I'm raising money in memory of my mum who died of breast cancer when I was 13, and my sister Katie just 4. I suppose it should all go into a benevolent fund for my dad who somehow managed to blindly navigate the minefield of bringing up two girls. Unfortunately the Charity Commission take a ludicrously myopic view of that.

Tradition has it that I should do Race for Life or some similar event, but seeing the volume of public donations received by Cancer Research UK made me feel I should find an equally deserving but less well supported cause.

I also want to let other people know that to fundraise in someone's memory, you can choose any charity that resonates with you. You don't have to raise money for research into whatever killed them, you can do it for a cause that reflects what you loved about them. 

My mum was a nurse. She was good at it because she really bloody loved her patients. Her patients were mostly older people who needed leg ulcers or bed sores dressing. That sounds grim, right? But it wasn't because she really cared about them and was genuinely interested in gabbing away with them.

 I'd often encounter her patients in the street when they came over to say hello. They'd know me because they'd seen pictures of me when they'd been chatting to my mum. She'd come home with bags of sweets that patients had brought in for me. She had this kind of friendship with people is because she actually cared about them and took an interest in what was going on in their lives.  

Anyway, the reason I'm raising money for Mind is because I've seen the people there show the same kindness and compassion that she did. That ability to see a person not a merely patient or diagnosis.

Caring professions sound insurmountably difficult to me. I'm raising money for a charity that reflects one of the things I really loved about my mum. It's not something I can do, but it's a great thing to aspire to. 

Thank you for reading. 

Footnote: 

Just to give you a more rounded picture of my mum; though an ostensibly danity woman, she also really liked eating until she couldn't move, drinking Jameson's until she couldn't speak, and arguing about politics with the more right-leaning of her acquaintances. In these respects I have endeavoured to be more like her.