My mother, Yvonne Chunn, has five children but only one daughter – me. If you saw us together you couldn’t miss the connection, and the older I get the stronger the resemblance seems to become.
But we are not together very often. She has lived most of her adult life in Auckland, New Zealand. I left in 1982 and have now lived more than half of my life in London.
For a long time I don’t think this bothered either of us much. Every second or third year I would go “home” at Christmas to get an injection of the New Zealand summer sunshine. Once I had my first two children (with their New Zealand-born father) there would be breaks of two to three weeks so that my parents could spent time with their grandchildren. My parents would come this way too. She was in London for the birth of each of my babies (with my second husband I had a third).
But now that I am middle-aged with two daughters of my own and Von is in her 88th year, I feel sad that we are so far apart. We speak on the phone, usually once a week, but it can’t make up for the fact that I can’t drop by for a cup of tea and discreetly check that everything is all right in her world.
My two older brothers and six of her grandchildren live in the same city, and two brothers are in Sydney, Australia. But somehow, I – the only daughter, and the child living furthest away – feel the most intense tie is to me.
As a teenager, I would not have predicted the strong love I have grown to feel for my mother. Decked out in charity shop clothes and armed with self-righteous student fury over just about everything, I thought my mother was an haute bourgeois sell-out. Her natural social ease seemed to unearth me and I practically nursed the pain unleashed when a boyfriend said he fancied my mother more than me.
In fact, she was always a pretty fantastic woman. Having trained as a nurse, she ran a charm school for a brief period in the early 60s (and never lost her eagle eye for table manners) and then wrote freelance for magazines and newspapers. This won her a slot covering interior design on a television magazine show. When my father was ill, she couldn’t find anyone to look after the patients at his GP practice, so once he’d recovered, she started a medical employment bureau, finding work in New Zealand for doctors from all over the world.
She was also an intrepid traveller, joining medical group tours to China in the 1970s, exploring Nepal and India in the 1980s, and South America and the Galápagos in the 1990s. Her last trip to the UK was with my eldest brother to the London Olympics in 2012.
I used to imagine that my father, a doctor who rather wished he was Graham Greene, was my lodestar. When I was young he would take me to a bookshop every Friday night, where I could buy whatever I wanted. He read my short stories and encouraged my ambition to be a journalist.
But, in truth, it’s my mum who in the end is the bigger influence. I worked in women’s magazines rather than reporting international affairs or writing books. And just as her company was based on frustration at finding the right doctor to cover Dad’s long recuperation, I started a business based on my experience of finding it difficult to find a therapist.
But there are many reasons to find life difficult at this point. My father died nearly four years ago, and her only brother to whom she was touchingly close, not long after. Within the last six months her two oldest friends have died and I know she misses both women deeply.
I have just returned from visiting Mum for the first time in 10 months. On previous stays we filled our days together chatting over coffee in cafes, getting old photos out of boxes, visiting friends and going to the cinema. This time was different. There had been a couple of “incidents”, resulting in the arrival of a fire engine at her apartment, so it was clear that the previously loose arrangements that were not even termed “care” are not enough any more. As she acknowledged to me, fresh off the 26-hour flight: “I need some help these days.”
She’s a healthy woman, in good physical shape, but her memory is very poor now. Always slim, she kept tapping her tummy and telling me she’d been getting fat; but when we visited her doctor we discovered she’d lost 7kg in the past two years. She’s skipping meals, probably not realising it.
I leapt into organisational mode, setting up help; re-doing her telephone book; creating a message book system; restricting her use of the cooker; organising her wallet; handing my email address out to everyone involved in her care so that I’ll know exactly what is happening.
We talked quite frankly about her future. My dad spent his last few years in a care home, with Mum visiting every day. She prefers to stay where she is and pay for care there. I used to think she’d be happier in one of Auckland’s highly rated care homes, but reading Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal has made me more respectful of what she wants. And when that becomes impossible? “I trust my family to make the right decisions for me,” Mum told me stoically.
I was in New Zealand for eight days, balancing seeing Mum with overseeing my business in the UK. And when it came time to leave, we were both sad, but not inconsolable (I hope).
Would she want me to be with her full-time? Up until now I’d have said no. But now I’m not so sure. I may have resisted being her daughter when I was younger, but now I feel a devotion that is hard to express when I am 11,400 miles away. I think about her a lot and I know she misses me because when she phone she tells me. Our calls are more frequent, though often short and sweet, and simply reassure her that I’m here, but not there.
• Louise Chunn is the founder of the find-a-therapist directory, welldoing.org
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