Here is my eulogy I gave at the funeral:
Phyllis Young
Phyllis, my mother is no longer with us. On Friday 29th January, as I sat by her side, she quietly,… peacefully.. slipped away, in a calm painless death, leaving behind a legacy of 3 children, 6 grandchildren, many friends, and host of memories.
Now is the right time to share some of these memories, and to weep a little for what we have lost, but also to enjoy those bittersweet memories of Phyllis, my mother.
Mum had lots of friends and was good at keeping up with them. She made many life- long friends when she went to London in 1947. There she worked as a typist in the Cabinet Office and lived in Rutland Gate, near the Albert Hall. She joined an amateur dramatic society and enjoyed acting out plays, especially those of George Bernard Shaw. Phyllis kept up with the people she met for 64 years, and it was at Rutland Gate that she first met Frank, and they were married in 1953.
She made good friends living in Surrey, Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells, Frant and Wavertree Court, Unfortunately, when she moved to the care home in Amherst Court, even though she was really well cared for, her blindness and deafness prevented her from making new friends. I remember one of the few things she really enjoyed was speaking to her old friends on the phone. This had to happen during my visits, so I could help Phyllis use the phone as her eyes were so bad.
Mum also liked to organise big get-togethers, to celebrate life’s milestones, wedding anniversaries, birthdays, or just reunions. She loved planning for and looking forward to these events. The more people she could get together, the better.
She also loved organising holidays: sometimes to visit friends who had moved abroad and often unaccompanied, she visited New Zealand, Australia, Norway and especially the USA to visit her sister Marie.
Mum was very single-minded about organizing these events, as she was about many other things. She would have a vision of what she wanted, and the way she would like things to go, and doggedly organize it through until the end, ensuring things happened the way she wanted.
It was a massive disappointment to all of us, that, because of the COVID lockdown, she was unable to celebrate her 90th Birthday with the party she had looked forward to and planned for many months.
Until near the end, mum maintained a good memory, especially for those things that had happened in her early childhood, her times at school and her time in London. At her reunions she would impress her friends with memories of events that they had nearly forgotten and bring a smile of recollection back to their faces.
Phyllis always liked to have the best of everything, especially things to do with cooking and eating, she liked the nicest cuts of meat, cooked to perfection served on the best dinner plates she could find. I remember her joy when I was able to take her and her sister Marie to tea at the Ritz. Alongside my Dad, Mum was a very good cook, producing excellent roast dinners, quiche Lorraine and fruit cakes.
They say grandchildren are the joy of old age. This was certainly true for Phyllis. I remember how Phyllis loved her grandchildren and was always delighted to see them. She proudly followed them around with a camera photographing them and (whenever she could) sneaked off with them to show them to her neighbours.
So that was Phyllis, my mother, a strong-willed woman who knew what she wanted, and followed through until she got it, but, as many of you have told me, a real character, and a woman with a heart of gold.
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