Children were playing card games on the floor, groups of relatives sat around talking and the scent of curries and chicken wings wafted through the corridor.

The person at the heart of all this: 85-year-old Madam Loh Bick Lan, wheelchair-bound and hard of hearing - but greeting the brood in turn.

She was supposed to have been in hospital, fighting off the effects of two failed kidneys, but she hated every moment there and said plainly that she wanted out.

She wanted to be with her family on Mother's Day.

So permission was obtained from her doctors at Changi General Hospital for her to be discharged.

MadamLoh has been in and out of hospital over the last four years for diabetes. She was most recently admitted two weeks ago and her doctors do not expect her to live beyond this year.

But her 13 children, 71 grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren wanted to grant this headstrong woman her wish to be out of hospital and among her family for what would likely be her last family reunion.

And they intend to give her the best time of her life in the next few months, which she will spend in the Balam Road flat.

One of her daughters has hired a full-time maid to look after her.

Madam Loh has always been fiercely independent, said her third child, MsLilian Phua, 51.

'She was hands-on and not the type of woman who would rely on her husband,' she said.

'For years, she made handicrafts for sale, cooked for construction workers and ran a provision shop to survive.'

MsPhua's most vivid childhood memory of her mother is one of her pregnant, sitting and feeding her younger brother while rocking her sister's cradle with her foot and watching the timer on the rice cooker at the same time.

Said MadamLoh's second eldest son, MrPatrick Phua, 60: 'We really want to do everything we can for her. She brought us all up and has suffered quite a bit in her life.'

Madam Loh came here by boat from China at age 15 to join her brother.

She landed a job at a construction company in the Chinatown area, where she cooked three meals a day for about 50 construction workers. There, she met the company's clerk, whom she was to marry in two years.

The couple's 13 children were to come over the next 23 years, with the last one arriving when MadamLoh was 41.

With so many mouths to feed, her husband had to moonlight. Then earning 20 cents a day as a clerk, he started making the rounds in the Geylang Serai area to collect unwanted jewellery, which he would melt down, recast and sell.

To supplement the $100 he earned from that monthly, he turned the front of the family's house in Minto Road, off Jalan Sultan, into a provision shop.

He died some decades ago of a heart attack.

When the children were old enough to take care of themselves, Madam Loh tended to the shop. She stopped working and sold it only six years ago when none of her children could be talked into taking it over.

Her health went downhill from then. But if yesterday's gathering was bittersweet, the family knew she was content.

MadamLoh said in Teochew: 'This is where I want to be, with a lot of people. I am happy.'

Mother's Day was marked across the island yesterday: About 180 seniors watched a concert at The Esplanade, organised for them by the Chinese Development Assistance Council and Lions Befrienders Service Association (Singapore).

And five mothers, whose children sent in entries in tribute to them for a Singapore Press Holdings Cats Classifieds contest, were presented with $1,000 worth of prizes each.

limjess@sph.com.sg