Why I was happy when my parents died:Ann Thwaite

Ann Thwaite: 'I myself have no fear of death, but I do fear a stroke and years of pain.'

Have you ever been asked to admit to the happiest moment in your life? I think it is supposed to be on your wedding day, or the moment you held your first-born child. It is the sort of question daughters are inclined to ask, and I remember shocking one of mine by suggesting that my happiest moment was when the examiner told me I had (at last) passed the driving test.

I have never before confessed that my happiest moments were in fact when I was told – 27 years apart – of the deaths of my parents. Let me explain. In late 1960, my father, who was only 60 and fit and healthy we thought, set out by ship from England for New Zealand, his native country. There was a book he needed to research and write, and my brother and his young family to visit on the other side of the world.

The plan was that my mother would spend Christmas with us in Richmond and later fly out to join him for a short holiday. On Christmas Eve there was a phone call. My father had had a devastating stroke on board ship, had been put ashore and was in hospital in Perth. He was never to walk or talk normally again. Certainly when my mother arrived in the Australian hospital, in a city where she knew no one, it was thought that he would soon die.

And how much better it would have been for everyone if he had. I have just been re-reading some of the letters my brother wrote to me during the painful years that followed. They were hard to read, but now I am myself in my 80th year I need to be reminded that death is not the worst thing. My father recovered sufficiently to be moved to a hospital in New Zealand and my mother sat by his bedside for most of the next two and half years, while, angry and resentful, he could swear at her, but say or do little else.