Started 6 March 2017. Finished and Posted 23 March 2017
Well- I did it.
I said I would stay with Mum till she died, be right by her
side, if I possibly could. And I have done.
Actually, Mum died, quite suddenly, on New Year’s Eve.
But since then my life has been so full of things I’ve had
to do that I’ve really had no time for reflection, or to experience my own
feelings about this. So I’ve found it hard to collect my thoughts and feelings
enough to write anything for this blog.
Looking back over it all, I’m glad I was hooked into the
Palliative Care Team in that month or so before Mum died. Not only did I have everything in place about
the Do Not Resuscitate order, but I also had a phone number to call when I
realized Mum had started to die. It was New Year’s Eve, so the normal doctors’
was closed, and I didn’t know the number we are all now meant to use for
out-of-hours doctors. I didn’t grow up under that system. When my husband died
in 1984, we still called our normal GP and got the one who was on duty that day
or night. I couldn’t remember the number posted on the door of the local
surgery for out-of-hours calls, and I certainly didn’t want to press the red
button on Mum’s alarm system, as I had such bad memories of the last time I
used that and the appalling ambulance men who turned up.
But the Palliative Care Team had left me a number to call
and clear instructions about who to ask for. So – after about 30 minutes of
sitting by Mum’s bed, thinking “Any minute now, I’ll just stay here and be here
with her while she goes,” but actually feeling completely shocked, I did
finally think to call them.
In the end it took about 2 hours for a doctor to arrive and
Mum seemed to breathe her last just as he came into her room. I thought she was
coming round. I thought this was just a scare like we’d had so many times
before, and she always rallied round. The
Oramorph I had given her when all this started had worn off after an hour and she
had seemed to become more active, somehow agitated, plucking at the quilt over
her and pushing it back, fiddling with the oxygen tube in her nose. I think now
this was because whatever was happening in her lungs, a final collapse of the
only part of her lungs that was still open, had just got worse and she was
reacting instinctively to suffocation, but at the time I thought it meant she was coming round.
I stood in the front hall talking to the doctor, telling him
what was going on, and then we went into the bedroom, and Mum’s face had gone
so white, I could never have believed it could go any whiter than it already
was. Her jaw had gone slack and her eyes had closed.
In a high, incredulous voice , I said “Has she gone?” to the
doctor. He took her wrist and felt her neck and said, “Yes, I’m afraid so.”
She looked so tiny, so defenceless, I just said “Oh, Mum,”
and fell to my knees by her bed, and stroked her hair and held her hand. Just then the doorbell rang again, and I
said, “I think that’s the nurse, they said they were sending one,” so the
doctor went to open the door, and while they were talking in the hall Mum’s
eyes suddenly opened and she started up, it was like she was choking, her
tongue was poking out and her face went even whiter, such a ghastly colour. I
was terrified. She was suffocating to death, and all I could do was whisper
“It’s ok, Mum, everyone you love is waiting there for you. Dad is there,
holding his hands out to you, Betty’s there, your Mum and Dad are there. You’ll
be ok. Don’t be afraid.” She was still somehow responding to my touch, as she
had been all along, but her eyes were staring, unseeing.
I don’t know how long this lasted. It was over by the time
the doctor came back in with the nurse. To them Mum had just passed peacefully
in the gentlest possible manner. But it
has been a long time for me to get those last few seconds out of my mind. I’ve
been in shock from it since, though it is now abating to the point where I can
write about it.
Our ancestors witnessed people dying as a regular part of
life. I suppose they were used to it on some level. But in our present day
culture we are simply not prepared to see anything like this, to feel it, hear
it, even smell it. It was such a body experience for me, feeling that tiny,
so-light body in my arms, so helpless. All those times when I was helping her
dress in the final few weeks when she had so little breath in her she truly was
like a tiny baby, still fully aware, but barely able to eat or speak for more
than a few words at a time – all that is still with me. I feel so protective of
her.
Even now can’t really take in that she is gone.
There is something so incomprehensible about death.
The nurse was a young male one who I’ve seen a couple of
times when he came to do Mum’s blood tests.
He stood with me in the hall while the doctor performed his formal tests
to confirm death. The doctor came out and said he’d rarely witnessed such a
gentle death, and that I must not feel there was anything more I could have
done. I knew this. I knew I had done well. I’d done all I’d hoped to for Mum,
and even it that state of shock I felt a kind of pride that I had been able to
fulfil this last thing for my mother. I hadn’t fobbed it off on anyone else.
I don’t totally
remember the order of the next things. I went online and found the contact
number of the same funeral directors Mum had used for Dad’s funeral – except
that one had closed and been bought out by another firm. I called them to come
for Mum. I was able to be by her when she was dying, but certainly could not
cope with having her stay there in the house with me once she was dead.
I called my best friend, and she agreed to come round
instantly. The nurse waited with me till she came. I remember him asking if he
could go in and say goodbye to Mum as he remembered her from his occasional
visits. I was quite calm and
clear-headed, but also quite spaced out, all through this. The undertakers came about an hour later.
They asked what I wanted Mum to wear, but she was dressed, not in her
nightclothes. She had begun to go into dying literally as I was dressing her –
it was when I rolled her onto her side to pull up her trousers up at the back,
the breath just seemed to go out of her in a gasp – I don’t know if that is
what they mean by a death rattle – and I think that is when the last of her
lung collapsed. I didn’t want them to mess around with her more than they had
to, so I said “I’d like her to wear what she’s in now, those clothes are so
much ‘her’.” So they asked us to sit somewhere else in the house and they took
her out through the living room and front hall.
My friend works for the local church and therefore has to
deal with all the local funeral directors, and she told me this one was the one
she’d have when she died, as she liked their ways and it was a small local
firm, not a franchise. I felt glad of this advice.
Then after that it was all action:
Phone my three brothers, two of them in Western Canada,
therefore it was about 5 a.m. for them. But they were glad I’d woken them to
tell them. I couldn’t cope with calling
Mum’s twin sister, so asked my youngest brother to call her as he had a close
relationship with her.
There’s so much to do when someone dies. And I was the only
one who could do most of it. As I live here right where the funeral was to take
place, I was the one to co-ordinate it all.
I had help. My oldest brother and his wife came down the
next day from Scotland, and David and I went to the Registry Office, once it
was open. New Year came at a weekend so there was quite a delay till everything
opened. We went through all of what you need to do – mostly following advice
from the undertakers, who know people have no idea what to do when someone dies
and therefore give very clear, care-full advice.
This is why I am writing this. Most of us have no clue. I’ve
only had to do it once before, when my husband died back in the 80s.
So - what advice do I now give to anyone else who may be in
the same position as me?
Arranging a funeral seems to be as complex an operation as
arranging a wedding – only without the clothes. The worst thing for me was that
we needed to wait for over a month before we could get everyone together at the
same time. Every time I thought of Mum’s small, fragile body still lying there in
some morgue, in her red sweater and navy-blue trousers, I felt my heart turn
over. I felt angry and betrayed that my
brothers couldn’t get themselves over sooner – though actually there were other
factors getting in the way, that were nothing to do with them. That was just
the way it felt to me at the time. Once the funeral started and I saw the small
coffin being brought into the crematorium, it brought up all those feelings for
me. I was so grateful for my niece who just came forwards and took my arm, because she noticed my reaction. But, after the prayers and hymns, which none of us could sing, when
the coffin went onto the rollers and the curtain drew across I felt such a sense of
relief, like a weight lifting from me.
But I found that month-long wait so ghastly that I am seriously
considering stipulating in my will that my body must be disposed of within a
week, regardless of whether people can get to the funeral or not.
The really important part of the funeral was the Memorial service
that took place the day after – a celebration of Mum’s life in the church she
used to attend, before she got too weak to get there. As is usual in these
cases, so many of her friends had died or gone into care homes that the
attendance was a lot thinner than it had been for my Dad, 8 years prior to this
and in the same church. But we still gave her a good send-off. Various people read things - some that had been
sent in by people who could not attend – and another of my lovely nieces sang. We
went on a bit, I know some people began to space out, but I didn’t care. I felt
proud that we had so much to say about our Mum. I wasn’t sure if I would be
able to get up and speak, but it was important to me that I did. Not just to
say things about Mum, but to take my place as the chief mourner, to be seen and
acknowledged as the one who had played such a strong role in caring for Mum and
helping her die so gently and with such dignity. In a
way, I felt I was owed my place in the limelight – and I used all my practiced
skills at performing in voice to deliver what I had to say.
This is what I wrote for Mum:
Mum’s funeral
Many of you
will be aware that I moved in with Mum about 8 years ago to live with her and
look after her. To be honest, I originally came to stay as a temporary measure,
because my own life had gone a bit pear-shaped and I needed somewhere to stay
while I re-grouped and worked out where to go from there.
But I
quickly realized Mum wasn’t doing too well on her own – both physically and
emotionally. Her osteoporosis and arthritis and other health issues were
getting worse, and she was lonely and seemed to feel it was downhill all the
way from here.
She told me
she’d imagined the final quiet years of her life would be a time to come closer
to God, when she would have time to think, pray and read her Bible. But she was
finding it wasn’t quite working out that way. Life felt a bit gloomy and she
was afraid of the future. Though she was still mobile and able to drive, it was
clear this would not last much longer.
I hated the
thought of her going into a Care Home, as did my brothers, so I stayed so that
Mum could continue in her own home till she died.
I didn’t do
this out of some martyred sense of duty. Yes, there were many times when I
chafed at the bit and was desperate to get on with my own life. But I set out
on it as the next stage of my own journey, to grow and become and learn in
whatever way I could through this unique opportunity. So – it became a conscious process of looking
at this most difficult-to-describe relationship – this mother/daughter …..
thing.
I think
most of the women here will know what I’m talking about. I don’t know about men, but every woman seems
to have …. Stuff …. With their mothers. Admit it. We all do. I don’t know why,
but we all grow up with that mixture of being so close we can’t really see each
other, and yet, utterly exasperated by our differences; so supportive and yet,
somehow competitive to each other. It’s almost impossible to put into words
really. All I know is that every woman who tries to talk about her relationship
with her mother ends up rolling her eyes, sighing and muttering about ‘issues’. I can see small smiles and nods of
recognition in many faces here.
We love our
mothers, because they are the air we breathed and the earth we walked on when
we were little, and then we grow up and we are both women, and even when we are
as different to each other as my mother and I were, we are still in each other
and of each other in a way that is very different from whatever that is for men.
And none of
us has words for that. So- as a story-teller, writer and poet – I wanted to
find some words, if I could. This is the poem I wrote as the beginning of that
journey:
Mothers, thank the Lord
for your delinquent daughters,
Who went off and did what
they shouldn't ought ta.
Who danced to a different
drum
And followed the Moon and
not the Sun.
Found themselves,
silvered driftwood, on an empty shore
Still following that
elusive star.
Whole, though scarred,
and eyes too wise,
A hatful of dreams and no
compromise.
They are the ones who
flutter home
To a nest that's no
longer lined with down,
But with silver gossamer
And two silvered heads,
one haloed white,
One speckled black,
Lean together in the
slowly dimming light.
And, yes, Mum and I are
very different. I’m much more like my Dad in character. He was introverted,
complex, bookish, always thinking and chewing over things, full of ideas. And
even though Mum wrote and did all sorts of creative things, as we’ve heard from
others, she was essentially a straightforward person, who just did things like volunteering
to visit people who needed help, or Marriage Guidance counselling, or
fostering, just because it seemed the right thing to do. She wasn’t really
reflective in that chewing things over way, she was just instinctively kind,
and acted on that basis.
She was actually quite shy
and struggled with some of the things she did – she was not especially
self-confident, but she kept on doing them anyway.
She said to me a couple
of times that she felt a bit out-classed by Dad and us four. She’d say she was
just ordinary, she’d married an unusual sort of man and had 4 talented and
unusual children, and she was just sitting in the middle of us like a little
daisy surrounded by roses or something. She certainly took great pride in all
four of us – regarding us as her life’s great achievement. But I think you can
tell from Michael and Jim Bland’s account that she did plenty else with her
life and was talented – she did more than most – and so much of it was giving
something back into her community.
And for me, it was that
simple quality I’ve described here, that shone through and made her such a true
and authentic person – loyalty, kindness – nothing showy about these, but they
just came naturally. Openness to others was another. She was of her generation,
so had some prejudices and judgements – but she was always open to others and generously
accepting of them for what they were – qualities that I think all 4 of us carry
through in our lives.
And so – during our time
together there was an exchange between us. We were giving and receiving from
each other. I would ask her questions that would trigger memories in Mum that
she’d share with me. Or she’d re-think old stories, because of me looking at
things from a different perspective. I know she did a lot of quiet reassessing
of her own life during those years. I can’t speak now of my own learning and
re-appraising and slow collecting of insights, but I know I came to a closer,
more compassionate, more adult and equal relationship with Mum and I think she
did with me. I’m grateful for the opportunity to do that.
And in her final year,
the essence of who Mum was shone through more and more as she shed all the
roles and public selves – that we all put on – she just dropped all that, and
just ‘was’, as she grew more and more frail. In her final months she would say
“I’m just going to BE today,” as she found she didn’t have the breath to do any
exercises at all.
And then
her essential simplicity shone through. She didn’t see herself as anything
special, but that kind of simplicity and clearness is special. The way she
remained positive and quietly cheerful as she grew weaker and weaker – knowing
she was dying – touched everyone.
And I went
with her on that journey, and so shared some of the light that began to shine
through her.
A few
months before she died I wrote this:
LIGHT
I am living in a field of death.
Not asphodels or grim shades grieving.
This is light
Dissolving into light.
We now know that all
Is everywhere
For all time.
That we are each a
Distillation of light
And breath. A drop
Of nectar quivering
For a moment
On the skin of a petal.
