I was in Miami airport, on my way to New York to celebrate Felix’s twenty-ninth birthday. My other boys were meeting me there. We had a weekend filled with plans. David was heading to London to be with Domino for her final school speech day.

My phone rang.

It was my brother Ashley.

Our mother had fallen.

A serious fall. Were they right not to call an ambulance?

My mother had always been crystal clear about her wishes. She had absolutely no intention of ending her days in a hospital. Many years ago, she had signed a legal Do Not Resuscitate order and drawn up an Advance Decision, making it abundantly clear that she wanted no extraordinary measures taken to prolong her life. She had made her feelings known to family, doctors, and lawyers. Home was where she intended to stay.

Remember, this is the woman who, along with her sister, in their early eighties, went away on a cruise but not the fancy kind. They had to do the precautionary lifeboat drills along with all the other passengers: loud alarms, hustling through corridors, up onto the deck, finding your muster station, getting the life jacket over your recently “set” hair. The sisters looked at each other and agreed they would prefer just to stay in their cabins and go down with the ship rather than fight through that performance again.

“You’re doing exactly the right thing,” I told my brother.

I called a doctor we knew well, and the wheels of action immediately began to turn. Night nurses, painkillers, specialist beds, and carers all arrived to make my mother as comfortable as possible, with my brother managing it all.

“It’s the falls that get you in the end,” she told the doctor with a wry smile.

My mother possessed an extraordinary presence.

On first acquaintance, her warmth, wit and wisdom, enhanced by that rich, beautiful voice, revealed the legendary charm by which she lived and, indeed, by which she died.

When my cousin Tim came to see her, she made him laugh by reminding him of Mrs Thatcher visiting an old people’s home and stopping beside a patient’s bed.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

The patient looked at her kindly and said, “No, dear, but if you ask Matron, she’ll tell you.”

A few days after her fall, my mother woke one morning and said to my brother and me, “I apologise for the unconscionable amount of time I’m taking to die,” a reference to King Charles II, who famously said the same thing on his deathbed.

“But I’m very glad I don’t have the Privy Council here,” she continued.

But she did have, every day for ten days, a member of the family come to see her. They came to sit beside her, to hold her hand, to tell her how much they loved her. And she, in turn, would tell them one of her memories, or one of her amusing anecdotes. She was still, even then, the hostess in her own room.

Another niece came, and my mother remembered another story that made us laugh.

A famously eccentric, socially unfiltered wife of one of Queen Victoria’s prime ministers had arrived at a court event dressed in a manner not quite suited to royal expectation. One of the ladies-in-waiting noticed, with horror, that she had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders.

“Oh, you know how much Her Majesty dislikes shawls,” she whispered. “May I take it from you?”

“Shawl? Shawl?” said the Prime Minister’s wife, looking surprised. “Oh. That’s where I’ve put my skirt.”

There was one moment when the special air mattress my mother had been given to make her more comfortable began to leak. In a panic, we called the company, and they arrived with a couple of strong, heavily tattooed, slightly dubious-looking men. Soon the room was full: the carers, the new nurse, the mattress men, my brother, my son, my husband and me, all gathered around the bed to help move my mother while the mattress was mended.

My mother looked up and said, “Can I be introduced to everyone?”

Even at the edge of life, manners had not deserted her.

She made the hefty men laugh when she also said, “Has anyone been eating my Toblerone?” which seemed an entirely reasonable question to all of us.

One afternoon, after a very long day and another sleepless night, I went for a walk, leaving her with her much-adored carer, Alison. I walked through the gardens she loved so much, under the full green canopy of summer leaves, while the deer and muntjacs moved quietly through the grass, and red kites circled and soared in the summer sky above, their wings tilting silently on the warm air, entirely untroubled by human sorrow.

By then my mother was fading. When I came back, I leaned over her bed and whispered in her ear, “What have you been up to since I was gone?”

Suddenly her eyes opened.

“I’m wondering the same thing,” she said.

Her hairdresser of nearly forty years, from the little local town, came to say goodbye. Now she was asleep most of the time. He did not linger, only long enough to mutter that the new hairdresser, who had taken over since his retirement, was NOT doing a good job. He was particularly disapproving of her hair colour.

On the Friday morning, just two weeks after her fall, I went down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While the kettle boiled, I stepped outside the quiet house and wandered a little way down the drive. Out of the stillness, from one of the great oak trees, a large white owl appeared and took flight, moving across the fields into the sunshine. I turned back to the house, went straight upstairs, and found that my mother had taken her last breath.

How threadbare language feels when faced with the deepest sorrow. How meagre words are when trying to convey the desolation, the emptiness at the heart that I feel now my mother is gone.

But there is comfort, too, in knowing that her ending was exactly as she would have wished: at home, held in love, and spared everything she had so clearly refused.