My Mother

Five years ago today, on 18 December 2002, my mother Jenny Walker died aged 61.

Like me, Mum was a writer and speaker. As a writer, she produced very funny comic verse as well as more serious poetry. She was also a great anecdotalist. As a speaker (unlike me) she needed no presentation skills training before she started getting up in front of audiences. She had a very natural, friendly manner which drew people to her, combined with a phenomenal ability to find the humour in any situation despite having had such a difficult life (a popular talk of hers was called At Least My Smile's Not Broken!) It's true that she was self-conscious about her numerous disabilities, especially as many of her talks in her final years were delivered from a wheelchair, but she loved public speaking so much that even when she was extremely ill, she would frequently discharge herself from hospital for a couple of hours to honour a booking!

As part of the eulogy I delivered at her funeral, I read some of the many glowing, unsolicited testimonials she received from her speaking engagements.

I have been thinking about a phrase that Earl Spencer used in his eulogy for his sister Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, described by Ronald Reagan's speechwriter Peggy Noonan in her book On Speaking Well as the greatest speech of the 1990s. At the time, the sections which got the most media attention were, of course, the barbed comments about how Diana 'needed no royal title' and 'we, your blood family' but when I watched that service on the television, there was another line which absolutely leapt out at me because it was so simple yet remarkably moving:

'We want you to know that life without you is very, very difficult'.

Five years since my mother's passing, this perfectly sums up how I still so often feel.

Public Speaking Tip #101: However much we may like to show off our vocabularies, sometimes it is the simplest phrases which can be the most effective.