On the morning of Wednesday 1st January 2025 my mother was found to have passed away by her partner, Ron Hirst, who lived in the flat next door. She had been increasingly unwell for several years, and the causes were entirely natural, but it still came as something of a shock to all the family. Her funeral was on Thursday 23rd January, at the East Lancs Crematorium, Radcliffe with about 40 friends and family in attendance. Donations were taken for the MS Society and what follows here is the eulogy that I wrote and delivered and tributes from friends and family.

Eulogy for Mam
Lorraine Estelle Fitton (née Lord)
5th June 1944 to 1st January 2025

When I was working out what to say in this eulogy I was struck by a particular quality that my mam had, that I hadn’t really paid much attention to before – her ability to deal with things by reconciling contradictions and, through that, to transcend her limitations.

Okay, that’s a lot of big words, so I’ll give an example
Most people know how small she was – especially getting older and losing that vital half inch that made her bigger than 4’9” – but after spending five minutes in her company that sense of size would disappear and she would become a large person who could command a room, should she want to.  There have been many times that I’ve completely overlooked a tiny, grey-haired woman walking towards me in Bury town centre, and not realised it was my mam until she spoke.
She was so big that I regularly forgot how small she was.

Similar things could be said of her upbringing, which was not easy by anybody’s standards.
She lived in a total of 20 different addresses – a couple of them twice – which, frankly, has got to be some kind of record.  She’d lived in eleven places by the time she was seventeen, a further five with growing children of her own, and 6 more after we’d grown up and left.  Yet, as an adult and a parent, she managed to create a home environment for myself and my sister that was secure, safe and reliable.  And really tidy.

Lorriane (or Mam, Loz, nana Loz) was born on D-Day, 1944 in a caravan on Dean Street in Radcliffe – that’s literally what it says on her birth certificate, “Caravan, Dean Street” – which sounded quite romantic when I was a kid.  It wasn’t.  It was one step up from the workhouse, in her grandparents’ woodyard, and only happened because grandad had an uncharacteristic fit of conscience and bought the caravan.
She grew up witnessing poverty, hardness and volatile relationships all around her.  There was love, and her mother Maureen, aunty Kath and uncle Wilf were always there, but the rest of the extended family weren’t always quite so steady.  Her relationship with her father, Terry, was particularly strained and never really resolved in any productive way.

There was also a life-threatening situation in 1951 when she spent her seventh birthday in hospital with meningitis, which she just about survived but which left her permanently deaf in one ear.
And later there were siblings, Christopher when she was eight years old and Aleta when she was nearly twelve.  As the oldest sibling by quite some distance she, of course, had babysitting responsibilities on top her schoolwork.

It strikes me that growing up like that would lead to one of two results, either you’re permanently damaged psychologically, or you quickly grow some kind of protective shell.  In her case, she grew a shell.
But, to stretch the analogy a little further, it wasn’t a rough, spikey shell grown to keep people at a distance, it was shiny and pretty and attracted people – people really liked my mother – but it still protected what was going on inside, and very few people ever witnessed that.

The one who did was my dad.  They met in 1959, in the latest trendy hang-out for teenagers – a milk bar.  It was called Brown’s and was on Mellor Street, which sadly doesn’t exist any more.  She was 15 and he was 17 and living a totally different kind of life with his adopted parents, Harold and Fanny, in Park Street – people whom, to her, seemed weirdly old-fashioned, but also cosy and welcoming and, above all, steady.  Through them she gained another extended family in the form of John’s natural parents, Jim and Alice, and all his siblings and cousins.

A massive drama occurred in 1961, the time when the “ten-pound poms” were encouraged to emigrate to Australia with offers of financial help and a fabulous new life.  Maureen and Terry wanted to go.  Lorraine didn’t.  She was in love.  Unfortunately, she was also only seventeen.  It took some work and no small amount of money, but the answer came when Harold effectively adopted Lorraine by making her a ward of court and giving permission for her and John to marry.
They even got their pictures in the paper.

They lived with Fanny and Harold for two years before moving to their first, weirdly shaped, little house on Bright Street.  This was where both I and my sister, Justine were born.  However, I wasn’t the first and Justine wasn’t the second.  The first was called Janice, who was stillborn with hydro-encephalitis, the second was miscarried before being named, the third was me, the fourth was Justine’s miscarried twin and the fifth was Justine. 
All this happened between the ages of 19 and 26, and I wonder if I’d have had the emotional maturity to deal with so much at such a young age.  But, deal with it she did.  She dealt with things.

It was also around this time that her dislike of religion came to a head.  Religion had never really made any sense to her, but old ladies saying “It’s God’s will” in an attempt to comfort her over the death of a baby was the last straw.  I can see her point.

Family life, from my point of view as a child, seemed to involve a lot of building work as we regularly moved from one nice house to a dilapidated house and turned it slowly into a much nicer one.  We never seemed to have much in the way of spare money but we never went without.  She hand-made my first school uniform because we couldn’t afford the ones in the shops, but proper meals were always on the table at precise meal times and the house was always immaculate, even when she had a job of her own.  I think the point I’m making here is that, despite whatever chaos was happening, I grew up in the absolute certainty that my mother was always there.

It was in 1986, at the age of 42 and after a lot of tests and a couple of years feeling increasingly wobbly that she was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
That’s pretty big, but somehow she learned to manage it.  She dealt with it.  It was six years before she was registered disabled and another four before she retired on invalidity benefit, and all that while dealing with elderly relatives and grown-up children.  My dad retired three years later and became her official carer a year after.

And, there’s another contradiction that she reconciled.  Dad was, really, no healthier than she was and, even though he was officially her carer, the care soon became reciprocal.  She enjoyed retirement, though.  They took weekend trips all over the country, first with my dad driving and, later, on coaches, and she was always the one to make the final decisions about when, where and how much to pay.
As dad got older and sicker with heart problems and the beginnings of Parkinsons, she very much became his carer, despite the limitations of her own condition, and it’s interesting to note that while her shell didn’t let in a lot of vulnerability, it also didn’t stop love and compassion from coming out.  She dealt with it, like she dealt with Justine’s death of cancer in 2015 and dad’s eventual death from Parkinsons complications in 2020.  Some might have accused her of being hard for coping so stoically and efficiently.  She wasn’t, she was practical and realistic.

In the last couple of years, and may we all be this fortunate, mam even managed to find love and companionship again in the shape of Ron, her “fella in the cellar” as she called him.  They didn’t live together, which was probably very wise, but they did build a deep and meaningful partnership in the two years or so that they had together.

I’m going to finish with a poem, now, and it’s one of mine. 
In Judaism it’s quite usual to say, “May her memory be for a blessing” and I like that.  It doesn’t rely on God or an afterlife, or any of those other things she didn’t believe in.  It simply says, may thinking of this person bring you a feeling of warmth and comfort.  So, with that in mind I’d like to offer, as a memory, this poem that I wrote two years ago. 

It’s called Four-Foot-Nine and Fierce.

How are you still kind and strong
Like the lee of a wall in the height of a storm
When everything has gone so wrong?

Your tale should be a depressing song
A world of illness near since you were born
But I see you face life kind and strong.

The deaths of children, before long
Should leave a heart dry and torn
From everything that went so wrong.

From a diagnosis lived with overlong
Of multiple sclerosis drawn
How are you still kind and strong?

You fought the battle that Parkinson’s had brung
To a husband whose mind was worn
Away.  Dealt with everything that went so wrong.

You could be hard and angry when you were young
But age and pain must have shaped your form
Through everything that has gone so wrong
To a person who is kind and strong.

Tributes

My earliest memory:
Lorraine was left to look after me, when I was about four years old.  I had a wobbly tooth, so she thought she would help it along.  She tied a piece of cotton to the tooth and the other end to the door handle, and said, “Stay there”. 
She shut the door and the tooth shot out.  OUCH!
This was all before the upset of emigrating, and the house was unhappy and full of arguments.
She was my big sister and, as the years went by she became my big little sister, and the age gap got smaller.  I will miss her.
Aleta, sister

I’ll save talking about her as a person for the people who knew her more intimately than me. I’m sure my dad has already covered that beautifully. When asked to bring an image of Lorraine to mind, only one thing comes forward. Only one thing possibly could. It’s Nana Loz, it’s myself, it’s Grandad John, it’s Mum, Dad and Bee, sitting in an interchangeable flat with cups of tea and coffee at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning.
On the 16th January as I write this, my dad has just told me that Loz lived at twenty distinct addresses throughout her life. So interchangeable is probably the perfect description. 
But the flats, bungalows and caravans don’t matter. This meeting was a tradition. It was regular, it might have been the most consistent weekly event of my entire life. I hardly ever saw Loz in any other setting. Nana Loz was Sunday morning.
For years of my life I would sit in one of three chairs, sip tea and listen to her talk about her week. She would update us on the lives of extended family remembers I would pretend to know and we would give her our update too. As the appointed matriarch of the family, all news went through her. You wanted gossip, you went to Nana Loz.
Over the years, things would change. Interchangeable flats, furniture, the loss of Grandad John. Eventually I would start making the drinks and Loz would start needing an oxygen machine, but the tradition stayed the same.
Lorraine, to me, was as much an institution as a person. A tradition and a commitment, the centre of a network bigger than she might even have known. This is how she was presented to me from a young age. The centre of a loose cobweb labelled ‘Fitton’ which will never be quite as stable again with its centrepiece taken away.
Or, well… I suppose that’s up to all of us. I was out in Manchester yesterday with Bee, helping them carry an IKEA table back to their shared house, cats eagerly awaiting their return, and they said something that stuck with me. They want to start visiting regularly on Sunday mornings, effectively taking over the tradition for a time. It won’t be as regular, we both have jobs that sometimes require us to work Sundays, but there’s an understanding there of what it means. Normally, I’m against tradition for tradition’s sake, but I’m happy to accept this one until it has to change again. The institution of Nana Loz continues long after she leaves, and her legacy is felt everywhere.
Rowan, grandson

We first met when we were both 16,  I have seen her every week for 61 years and will miss her sorely, even our chats on the phone.  She was a strong lady and I loved her dearly.
Dorothy, friend

A Final Word from Seán
This, last, section contains a poem which is not really appropriate for a funeral, a eulogy or a tribute – it’s quite intense and contains some swearwords – but I feel that it’s important to share because of the circumstances of its writing.

I wrote this poem in the week between Christmas 2024 and the following New Year, at a time that my mother was in and out of hospital.  It’s based very closely on Alan Ginsberg’s famous 1956 poem, Howl and, consequently, is about several people all mixed up together.  On of the main characters, though, is my mother, and the poem is dedicated to her in the text.  Look for her initials, L.E.F.
I finished the poem (which is presented here unedited) on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2024.  The following morning my mother was found to have died, unexpectedly but of natural causes, at some time in the early hours of New Year’s Day. 

It’s called Howl for the Elderly

I saw the clearest minds and the strongest bodies of my childhood brought to low greyness by years that settled like dusty crows on their shoulders

Those who stood solid as beech trees we could climb, and smaller like L.E.F. the dedicated in this poem

Who shocked by telling me to fuck off when I offered to pay for coffee at Manchester Airport

Who listened to Demis Roussos singing Forever and Ever on repeat and watched Yul Brynner in The King and I and fancied both of them

Who blu-tacked children’s paintings on the wall beside the fridge and encouraged the painting of more

Who played charity football in red knickerbockers and tried to learn Urdu but never got past Aap ka nam kia hai?

Who were the model of what beauty looked like, and that beauty had skin the colour of milky coffee and black freckles

Who taught themselves to play keyboards because their pianist was crap and made their songs sound bad

Who I hear daily in my own voice, and who called the dog the Hound of the Bastardvilles

Who stole the top from the rice pudding and spoke in perfect bilingual dialect

Who threw a sherry bottle at John but missed leaving a crescent moon in the anaglypta chimney breast that he refused to fill

Who was and used to be and used to be and used to be and used to be

Who got drunk and poured boiling water on the floor narrowly missing his stockinged feet as well as the tea cup

Who could make anything out of wood as long as it didn’t have to look pretty and only used two screws to attach hinges and door handles

Who saw teddy boys, mods and rockers, glam rock glitterers, punks and new romantics and never became any one of them but loved to look at Whitby goths

Who might or might not have had affairs or wild swinger nights or drunken sexual adventures but would never admit anything beyond the vaguest hints

Who were locked up in Strangeways
Who were prison guards in Strangeways

Who ate without money, who clothed without money, who provided without money, who denied without money

Who met siblings and siblings and siblings and cousins and cousins at gatherings for weddings, christenings and funerals, and funerals became more common

Whose Austin Mini burned on Eton Hill Road

Who loved the poems of Robert Burns
Who couldn’t understand the poems of Robert Burns and preferred Star Trek and Space Precinct

I won’t bump into you outside WH Smith or spot you on the Metrolink getting off at Market Street because your legs will no longer carry you that far

I will see you in your flat in your chair where you will sit in your chair and eat in your chair and speak in your chair and breath in your chair and watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers in your chair and sleep in your chair and be fearful and smaller than ever in your chair

I will watch the dusty crows gather on your shoulders and your hands and your words and know that I can’t scare them away