Writing these farewell posts has always been a sad duty, but this was the hardest to date; I lost my mum on the 18th of May 2023.

With great sadness, I dutifully record and reflect on the loss of another member of the Jamison family, and the one closest to my heart. My mother, Isabell Jamison (nee Conway) was born on the 3rd of May 1946 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and died in the place she loved best, a stone’s throw from her childhood home and her favourite place in the world, her beloved Belfast. Mum died after a brief illness.

Mum’s funeral was held at the beautiful Roselawn cemetery and crematorium at Crossnacreevy, on the southern outskirts of Belfast. Already buried there are my paternal grandparents and several aunts and uncles. Mum was cremated, and my sister and I will share her ashes. I’m planning a road trip in the spring to scatter her ashes in some of her favourite places along the Antrim and Down Coast roads.

When I updated my Ancestry.co.uk family tree, it provided some statistics about mum; she was one of 592 children born in Belfast in 1946, a product of the post-war baby boom; and during her lifetime, people from Northern Ireland with her surname had, on average, two children, which was the case with mum.

I saw mum just before she died, and although it was incredibly difficult to see her so ill, I know she was where she wanted to be. Every aspect of that trip and her funeral was incredibly nostalgic, and I was almost overwhelmed with memories, good and not-so-good, of my childhood in Belfast, and of my mother and all our family’s associations with Northern Ireland. I’ll always be bewitched and intrigued by Northern Ireland, especially County Antrim and of course, Belfast; it was my mum’s love of her home country and its history that sparked my own deep connection with Ulster.

I took the header picture on the ferry home as we pulled out of the Belfast Victoria docks; Belfast has one less character now, and many will miss and mourn her, but will also recall her determination to overcome adversity, single-mindedness, courage, and sense of humour. Sleep well, mum, reunited now with my dad, her mum and dad, and her younger sister.

Rock Me To Sleep by Elizabeth Akers Allen – Poetry Foundation

Isabell Jamison, nee Conway–3rd May 1946 – 18th May 2023