My mother started smoking when she was 14 or so, because “the movies made it look so glamorous.” Or so she told us in later years.

While she tried to quit, and did quit, several times over the years, she always started smoking again. It wasn’t till she had a stroke at age 69 that she finally gave it up forever.

I always thought that if she were going to get lung cancer it would have happened long ago, but I was wrong. She was just diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, and it seems that her remaining time with us will be measured in months.

Mom never knew her father. My grandmother bravely had her and raised her as a single parent in times when such things were Not Done. Her father was much older than her mother and married to someone else. He saw her only a few times when she was a baby and she has no memories of him whatsoever. He was never involved in her life.

A few years ago she said that she’d like to at least know what he looked like. So I started browsing the internet, looking for photos. He had a title, and he was a big muckety-muck at a respected British institution, so I thought surely there would be a picture of him floating around somewhere, but there wasn’t, at least not one that I could find.

Yesterday, through a happy set of circumstances and through the kindness of someone I only just “met” via email, I managed to obtain a photo, print it out and send it to my mother.

So at least there is that, to brighten up some otherwise gloomy times.

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