

I did it at school with Mrs. Peters, who does art, and it was a lino cut, which is when you draw a picture on a piece of lino and Mrs. Peters cuts round the picture with a Stanley knife and then you put ink on the lino and press it onto the paper, which is why all the cars looked the same, because I did one car and pressed it onto the paper 9 times. And it was Mrs. Peters’s idea to do lots of cars, which I liked. And I colored all the cars in with red paint to make it a Super Super Good Day for Mother.
Father said that she died of a heart attack and it wasn’t expected.
I said, “What kind of heart attack?” because I was surprised.
Mother was only 38 years old and heart attacks usually happen to older people, and Mother was very active and rode a bicycle and ate food which was healthy and high in fiber and low in saturated fat like chicken and vegetables and muesli.
Father said that he didn’t know what kind of heart attack she had and now wasn’t the moment to be asking questions like that.
I said that it was probably an aneurysm.
A heart attack is when some of the muscles in the heart stop getting blood and die. There are two main types of heart attack. The first is an embolism. That is when a blood clot blocks one of the blood vessels taking blood to the muscles in the heart. And you can stop this from happening by taking aspirin and eating fish. Which is why Eskimos don’t get this sort of heart attack, because they eat fish and fish stops their blood from clotting, but if they cut themselves badly they can bleed to death.
But an aneurysm is when a blood vessel breaks and the blood doesn’t get to the heart muscles because it is leaking. And some people get aneurysms just because there is a weak bit in their blood vessels, like Mrs. Hardisty, who lived at number 72 in our street, who had a weak bit in the blood vessels in her neck and died just because she turned her head round to reverse her car into a parking space.
