My mother tried very hard to die. She stopped eating – everything.  To avoid nagging from me and other carers she became sly at pretending to eat, or at devising reasonable excuses why she couldn't... just yet.  With such cunning that I often doubted her dementia.  

Eventually, we all stopped pretending and watched in horror as her body consumed all its remaining fat deposits – cheeks, chin, buttocks. Her stomach  hung like a hammock from her hip bones.

Sometimes Myra became so ill I’d think she was about to succeed in her deathwish. Seeing her agony and reading terror in her sunken eyes, I’d make calls to the doctor, take her to hospital for scans and tests, insist she took the prescribed pills. She railed at being ‘prodded and poked, carted about, bothered with’.  In hospital waiting rooms this dignified woman  became shockingly rude. I felt frustrated to the point of sullen fury and worse, like a traitor for trying to sabotage her plan.

My mother achieved her wish for death on April 11, 2019.  

On the first anniversary of her death I scattered her ashes in the garden she’d made. The camellia she nursed back to life was white with waxen blooms and her sulking clematis finally flowered. She'd also insisted on transplanting lily-of-the-valley.

—  It's invasive. And it smells of old ladies.
— ​It will remind you of me then. (She'd moved in  with us at at the time.)  

Unseasonally early, the lily-of-the-valley in that patch of garden sprouted by April 11, 2020.  Myra's great-grand daughter toddled about, poking at the rows of tiny, white bells on the plant. The day was fresh and sunny, full of peace and promise.