Into the final straight and not long to go now.

 Into the final straight and not long to go now. 

For many of us this has been the most emotional roller coaster of our lives and recently it has become very troublesome and moving, touching and raw, deeply penetrating your soul and mind, attacking the very core of your being without destroying it as such. So you detach yourself, force yourself back to where you were before this all started. And still it probes away at your subconscious, taunting and teasing you every so often, asking impossibly profound questions and leaving you drained, still devastated, sinking into morose introspection, crying like a maternity ward of babies and still missing the mother who gave birth to you. 

It has now been over a week since my dear, lovely mum passed away and they tell you that the pain of loss doesn't really subside until you reach that moment of ultimate closure, where the childhood reminiscences float ethereally around us like angels with harps who just want to comfort you. But you have no words and you have no sentences, no paragraphs for a minute or two before realising that this feeling has now taken up residence in your mind, still drifting across your vision like sepia- tinted photographs in Kodak Instamatic splendour. 

There were the ground-breaking holidays to Spain, the Costa Del Sol, Benidorm, Majorca among a multitude that would follow in later years with your wife and family, when you became the parents they used to be but are sadly no longer more. Those were the days when your mum tucked you up in bed tenderly, shortly after Crossroads with Noel Gordon, then looked forward to the weekend when you would sit in the swings and then cling onto the roundabouts of your local park because mum and dad loved to make a fuss of you. 

Now though you are without the lady who did her utmost to make you feel important, dignified, loved, wanted, cossetted, pampered, protected from the potential dangers that might lead to that first fall from your charming, lime green bike with stabilisers. Mum was the one who kissed it better, stuck the firmest of plasters on a bleeding wound and consoled you deeply when you came last in the egg and spoon race on school sports day. Mum smoothed your passage into a world sometimes fractured and divided, argumentative and hostile, frequently at war with itself and politically anguished. 

But mum always knew best, always had her sons best interests at heart, preparing you carefully for the failures and the setbacks, the minor disappointments and then the victories against the odds when you'd passed an exam or got full marks in your spelling test. You'll always think back to yesteryear because that was a time of safety and security, of gentle encouragement and light hearted chastisement when you simply refused to read a book, knowing foolishly that you had to read in order to get on in life. 

And so you try to imagine what your mum must have thought of the ongoing coronavirus crisis. Warmly wrapped up and cocooned in the place she called her dolls house, a flat merely a couple of miles away from the house she and her family used to live in, she would express her agonised despair and frustration. She would affectionately refer to Covid 19 as the CV, a splendidly simple description for an enormously complicated virus that had killed millions across the world. 

Today we now reach what feels like the final furlongs in a horse race that seems to have lasted forever. We are heading towards the back straight and approaching that golden horizon where the world will shortly fling open the blinds and watch an explosion of jubilation, a global celebration, the end of the Covid 19. Even the beginning of March feels, quite bizarrely, like the end of April such has been the speed of change in the air and the exciting possibilities that a full recovery will now bring sooner rather than later. 

You can still see your late mum closing her eyes in utter bemusement, wiping her legs and ankles in some fruitless quest to keep the blood flowing and in functioning circulation. She would rest her head back  awkwardly, movingly, helplessly, trying tearfully to find solace in something that would finally bring an end to her mental and now physical suffering. But then we would laugh at the wondrous progress that was being made to combat the virus, crushing it into oblivion once and for all.

But when my dear mum said goodbye to her doting family for ever, she must have known that the virus was almost over because mum always had exceptional powers of foresight. Even now you suspect that mum is still here with our family confidently believing that by Easter and Pesach, matzos and chocolate eggs will be eagerly devoured surrounded by our families and your families, our smiles and your smiles, our jokes and your jokes. Oh happy days.