My phone was ringing this morning. One message was from Regan, to say that mum had collapsed this morning and the staff at the home had asked us to there right away. They suspected a heart attack.

I left right after breakfast and had barely been in the car five minutes when Regan called again to tell me that mum had died. It was a strange feeling, dissociated, calm, already thinking about the numerous things that now need to be done. I spent much of the remainder of the trip on the phone to a friend who I had told, earlier in the morning, about the first call from Regan.

At the home I went to mum's room and found Regan and Rachel there with mum. Greg was still at work, busily trying to rearrange his week so that he can take the rest of it off work. Mum was lying in the bed, her face yellow, still badly bruised. She reminded me immediately of dad, lying dead only a few metres away, exactly fourteen weeks ago.

Apparently the staff had woken mum and got her showered and dressed. She had been put to bed when she collapsed, but it was only ten or fifteen minutes later when she died. None of us got there in time.

My reaction this time was almost completely the opposite of how I felt when dad died. Back then, I just wanted to withdraw and think. This time, I wanted to get cracking, do what had to be done and not spend any time commiserating with myself. I left maybe half an hour later, sent some emails to Derek and our cousins, made an appointment with the undertakers (10am on Friday), and began collecting the information that will be required for the death certifcate. This time I am making sure there is no room for error, I've printed out all the details in exactly the format of the NSW death certificate, and I shall give the undertaker a copy of that.

I am quite prepared for the meeting. This time it is Greg who wants to keep out of the preparations. He said that as far as he is concerned, we can do an exact repeat of dad's funeral, and I am inclined to agree. I said to Rachel that if she wants to do more, that is fine, we just need to know what the differences are to be by Friday's meeting. It might behove us to decide early rather than at the last minute what the death notice should say.

My over-riding feelings are one part relief, two parts release. Numbness too, perhaps. I think it is a release for all of us. Mum may have been content most of the time, and cheerful for quite a lot of it, but we had the prospect of steadily worsening conditions, and constantly lowered expectations. We've been released from that now, and this overlays the realisation that we can now really start to sort things our, rather than constantly steeling ourselves for worse to come. The numbness is due to the fact that it still hasn't quite sunk in that dad is dead.

Dad's affairs are by no means resolved, and now a number of the processes that I had initiated are invalid, as they had involved the transfer of assets to mum. We now need to go back and do things differently, and now things are not quite so clear-cut, as there are four beneficiaries (my three siblings and I) instead of one.

It has been one hell of a year: putting first mum and then dad in the home, clearing the house, dealing with dad's death, its bureaucratic aftermath, and now with mum's. I went back to my blog entries for early January, just to see how things had changed since then. Back in January dad was plaguing me with telephone calls and I was constantly impatient with him. Back then, he was still compos mentis enough to suggest in his garbled way that we go out for lunch together. And we never did.