passenger seat and let out deep, heart-wrenching sobs. The first day of life without her mother.

I’ll remember Diane as a beautiful, musical, artistic soul, sometimes troubled, but never far from a smile, a mischievous laugh and a song on her lips.

• Diane Gray, née Marchant, was born on February 15, 1938 and died in Ketton, Rutland, on July 29, 2023.