I washed the last of Mum from her silk scarves today. Those scarves were the only bit of choice she had left, once creeping blindness and the coded doors of the nursing home closed in. She would never go down to the dining room without a scarf knotted around her neck, "to make me look respectable". Head held as high as she was able, she would make her way between the tables, quietly greeting whomever she recognised through the blur. Sometimes there was a table companion, but mostly, she sat alone, like a small, stoic child left at boarding school.  I suppose there's another gallant, lonely soul sitting in that seat now.

Mum hated being dirty, she loved doing laundry and would have been quite shocked to see how much black water came out of the scarves. The meticulous diaries she kept for years had so many entries about washing clothes, drying clothes, not being able to wash or dry clothes, bad weather, broken drive belts and blocked drains flooding the laundry. She never adjusted to automatic washing machines, and would stop the cycle once the machine filled, open the lid and hand scrub the clothes with velvet soap before letting the cycle finish. Our after-school homework was frequently punctuated by the sound of loud banging from the laundry and shouts of "can somebody fix that machine?!" One of us would fling open the lid of the wildly rocking machine, rearrange the unbalanced load, and set it on its whirring way again. I didn't realise until I grew up that some mothers got to the bottom of the dirty clothes basket, because I never saw it empty.

All that soapy water played hell with her hands, and Mum wore white cotton gloves underneath the rubber ones, but it didn't help much. Her hands were always rough and scratchy and usually smelled of chopped onions. I didn't like the smell, but I loved the scratchiness when she would come in and sit by our beds if we couldn't sleep, run her fingers through our hair, soothing and smoothing our worries away.

Even after a good, soapy wash, I had to rinse those scarves three times to get the water to come clear. I'd held off washing them because I knew that they would no longer have that Mum smell in them. I said goodbye to her again as I poured the black water down the sink. Goodbye Mum. Darling Mum.