Tried by different ordeals, my mother’s understated courage is more steadfast than mine and more esoteric that that of her forefathers.

Pregnant as an unmarried teenager in the 1950s, she had given her daughter away for adoption. The end of both her marriages, and loss of her parents, her only sister, and her own childhood home she endured with stoic resilience. There were sometimes private tears at home when she had lost a patient or seen them undergo particular suffering, but she would fast recover with altruistic resolve.

Ultimately an independent-minded woman, mother of three children, she has confronted her own restlessness and discovered great peace of mind at 67, living in Somerset in the company of her lurcher and terrier. She loves life. She doesn’t want to die.

And I adore her. A source of constant intrigue and enchantment, I find her the funniest, the most companionable, person I have ever met. Across the years and in spite of the time I have spent away, at boarding school, in the Army, or as a correspondent, my mother has become my greatest friend.

We have a complex yet tested relationship that has traversed many difficulties including my six-year heroin affair and the longer absences I have spent in wars. There are subjects that she, my younger sister Natasha and I hold private, but our closeness has left no unexamined source of resentment. In the climate of the time I believe us to be a very sane and functional family of three. Her death is something I hope I never have to face. Indeed, it is my dread.

Our estranged relationship painfully unresolved, my father died of cancer in 1994. The war reporter Kurt Schork, my friend, mentor, the father I never had, was killed four years ago. The job has taken some good friends. I have had enough bereavement. I don’t want to face it again. Narcissistically, at times I wonder at the thought of a surprise, sudden and instantly fatal bullet on a job one day (nothing protracted — I don’t know how well I could face the moment), a one shot to clear the tray marked “pending pain”. Enough sorrow. Not my mother.

THERE is nothing to suggest death on my return home from Iraq though. Far from it. A GP lazily suggests neuralgia, assuaging our fears but not my mother’s pain, for which he prescribes ineffectual non-prescription tablets. She sees him a number of times — the diagnosis never alludes to something more ominous.

By late autumn the pain attacks get worse, more frequent and longer in duration. She never cries but the pain makes her tremble as she fights it. I see her shake like a little leaf. With a naive faith in the medical profession we do what we can. It’s neuralgia after all and, though excruciatingly painful, neuralgia won’t kill her, right?

In November the sight in her right eye suddenly blurs and fades in the space of a few days. She wears a black patch similar to that worn by her decorated grandfather. Some neuralgia. We bypass the GP and arrange for specialist tests.

Meantime, to ease her discomfort I buy her St John’s wort tablets and bath oils. They are still in the medicine cabinet now. I can’t decide whether to throw them away or stuff them down the GP’s throat as a prelude to smashing his head through the nearest window.

So Christmas isn’t great. As one of life’s more twisted treats, my 18-month-old marriage is coincidentally taking its last cartwheel down the runway, victim of too much fighting and too little empathy: a fistful of dust in place of love and a blackboard screech where once was whispered entreaty.

“IT IS CANCER,” a man in a grey suit tells us in the same way one says “rain today”. Jesus, couldn’t he even have managed “Sorry, it’s cancer”? In an instant the words throw my world into crisis. I expect Nasa to call in its space missions, factory sirens to wail across the planet, the World Health Organisation to announce a crisis summit — yet the man in the grey suit leaves the room and there is silence. My mother and I walk out of Poole hospital where the tests have revealed a small tumour at the edge of her brain.