She slipped away in a modest London room, the kind of place no one expects to find a legend. On the television, Fawlty Towers crackled on, its barbed wit and perfect timing echoing against quiet walls. Her sons sat nearby, not as audience members but as witnesses, holding the space between the woman on the screen and the mother in the bed. There was no dramatic last line, only the strange poetry of her greatest work playing as she exhaled into stillness.

In those final years, when names blurred and decades folded in on themselves, something essential refused to fade. A flicker of mischief in the eyes. A reflexive half-smile at an unseen joke. To millions, she was a storm of laughter; to those closest, she was tenderness welded to iron. Her final act wasn’t written in dialogue, but in the quiet courage of knowing when to let the scene end.