I have read Peter Apap Bologna’s eulogy of the late Phyllis Depiro D’Amico Inguanez and her husband Jerome (November 19) and certainly feel the same way. Not only was she “the last of the great matriarchs” but her departure marks the end of an era, an end to a way of life on this Fair Isle.

How true it is that all Malta should be proud of her, “for they lived exemplary lives which are an honour to our nation”. No two ways about it, the women of Malta today have an undisputed model to emulate, as best they can; both for life and for eternity.

I remember reading an epitaph engraved on a wall of an Anglican church for someone who died in the 17th century which I feel, by acclamation of all who knew her, the baroness can proudly and confidently share: “Know Reader that if Prudence, Piety or Beauty could rescue from the grave, she had been immortal” (sic).