The inevitable has happened. On Friday evening my mum lost her battle with cancer. The past three weeks have been really tough on her and on my whole family. As I sit here trying to wrap my head around the new reality in which I find myself, with my mother, confidante, and biggest fan and supporter gone, the dominant feeling is relief. Relief that she’s no longer suffering and struggling, relief that she’s no longer losing her independence, her health, her vigour, all those things she prized and were such a big part of who she was. I’m sure the grief will strike later, but right now I feel relief, not just for my mum, but also for everyone in my family, all of whom have been living these past few weeks with the dread expectation that the centre and linchpin of our family would soon be gone. My mum is at peace now, her children, her husband -my dad – her grandchildren, great grandchildren, and her sister and brother are bereft and lost.
My mum never let her cancer diagnosis get her down. She was diagnosed with ocular melanoma early in 2023, a particularly aggressive type of cancer which does not respond to chemotherapy. She was determined to fight it, determined not to let it stop her living her life. She was always a formidable woman, and she resolved to face down the cancer with the sheer force of her personality. For the first couple of years she succeeded, and succeeded in style, even after the cancer cost her her left eye. But the surgery and radiotherapy did not succeed in halting the spread of the cancer and she underwent a course of immunotherapy. Unfortunately she had a very bad reaction to the immunotherapy drugs, which caused her to suffer inflammation of her brain and internal organs. Just before Christmas 2023 we thought that she was going to die. We were called to the hospital twice because they thought the end was approaching, but my mum defied all expectations and pulled through.
Even though the immunotherapy almost killed her, it did work, and succeeded in shrinking the lesions and slowing down their spread. My mum sailed on regardless. She was always a formidable woman, a force of nature. Her own mother died young – I was only 6 months old when my grandmother died so don’t remember her – and my mum stepped in to look after her younger siblings, who always saw her as much as their other mum as their big sister. The four of them remained tight knit and all of them looked to Martha for support and love, which she always gave in abundance.
My mum had four kids in the space of five years (I’m the second) but decided when she was pregnant with her fourth, my younger sister, that being a stay at home housewife was not for her. With three kids under 5 in tow and pregnant with her fourth, she went to night school and got the O grades and Highers she needed to study for a qualification as a primary school teacher. She had a long and successful career in teaching, eventually becoming a deputy head, she never wanted to become a headmistress. Throughout her career, she touched the lives of hundreds of kids who knew that Mrs Mosson was not to be messed with. But to me, she was just my mum, and she fiercely defended and protected me, like the time when I was assaulted by a PE teacher in secondary school, and she marched into the head’s office demanding that the teacher apologise and that he was to be kept well away from me in future.
She had an unremittingly positive outlook on life, always seeing some good in any situation. You could give that woman a bag of shite and she’d say: “Oh that will be useful to fertilise the garden!” I’m not going to lie, it could get wearing at times, but you could always rely on my mum to make you realise that nothing was ever as bad as you feared it might be.
My mum was a huge supporter of independence, and now she joins the ranks of those who believed that a better Scotland is possible but who didn’t live to see it.
Our family now has lost its centre, the warming and nurturing star around whom we all revolved. Life will never be the same any more. I’ll miss her. I’ll miss speaking to her every other day, I’ll miss her telling me not to worry when things get me down. I’ll miss her smile and her sense of humour.
I’m going to step away from the blog and The National for a couple of weeks, to allow myself to grieve and to come to grips with this new life without my mum.
Martha Mosson (née McDonnell) 18 September 1939 to 20 June 2025
