But some days it catches you off-guard. I still go to dial the first few digits of her number, or file a mental note to tell her something - usually inane, often a recipe. Then I stop and my heart begins to pound. In a shocking instant I have to reprocess the loss all over again. She is gone. And it leaves me gasping for breath. Five years on and the tears still flow with unpredictable intensity.

One of the hardest things about living in Canberra, the city in which I was raised, is that it is completely overlaid with memories of her.

I stand at the queue at Dickson Woolworths, and suddenly I'm seven years old and pleading for a chocolate frog with the same look of desperation in my eyes as my own seven-year-old's. The graceful arches of the Melbourne building in Civic recall the afternoons of my teenage years as I would sit on one of the upstairs balconies, do my homework and wait for her to finish work.

The Canberra Centre? That was our territory. When I was a grown-up, working, and in possession of my own credit card, we'd wander hand-in-hand and exhaust ourselves in a frenzy of impulse purchases. Then we'd flop down at a table at Milk & Honey, order a glass of champagne, and never once stop the endless flow of conversation we'd kept up since I was a child. When I had my son, a new romance bloomed, and our mother-daughter bond graciously accepted a sweet-natured and placid little boy. What a joy it was to see how much she adored him. And he her. So forgive me if I stop to wipe my tears on my sleeve when I see a mother and daughter push a pram together as they stroll around. That doting circle of life used to be mine and I absolutely ache for it.

I ache for her conversation. I could speak to my mum like no one else in the world. She was interested in every minute detail of my life.

We would talk for hours at a stretch. And then call each other on the phone to discuss the bits we missed. We were each other's other half. It was always this way. My dad left the marriage shortly before I was born. As an only child it was always just the two of us.

We were incredibly close and it's hard to explain to people who didn't know us just how deeply connected we were.

My husband knew. He joked after our wedding that the most romantic shots of the day were of my mum and me - not of the bride and groom. But he didn't mind, he loved my mum, too. Everyone loved my mum.

She was diagnosed with cancer seven years before she died. I remember the call from the nurse at the hospital after a routine colonoscopy, when she told me my mum needed to be admitted. It was my greatest fear realised. From that instant, I knew our time was limited. And that wretched disease broke both our hearts.

But my beautiful mum was not defined by her illness and my memories are not of the hospitals and my fear, nor her pain. My memories are of her smile, her gentle voice that I remember as clearly as if she were talking beside me now, the soft feel of her skin, the powdery clean smell of her cheek. I remember her endless care, her boundless patience and affection, her incredible cooking, her worry when I was sick, her disappointment in my wrong-doing, her impossibly high standards, her pride when I met them, her kindness to friends and strangers alike, her remarkable elegance and her mad sense of humour.

I carry with me the weight of her love and her wisdom rings in my head as I go about my business raising two children and working and cooking and cleaning and loving and laughing and using up my own supply of days on this earth. Because her death has shown me so clearly, so jarringly, that it's over very quickly. Perhaps it is the only positive thing that can be said of cancer - it leaves the ones behind with a greater sense of what it is to live.

And it gave us seven years to say goodbye in the most tender and meaningful way. We knew how much we adored each other. We knew that one day we were going to have to part. We made every year, then every month, then every day count.

She died on May 25. Mother's Day was our last special calendar event and we celebrated in the hospice over crab sandwiches, Silo tarts and fine champagne. I bought her a bottle of Chanel No. 5 and a Glasshouse candle - tea rose and geranium. She always had exquisite taste.

How fitting that her last weeks were enhanced by the colours and light of a Canberra autumn, visible from her bed through the large windows of Clare Holland House, which faced on to Lake Burley Griffin. We both loved autumn best of all.

And in the end, in those final few days when I never left her side, I just remember the golden light of each day fading and passing us by. And the smell of the candle the nurses left burning for us.

We didn't speak. We didn't need to communicate in words. I just held her hand and listened to each breath. Her eyes were closed and she seemed focused on the journey of dying.

And when the final breath came, she opened her eyes and looked deeply into mine. A single tear rolled down her cheek. I've never felt more alone, or more loved. I was just so lucky to have her.