DEATH and taxes are the only two things we can’t avoid, said Benjamin Franklin.

Daniel Defoe said it before him, but that doesn’t necessarily make Franklin a plagiarist; he might have come up with it independently.

Besides, I think both are wrong. Cynically witty, perhaps, but wrong.

I believe there are great numbers of people in the world who have successfully avoided paying taxes, but very few who have avoided death, which as a consequence I am minded to put in a category entirely of its own.

I wouldn’t like to guess whether Defoe and Franklin ever avoided taxes. But I know for sure they didn’t avoid death.

Death’s sable brush wafted us last weekend. I’m using the metaphor ‘death’s sable brush’ rather than ‘death’s rusty meat-hook’ or ‘death’s swinging scythe’ because what happened was a brush with mortality, a clarion call to remind us of our fleshly impermanence.

There is no such thing as a mere brush with death, however. Death in its imagining is in all ways but one as fearsome as death in actuality.

My mother is in her late eighties and in a care home in the south of England, where she lives wrapped in a dozen layers of what is known in the trade as TLC (Tender Loving Care).

She jettisons a shedload of memories each day that passes. Every time we see her something more has disappeared.

She’s not sure which son she’s seeing; she’s lost the names of her four grandchildren, and has to tap her immense collection of photos to remind herself. Even then, the reminder fades in minutes.

I often wonder how it must be to live in a world whose bounds are so narrow. But you can’t imagine such a thing. You can only live it. And she seems happy, most of the time.

Then the call came, at 3am, from the care home. "Your mother’s very poorly. I mean really very poorly. She has an infection. We don’t think she got over last week’s fall. We don’t think she’s, er ... the doctor’s been called. We want to know if we should get her to hospital or just give her TLC."

The TLC bit was the most ominous. In this context, it’s holding someone’s hand as they fade away.

I said: "Send her to hospital".

The paramedics arrived first and ‘stabilised’ her, then she was in hospital. An hour later the doctor came on the line to confirm she was seriously ill.

"I think if you could get down here as soon as possible, that would be good," he said. "Meanwhile, if it becomes necessary, do you want us to resuscitate her?"

There is only one way to interpret this, and any reader who has travelled this road will know how it feels.

As day dawned, however, the picture changed. A condition check at the hospital revealed that Mum was ‘responding to treatment’. Her blood pressure, which had dropped to not far off that of a corpse, was coming back up.

My brother, who lives much closer to the hospital, was told she was still very poorly, but was conscious. As he sat with her, she came round, smiled, and made a joke.

Shortly after they left, the doctor said she was sitting up, trying to pull out her various tubes, and making every effort to get out of bed and ‘go home’.

Birthdays are good for you, says the popular card. Statistics prove that the more you have, the longer you live. Mum now looks as though she’ll make it to her 88th in a few weeks’ time.

Sitting through that dark weekend night, watching the clock tick and waiting for news, turned out, thankfully, to be a false alarm.

But it was still a genuine test of how I might feel about my mother’s death when, inevitably, it comes.

We know that death is inevitable. You can’t cheat it. You can’t put it off, and you don’t know when or how it will arrive.

The care assistants, the GP, the paramedics, the nurses and the ward doctor were all wrong, on this occasion. Mum’s tough as old boots.

I was quite proud of her really, confounding the experts and turning the odds, which seemed stacked against her, so spectacularly in her favour.

So let’s see what tomorrow brings, Mum. Let’s make every day count.