Biddy Nuttgens

I am Nick's mother.

I've spent hours each day thinking of him, and a strange picture model of his life has established itself in my mind. It looks Iike an extended rectangle, enclosed by two curved bookends – which represent those two inevitable events in all our lives: our birth and our death.

The rectangle itself is absolutely crammed with sqiggles and symbols representing everything that made up Nick's diverse life - his character, his feelings, his thoughts, everything that's ever happened to him, his succeses and what he saw as his failures. Highlights and lowlights – everything. Nick's life was diverse. He was not a person who pursued a single career or interest, climbing up the ladder aiming for what the wicked fox persuades Pinocchio to aim for: "lights, 12 feet high. " Nick's interests have always overflowed his immediate concerns to pursue connections, always working towards a holistic view of the world. How many jobs or causes was he involved in? When somebody asked me "What did your son do?" I was nonplussed. What should I say? Everything?

But I haven't mentioned something that was a theme running through every aspect of his life: other people. He kept in contact with people from all phases of his life, and even if they got separated for some years he could pick up, if they met up again, to ask them, "Oh , how did that operation your mother was waiting for go?" or "Did your sister decide to stay in Australia after all?" And if you think of it, that's why we're here today - not only to give our love and support to Jamie, but because at some time, or place, or job, or activity each of our lives have interacted with Nick's life. I found myself silenced by 3 separate letters I received: They said simply "Nick changed my life."

Oddly enough, I've found myself recently thinking about Birth. It must be an incredibly traumatic event for the baby, it happens to each of us, but none of us remembers a thing about it. I suppose a mother, especially with her first baby, comes nearest to sharing the experience.

Nick was born 3 weeks early, small and skinny and covered all over with soft down. When his father came to see him, the nurse brought out a large, howling bundle, red of face and hair, and Pat said, "That's not my baby. My wife says ours is so skinny his arms and legs look like twigs that have lain in the hedgerow right across the winter." Perhaps I used this image as a prophecy of how important nature was to be in his later life.

One day, I was watching him in his moses basket, frowning in his sleep and twitching and wriggling his nose. Suddenly his eyes shot wide open and he fixed me with a long intense stare, rather severe, as if he was trying to sum up what was that bulky thing blocking the light at the foot of his bed? I turned to my husband, raving about what an incredible thing we'd done, bringing a human being into the world. I think sometimes Pat thought I was quite batty: he said: "But you knew you were going to have a baby... ?" I said, "Yes, but I didn't know I was going to have a person."

I have been lucky to be with him at both his start and finish. I've been with several people within hours of their deaths but none so calm as Nick. He had made his decision and seemed to be moving gladly to death. I don't mean that he was desperate to end his life. He loved living and once told me that the 17 years he and Jamie had been together were the happiest years of his life. It wasn't just resignation – that's a very negative thing. Not even commitment – that's too legal. It was something about aiming for completion. In a sort of attempt to be with him as he was dying, I kept hunting for something that might express what I thought might be going on in his head, just as I had done as I watched him in the moses basket. All sorts of phrases tumbled around in my head. "There is a time for all things under heaven: a time to live and a time to die.' The title of a book by our friend Stan Barstow: THE RIGHT TRUE END.

And from a book I'd loved as a teenager over 70 years ago, a scene came back to me of a twelve-year-old boy coming home from what he said had been he most exciting day of his life, still high from the experience, but his body so exhausted he could hardly drag himself up the stairs. As he tumbled into bed, he stretched out between the sheets murmuring: "OH, GOOD bed!" Was it like that for Nick? Did he think, as he relaxed into the glorious freedom of painlessness: "Oh GOOD death"?

I think it was a very good death.