My mother wouldn't let death come between her and fashion

My mum was a beauty. 'One of Ireland's great beauties,' a colleague of mine told me once. And the tone she used was one of simple fact.

Mum was the oldest in her family. She was a lawyer, like her father before her. And she was a beauty. In photographs, there
it is. The magnificent bone structure, the great head of hair and the long elegant neck, and always, throughout the years, the red lipstick.

In many of the pictures we found in her house after she died, she's looking away from the camera with a hint of wistfulness, as if she's thinking about all the lives she could have led but didn't. In other photographs, she's looking down, an allusion to some sadness that could not be revealed. Self-conscious about her imperfect teeth, she was careful not to smile for the camera. She was a film star without ever being in a film.

Mum wore her beauty like a great cloak that trailed behind her everywhere she went. Whether she was stalking my brother and me around the pool at the Sheraton Hotel in Rio in her swimsuit and her 6in heels (we lived in Rio for a time in the 1970s), or walking Sandymount Strand in Dublin in her ostrich-feather jacket and wellies, her beauty was her armour against the world.

And it never let her down. When she got sick it was the lipstick and rollers that were the weapons she chose to brandish against the inevitability of her death.

'I don't mind,' she told me one day in the hospital. 'I really don't.' And I believed her. She was battle-weary by then, worn down by three decades fending off one cancer after another. 'I don't mind,' she said, 'as long as I don't lose my hair.'

Mum had formidable hair - great dollops of it that turned to frizz at the faintest hint of rain. And taming that hair was a lifelong battle that she fought with a clatter of ever more complicated accoutrements. The hair , it was called. I won't be able to come to lunch today - I have to do the hair.

When she was diagnosed with her final illness there was more talk of the hair than there was of dying. All of her energies were focused on maintaining her beauty regime. The thought of her roots growing out was, to her, a fate far worse than death.

One of her chief amusements in the hospital was to watch the ladies on the golf course outside her window. She would lie imperiously on top of the covers, her satin nightdress pulled up past her thighs to show off the full length of her glorious legs, and she would peer down at the comings and goings below.

'I'd prefer to be in my situation than theirs,' she would say. And she was deadly serious. Mum may have had terminal cancer. She may have had only months to live. But she was wearing a teal La Perla nightdress. She had her toenails painted red and her hair set into soft waves, and not for the world would she have changed places with those robust women descending on the seventh hole in their three-quarter-length trousers and their sun visors.

'Their time would be much better spent in the beautician,' she would say.

And then she would turn her attention to retouching her lipstick for the doctor. 'Too much leg?' she would ask him, as he came into her room. And he would peer at her, with the faintest twitch of a smile. 'I'm not sure the jaundice has entirely cleared up,' he would say. How he could tell, with all the fake tan, was a mystery to us.

'He's the best liver specialist in Ireland,' my sister told her. 'Well, that would be wonderful, darling,' she said, 'if I had a curable illness. But since I don't, I can't see what difference it makes.'

The day she was discharged she insisted on going straight to the Four Seasons for lunch. 'I'm dying,' she announced to the porter. 'But I'm planning on spending a lot of time here before I do.' She sank into a couch in the lounge and called for prosecco.

'Did your mother have any saints she was particularly fond of?' asked the priest as we prepared for her funeral.

'Father,' I said, 'my mother wasn't that kind of girl.'

This Is How It Ends, by Kathleen MacMahon, is available from Telegraph Books

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