This post is guest-blogged by Laurence Newman. It's an an incredible story of beauty, hair-raising talent, unbelievable tragedy, and an amazing comeback.  

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Bessie was a serenely beautiful woman. Her raven hair, high cheekbones and huge almond eyes were reminiscent of the great Hollywood star, Ava Gardner.

Dressed in tailored chic with a glowing white pearl collar, her face flushed and her heart beating wildly, she bowed before her audience.

The auditorium was filled to its two thousand seat capacity. She responded to her standing ovation breathless, animated and high on adrenalin.

This event took place over half a century ago. In those days Bessie had mesmerized entire audiences with her heartfelt, emotional renditions of the great masters. She recreated their music with the technical wizardry required of a concert pianist. Rachmaninoff was her forte.

When she had finished playing, and the piano keys had ceased to fly, you could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium. Immediately thousands of patrons began clapping as they rose to their feet cheering and whistling. The din rose above the auditorium and was audible throughout the theatre and in the streets nearby.  

Bessie was my mother. As I was growing up in the early sixties, she taught music. Like her audiences, I was fascinated by her. I watched and drank in the heady excitement as she practiced and performed. She was alive, vibrant and vivacious; the centre of the world around her and certainly of mine.

She charmed everyone she met and at school my friends were envious. They said she was "cool". For a sixties mother that was a mean feat indeed. Classmates who met her were fussed, offered chocolates and surprisingly, cigarettes. Please tell me which kid would not be flattered at being offered a cigarette by a beautiful and somewhat famous adult woman?

During the seventies as she was approaching forty she had a late pregnancy. Blooming and expectant, she looked the very picture of health. Photographs of her in maternity wear showed her looking content. She had long since given up performing and teaching.

Wishing to emulate her and play the piano, she had declined to teach me instead sending me to a teacher nearby. Having a musical mother was not easy as she heard every wrong note, every slurred arpeggio or missed beat. There would be a shout from within the house or out in the garden and I would have to redo the offending piece!

Suddenly she became ill. A blood clot appeared in her left leg. It was unsightly. She was taken into the clinic where they tied off her vein. Sadly, it was all too late. The clot hit her in the heart, lungs and brain as it traveled with speed through her bloodstream.

What began as a thrombosis turned into a heart attack, a pulmonary embolism and a stroke. Our family was summoned to the hospital where she lay hemorrhaging, the doctors unable to stem her internal bleeding.

In a desperate attempt to save her life doctors had aborted the baby at five months. My mother lay dying. I was beside myself, in a heightened panic and weeping alternately aloud and silently.

My world had come crashing down around me. The woman who had touched so many hearts as her deft fingers flew over the keys, creating harmony and magic all around her, now lay unable to move. Instead of the deafening roar of a thunderous ovation, she lay in silence, barely able to breathe.

However, she did not quite make it to death's door. Realizing that we needed her she clung to life and survived.

Recovery was slow and by the time she was able to walk again and was out of danger, we had begun to realize that Bessie was different.

A chance meeting with a crass young nurse in a lift sent her plummeting into depression. This gormless orderly, upon spotting my mother, had called her merrily saying: "Bessie, you had a gorgeous baby girl. She's in a bottle upstairs if you want to go and have a look at her.!"

Bessie began weeping and continued to do so for six months day and night. She was inconsolable, distraught and immensely sad.

As the year drew to a close it became apparent that the stroke had left her with peripheral brain damage which altered her perception and caused her to undergo huge personality changes.

She soon needed psychiatric treatment and by degrees it became evident that her great gusto for life, warmth and expansive feeling and generosity had disappeared.

She had become paranoid and imagined things. Quite sure that she was being observed by some unknown force she complained bitterly about it. Then she insisted she was being followed, spied upon and monitored.

Soon she was keeping doors locked, windows closed and the curtains drawn by day. She stopped going outdoors and refused to answer the telephone when it rang. Then she began to whisper so that people could not hear her.

As the inevitable hospitalization approached she decided it was all part of the plot and booked herself a ticket out of the country. She left with barely hours notice and it was twelve years before she was seen again.

She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and as she had long since given up caring about appearances and living as a human being had abandoned all her possessions. She was found wandering the beaches, barefoot, tanned brown by the sun, emaciated from malnourishment and her now grey hair burnt blonde by the ferocious sun.

She had disappeared and long years of searching had borne no fruit. Consulates, official organizations, the Red Cross and various newspapers had been unable to help locate her.

It had been a nightmare not knowing what had become of my mother.

Eventually necessity had dictated that I leave my job in the city, pack up my apartment and fly overseas to the Middle East to try to find her. It was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack as I had no idea where to begin.

The authorities were unsympathetic and I spent many hours searching beneath bridges, beside highways and in places known to be frequented by the homeless and lost souls of the various towns and cities I landed up in. It was the most difficult task of my life.

I trudged through alleyways between derelict buildings, relics from the Ottoman Empire, as I hunted for my mother. Sometimes I saw somebody who looked like her and would then run like a man possessed through the streets after her calling and beseeching her to stop.

People would stare at me and the person I had followed would give me a blank stare and move on.

How I longed for those heady days of the concert performances, safe and secure in a lovely home with my mother larger than life and at the centre of the universe.

I hated the hot incessant sun, the humidity that left me pouring with sweat and my clothes constantly drenched, hanging on my body. I felt nauseous from the stress, the smell of thick oil and Middle Eastern herbs and spices used in the cooking that pervaded the weltering heat of the day wherever you went.

Finally, and by some miracle, Bessie was located and hospitalized as she should have been all those years previously. I subsequently wrote a book about the missing years and how she was found.

She was flown home and many years of rehabilitation followed. They were unsuccessful as the prognosis of the illness left untreated for so long was hopeless.

She suffered from schizophrenia for some thirty years. She was silent withdrawn, preoccupied and locked in her own world. There were periods of catatonia and she existed for so many years as a shadow, benumbed by medication and shielded from the world around her in an institution.

It was a tragic life. A woman who, destined for greatness, had been discovered as a child prodigy and featured in newspaper articles. She had gone on to study music and perform. She had become ill and her career and life had nosedived into obscurity, illness and poverty.

Yet the story has a happier ending. The greatest comeback for me was that in the last years of her life G-d gave her a reprieve. As she lay dying, her vital organs giving up one by one, first her heart, then her lungs and then her kidneys and with all the life support systems in place, her illness vanished.

It left her as suddenly as it had come. She was Bessie once again. She was alive, vibrant and curious in everything going on around her. She even laughed for the first time in decades and spoke and asked me questions about my life that puzzled her.

My mother was back. She had resurfaced. She lay stretched upon her deathbed, with everyone around her at her beck and call, she wanted things, and she was kind to the people around her, generous and considerate. The nursing staff adored her and she held court with them literally eating out of her hands. She listened to music and nodded her head in time to the beat, her face lit up and she smiled. She was still serenely beautiful but her once raven hair was now snow white.

She passed away early one morning. When the phone call came, I was listening to Rachmaninoff and could swear I heard the applause of thousands of concertgoers as they stood clapping.