To say that she will be missed is an understatement.

Everyone who met her, who spent more than two minutes with her, got to like her. They liked her because it was easiest thing in the world to do:  She was beautiful, elegant, always humble, quiet and full of patience (she managed to put up with my brother and me all this time, that’s got to say something). She, unlike the rest of us in that household, was never drunk, never rude, never loud or crass, she never hogged the limelight or talked excessively about herself. She was an excellent listener, always ready with some wise words. She was, in the very real sense of the word, a lady.

Liking her was easy, as you’d know if you were one of the many, many people who had the pleasure meeting her.

Getting to know her was a lot more difficult.

Hand-in-hand with her cool exterior and natural reserve, she was quite a distant and mysterious woman, with a deep and complex internal life. She didn’t let people in very easily. Her emotional reservation caused some friction with Renaud and me (her children) but nothing either insurmountable or catastrophic. It was just the way she was and we learned, in our own ways, to deal with it.

This it doesn’t change the fact that she was distant and apparently detached, of course. She didn’t like to make a fuss and didn’t like a lot of attention, she preferred to give, support and simply be. And what that meant was that if you wanted to get to know her, truly know who she was and what went on behind those serene eyes, it had to take time.

But like all difficult and time-demanding things, it was worth it. Generally speaking, there is a direct correlation between the time and effort you have to invest in something and the reward you get out of it. And that was my mom’s secret: what you discovered about her, what she fought to keep to herself, namely who she was, was so precious, so beautiful, so full of love and a deep curiosity about the world, that it would have taken many lifetimes to uncover.

After thirty-six years with her, I still only barely knew her but what I did get to know blew my mind. And what I did discover, after taking the time to battle through her defences to understand who she was beneath it all, filled me with happiness, joy and a profound sense of connecting to another unique human being.

She was never one of big guffaws and loud proclamations. She was never brash and in-your-face. If you met her, you would like her but that’s all you’d get to know. To understand her, you had to roll up your sleeves, dig deep and decipher this complex code of secret smiles, kind and gentle gestures, little wise words and tender moments because it was there, between the lines of her vast and complex story, that she truly lived.

Those of you who got to spend that time to dig a little deeper to get a glimpse at her inner light know the truth of this. She was, fundamentally, someone who refused to be quantified and categorized. She resisted curious insights into her mind. Is it any surprise, really, that she surrounded herself with a man who took the limelight? After all, what better deflection and what better way to avoid the public gaze? I don’t think it was an accident at all.

But the great irony, of course, is that she didn’t fool nearly as many people as she think she did. The sheer inundation of support, condolences, messages and flowers attest to that. If you were smart and you were patient (and many of her friends were both), you got to steal a glimpse of the loving and beloved woman beneath. And once you saw it, you never forgot it.

Those of us who got to gaze into that share a secret about an amazing, wonderful, powerful, loving and loved woman. Those of us who got to see that secret light know how blessed we are, and how special Francois was because (contrary to what he’ll have you believe) it was when he was around that her light shone the brightest.

How Renaud and I will manage without her love, her guidance and her helping hand is beyond me. We miss her beyond words. We can only hope that we have even just a fraction of her strength and patience.

Here, before I call him an ignorant douche bag, I must step to his defence: he has a record of more hits than misses, which already puts him head and shoulders above most of the rest of our politicians. And has has been an active and successful force in the support of Human Rights in South Africa.

But, unfortunately, he will now henceforth and without delay be known as an ignorant douche bag. Why? Well, he is proposing that we do away with pornography on the Internet and cellphones. In that one instance, he has joined the repugnant autocratic totalitarians who has decided that we, rational, thinking adults, can’t be trusted to decide what is good for us. Who the fuck does he think he is?

What other open democracies does he think he’s emulating? What other shining beacons of free speech and open thought will we be joining? The We-Fucking-hate-Woman Saudi Arabia and Holy-Shit-it’s-the-Ministry-of-Truth Yemen. Excuse me for not jumping for joy at the thought.

The initial impulse: to want to protect the rights of children is, of course, a noble one but out of all the millions of possible ways to deal with it why-oh-why try and introduce a bill that both pisses all over the rights of consenting adults and kicks free speech in the nuts? It is clear that this has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children and everything about controlling what we, as lovers of curious bisexual co-eds have access to.

He must be stopped. Our access to unlimited hard-core amateur fisting bukkake orgies demands it!