LIZ NICHOLLS pays tribute to JR staff who were there as her mother passed away

Death is the ultimate taboo. We’re hard-wired for survival, of course, to forget our mortality so that we can get on with living. So when confronted with death, our tiny minds react in ways that surprise us.

At these moments it’s the remarkable people working at the precipice who pick up the pieces.

There are big figures bandied around about the NHS. It’s a political hot potato always at risk of being mashed as it is passed from hand to hand.

In this county, the GP-led Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group, which took over from the primary care trust after government reforms (or meddling, depending on your political stance) in April, is in the tortuous process of making £25m savings to meet its £650m budget this year.

I do not envy these doctors or wish to tell them where the axe should fall. But I do have the highest, heartfelt admiration, now, for Oxford’s own John Radcliffe Hospital.

It’s a virtual city of comings and goings, lit up and ready for the most dramatic peaks of life, death and everything in between.

And the much-overlooked commodity that runs it is one that can’t be quantified or made into a pie chart. It’s kindness. Our mother — Angela — died on the 5F ward at 4.04am on October 3.

A relatively young 61, in the last few days of her life, she was frail, confused and a million miles away from the fun-loving and glamorous woman of her youth. From this stressful summer onwards, when she was admitted to the JR with liver damage and various other health complications that are the occupational hazards of a colourful life, it was the one-to-one kindness of the nurses especially that made a difference.

Whether it was helping her put her make-up on, laughing at her rude jokes or efficiently coping with the daily grind of physical care she needed, theirs was a humbling service of kindness.

And, as her body battled hard to bounce back to health and she lay helpless, wired up to bleeping machines and drips, they were there to comfort, stroke a fragile hand, make tea and try to help all the visitors make sense of an impossible situation.

Of course, thousands of people die every day, and we all die, but each bereavement is such an acute tsunami of emotions to navigate.

And that’s where the specialists come into their own. The bereavement officers at the JR are the first port of call.

Their role is to help relatives deal with the frantic port-mortem to-do list (collecting death certificates, possessions, answers) that occupies so much time and energy at a time when you have neither. And then it’s down to the funeral directors to help with the next practical onslaught. In a hushed and cosy room in Headington (at SR Childs Funeral Directors) we were guided to make decisions on all the details from the tiny to the terrifically difficult.

Thanks to the skill of Joy and the other funeral directors, this too became a positive experience, talking about what the deceased would have liked and what she would have found ridiculous, with Joy asking us gently about Angela and buffering, comfortingly, between the past and the present tense. Mum was non-religious and unconventional, and these days there is a funeral to cater for all beliefs (or a lack of them), including one with Amy Winehouse, laughter, a humanist officiant (the wonderful Ann Day) and plenty of purple at Oxford Crematorium.

Mum, who was originally from Morecambe Bay and went up to Oxford to study French at St Hugh’s in the 1970s, loved Oxford.

She loved the spires, the pubs, the city’s sparkling labyrinth of intellectual and eccentric personalities. The biggest thank you I have ever had to give is the one all the people who helped us give her the send-off she deserved.