I can remember very little of what happened in the last couple of days of the election campaign in 2004. The day before election day, 8 October, I went to the Channel Seven studios at Martin Place in Sydney for my regular weekly appearance on morning television with Joe Hockey. After each Friday's program, I rang my mother. She always watched, as any mother would, and invariably commented on my tie, my hair and how exhausted I looked. It had been our weekly ritual for years. But over the previous 12 months these calls had become particularly precious. In late 2003, Mum – who'd never smoked in her life – had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Cancer is cruel, whatever its form. For my mum, it was an additional cruelty; for some years, she had suffered from Parkinson's disease, its own form of hell on earth, and now this as well.

One of the benefits of being largely redundant in then Labor leader Mark Latham's world over that year was that I was able to spend time with Mum. My sister Loree, a qualified teacher and nurse, had kindly come back from Moscow, where she had been studying Russian language and literature, to nurse Mum at home. My older brother Malcolm, who after returning from Vietnam had also trained as a nurse, was now living and working in Nambour. To this day I am grateful to both of them for providing Mum with a level of care that I simply could not. I went home to see her not long after returning from Jakarta and we had had a long conversation about her life, her marriage and my father. It was painful for me, but liberating for her. We gathered again for my birthday on 21 September. The whole family was there. We dragged out the old projector and showed the family slides on the wall, as we had done over the decades, seeing once again the faces of aunts and uncles long gone. Marcus, aged ten, had brought Mum his favourite chocolate mousse, made specially for her with a dash of rum. She loved it. By that stage it was about all she could eat.

Kevin Rudd with his mother, Margaret.

I saw her one last time, alone in her bed in the tiny living room that for years had been my home too. She was no longer fading. She was dying. Few words passed between us. I simply put my head on her chest as she stroked my hair. After a farewell kiss, I said I would see her the day after the election.

I took a strange route back to Brisbane. I drove up towards the Mapleton Range, towards the farm on which she had been born in 1921. I stopped the car at the highest point on the property, overlooking the old tank stands where the original farmhouse had stood. I saw the hill where, as a little girl, she had hurled the old rag doll in a rage. And I saw the old milking shed where she and her young siblings had worked from the crack of dawn, the Depression having stolen their childhood. For a moment, the world stood still. In my mind's eye, it was as if the generations had come together in time and space. And in it all, I was but the flashing of an instant. As for politics, it now seemed little more than "sound and fury, signifying nothing".