Christine Cooney – Tribute at Funeral
In May 1986, Edmund Cooney attended a drinks party in Skelton. He later said that across the room he saw a vision in white. That vision was my mother, Christine.
As a teenager, she was fit and quite sporty and captained the school’s hockey team. She became head girl of her school. I was going through some old family photos recently and came across some pictures taken of her when she was 18. She looked like a model - tall, slim and very attractive.
In fact, she was always an attractive woman who took care of her appearance choosing stylish clothes and matching colours carefully. She also used these same artistic talents on her great passion, her garden, as well as at Moorlands nature reserve where she was chair, in hobbies like flower arranging and brass rubbing in Norfolk churches.
Going into her late teens she embarked on the most adventurous phase of her life. First she spent some weeks working on a farm at Sleights in Yorkshire. It was here that she learnt from Mabel, the farmer’s wife, how to bake. We all benefited from her cakes over many years after that.
Then when she was 18 , she left home and went to live at the YWCA on Baker Street in London so that she could undertake a course in speech therapy at a college on Harley Street. She joined Young Friends at the Quaker meeting house on Euston Road.
It was at a Young Friends dance that my mother and father met. My father recounted how he was in a queue of six young men to dance with my mother and couldn’t believe his luck that she chose him.
In the early 1960s, Mum gave birth to me and then two years later Claire. Unfortunately in the same year as Claire’s birth, Mum’s father died and we moved house as a family. It was all too much and Mum had to go into a psychiatric hospital for several months to recover.
Claire and I recall our early years with great fondness. More than anybody, we both wanted to make our mother happy and to get her appreciation. We remember birthday parties playing pass the parcel to Beatles music, we remember all the cakes we ate, we remember some lovely family holidays.
At that time, our father introduced my mother to Zarita another speech therapist in York. Zarita became a life long friend of Mum’s. We also used to enjoy Zarita coming to baby sit and fluff up our pillows. Mum introduced Zarita to her brother Keith and it turns out that we weren’t the only ones in our family who liked their pillows to be fluffed. Soon, Zarita was our aunt.
I remember in the mid 1970s becoming frustrated with my mother and her inability to travel to other countries due to her suffering from agoraphobia for most of her life. In fact, she never left this country in her whole life. Nonetheless, she loved family holidays and instilled in us a great love for the Yorkshire Dales and the west coast of Scotland, both of which we visited many times.
My parents divorced in 1982 and Mum bought and did up a lovely old cottage on the Green in Skelton. She lived there for 38 years. Not only did she do wonderful things to her house but she developed her garden to be a thing of beauty. By now she was a real expert and put many unusual plants into her garden, knowing all the Latin names.
In May 1986 she met Edmund. They had a whirlwind romance and within just 3 months they got married. She had 13 years with Edmund which were amongst the happiest of her life. They travelled round the country on trips, often as part of the rhododendron group visiting various sites of interest.
I’m really pleased that Edmund’s two sons, Dan and Phil are here today.
Unfortunately, their relationship was all too brief and Edmund died in 1999.
She then went even more into her gardening and joined the team of volunteer gardeners at Beningborough Hall. She also took great pleasure in her family and particularly her two grandchildren, Richard and Peter – also here today. They remember her love of gardening too, her love of sport – particularly rugby, her phrase - spending a penny, doing jigsaws and crosswords – for instance, Granny is blank blank A blank blank Y.
She had long conversations with sister Vicky and with Keith and Zarita. She had many friends in the village too - John and Rhona, Rosie and Mark, Yonnie, Mary, Lena, Pauline, Molly, Peggy.
In 2004 she hurt her wrist in a fall. This took a long time to recover and whilst investigating this it was discovered that she had a nasty autoimmune condition called Sjogrens Syndrome. This went on to plague the rest of her life
To counter the Sjogrens, she took an increasing dose of steroids for the rest of her life. This plus her other conditions of Parkinsons, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and other things led to increasingly poor health.
After many years of care in her home from many people, particularly Dawn, she finally went into Lamel Beeches care home in February last year. This is on the site of the old Retreat Hospital where she had lived and been a patient 60 years earlier. The staff there are quite brilliant and superbly caring. But with the pandemic and despite many phone calls from us, it inevitably became a lonely existence for her.
Nonetheless, in the care home and latterly in hospital she remained so polite and good humoured with the nurses and carers. She was grateful to them all and still at times chortled at her own clumsiness for example.
Her health deteriorated quickly at the end and she died in hospital on February 16th.
That evening after I’d heard the news I was going through her emails unsubscribing her from mailing lists. I came across some photographs I’d taken that I’d sent her some days before – something I did regularly, always valuing her encouragement. I realised then that I still wanted to please her and to get her appreciation and that that would no longer be possible.
From Claire and me, goodbye Mum, we’ll miss you.
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