Don’t Tell Mummy (23 page)

I
knew that my days at the hospice were drawing to a close: my mother now sat helpless in her chair, dependent on me to feed her. She couldn’t swallow solids, no matter how gently I spooned them in. These were, I knew, her final days when only fluids could be consumed and then only with the aid of a teaspoon.

Bending over a chair spooning liquid into the mouth of a woman so sick that the ability to swallow has almost disappeared, is back-breaking work and I did it three times a day. Love, I was finding, as the minister had told me, was a hard habit to break. I already felt the loss of her departure, wanted to cry for those wasted years, wanted to keep her in this world, yet wanted to let her and her suffering go. She had lost the power of speech. As hard as she tried no words came; instead her face contorted with her futile efforts. I held her hand then and told her it didn’t matter; there was nothing that needed saying between us.

I told her I loved her and with her voice gone I was safe in doing so, for she was no longer able to ask my forgiveness. Knowing that she never meant to was a thought I pushed to the back of my mind, and her enforced silence spared me the emotion that unfulfilled hope brings.

This was the last night in a shared ward. I knew she was being moved to a side one the next day. The sight of a person so raddled and emaciated by cancer but still so determined to hold on was distressing to anyone who saw it. Her bones, unprotected by flesh, pierced the skin; each joint had to be covered in lint and plaster to protect it. A steel cage had been placed over her legs to keep the thin cotton of her sheet off them. Even the slight rub of that material could scrape her skin, leaving bleeding sores behind.

I stretched to relieve the ache in my back and, as I did so, heard a sound I recognized; a sound I had heard before in the hospice. The rattling noise that precedes death was coming from the bed opposite. I saw my mother look at me with fright: no patient in a hospice likes to be reminded how close to their own mortality they are. Although there are many moments when they pray for their release, it is the escape of pain they seek not the end of life.

I patted my mother’s hand gently and went in search of the nurse, who bustled in and pulled the curtains shut, an action which, along with the now silenced death rattle, confirmed Mary’s death.

I thought of the large farmer’s wife as I resumed my spoon-feeding. She had been in the opposite bed to my mother since my arrival. A cheerful and, judging by the number of visitors she received, a much-loved woman, who enjoyed classical music and had loved life. I had seen her face light up when she showed me photographs of her family, heard her chuckle at her fond reminiscences of her husband, dead for several years, and I felt glad for her, glad that she had slipped away so quickly before the need for morphine had ruled her waking hours.

The patient in the bed next to Mary’s body, who had been a new arrival that day, scurried past us to the bathroom, visibly upset. Still I continued to gently spoon liquid that was no longer wanted into my mother’s mouth. The new patient returned, saying no words as she brushed past us and climbed back into her bed. I heard her give a long sigh, then felt her silence. In those few seconds her hold on life had gone and I, present while it went, didn’t even know her name. Later I found out that she was also called Mary.

I pressed the bell to recall the nurse. She came in and gave me an enquiring look. Without pausing from spooning broth into my mother’s mouth, I nodded to bed number three. Again the slight noise was made as another set of curtains were drawn. An eerie silence hung in the ward for now, apart from my mother, there was only one old lady left alive, one who, out of the corner of my eye, I could see was looking far from happy. She called me and, putting down my mother’s spoon, I went to her bedside.

She told me in her quivering, aged voice that she did not want to stay in the ward. I took a thin elbow and helped her out of bed. Gently I drew on her dressing gown, put my arm round her waist and led her to the patients’ lounge. I turned the television on for her. Then I returned to the ward with its two corpses and one old lady with only hours left to live.

Exhausted, I stood back from my mother, only to find myself resting on Mary’s feet. It was an accident she might have laughed at when we had both been alive, but now only I was I did not want to repeat the experience. More nurses arrived. My mother was helped into bed and I opened her locker and removed the half bottle of sherry I’d placed there. She, I knew, would never share another nightcap with me. Clasping it in my hand, I went to the visitors’
lounge where, not pausing to find a glass, I tipped the bottle and drank.

I lit a cigarette and phoned England, needing to hear a voice that was neither dying nor related in any way to someone who was.

‘We’re having a dinner party,’ said my friend from the world I’d left behind several weeks before; a world that now seemed so distant. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Sitting with two corpses and my mother,’ was the terse reply I wanted to give but instead I said, ‘Having a drink.’ And with that I finished the conversation, tipped the bottle to my mouth again and swallowed deeply.

The following day my mother was moved and for the next two days I hardly left her side. On the third night she died. It was early evening and I was taking a short break in the lounge; tiredness had closed my eyes as I drifted into a light doze. In my half-awake state I felt the night nurse’s presence and, without asking, knew why she was there.

‘She’s dying, Toni,’ she announced, placing her hand on my shoulder. I rose from the chair and followed her to the side ward where my mother now lay.

She was still, her breathing shallow and her eyes closed. Her lids did not flicker as I took her hand, a hand where now the fingers had turned blue, in mine.

‘Can she hear me?’ I asked

‘We believe that hearing is the last of the senses to go,’ was the reply. ‘Don’t worry, Toni, I’ll stay with you if you would like me to.’

I went to ring my father. Not finding him at home I tried the second number I had for him, the British Legion Club.

‘My mother’s dying, she’s dying tonight,’ I managed to say, and then, for her sake, asked, ‘Will you come?’

‘I can’t drive in the dark, sure you know that,’ he replied in a voice already slurred by drink. In the background I could hear the sounds of music and laughter. Unbelievingly, I looked at the phone and repeated that she was dying. I said she would want him there, that surely he could get a taxi because she would not last the night.

With a note of finality that I recognized he said, ‘Well you’re there, aren’t you? What can I do?’

Stunned I wanted to scream at him, ‘Be there you selfish, rotten bastard, just be there. Say your goodbye, let her die knowing you loved her, knowing what she sacrificed was worth it.’

Instead I replaced the receiver with the words unsaid and returned to her bedside.

‘Daddy’s coming,’ I lied as I shook my head at the night nurse to convey the truth and picked up my mother’s hand.

Every few moments her breathing would stop and each time I felt that mixture of grief and relief that comes when one is keeping vigil. Her breathing kept stopping for a few seconds then starting again with a slight gasp as I waited over those final hours.

Remembering what I’d been told, that hearing is the last sense to go, I talked of our early life, of everything I could think of that if awake she would smile at. I wanted the last words she heard to be of pleasant times. I wanted them to be her final memories, memories that she could take with her.

And so that last night passed without my father, the man she’d loved so much for half a century. Instead it was me, the daughter she’d rejected so many times and a nurse who sat at her bedside and I felt the loneliness of that departure.

That night I silently cursed my father. This, I thought, was his final sin and I prayed that she would not regain
consciousness and be made aware of it. Let her die with her dream intact I thought. The end came as dawn broke: her breath rattled slightly in her throat, followed by a gasp. Breath left her body in a low moan and I, still holding her hand, knew it was over.

I felt the ghost of Antoinette stir in me and hoped she could now slumber in peace.

My memories left me as, half-asleep, my mind took in where I was: still sitting in the chair beside my mother’s bed. I was hungry; I could almost smell that yeasty pungent aroma that freshly baked pizza gives. An image of one, with melting cheese and spicy salami topping, placed on a checked tablecloth beside a bottle of red wine floated in front of my eyes, so real it was almost a hallucination. Time for a healthy tuna fish sandwich I told myself and, leaving my mother, I went to the lounge seeking coffee.

I then thought objectively about my relationship with my parents for the first time in a long time. I asked myself why I had not broken contact with them years ago. That question was impossible to answer; maybe, as I’d told the minister, I’d needed the illusion of a normal family to exist. Would my life have been different, would the road I had chosen have been the same road if I had found the courage to walk away? Was the love I felt for my mother a strength or a weakness? Would Antoinette have always haunted me? I thought of an analogy I had given to a psychiatrist in one of my therapy sessions when she had asked similar questions.

‘You can build a house and make it beautiful. You can make it look as wonderful as it is possible to do, and furnish
it with lovely things. You can turn it into a symbol of wealth and success as I’ve done with my flat in London, or you can make it a home and fill it with happiness. But if you did not care enough in the first place to build it on solid ground and make the foundations strong, over the years its cracks will show. If there are no storms to threaten its structure it could stand for ever, but put it under pressure, give it the wrong weather conditions, and it will collapse, because it is only a house that is badly built.

‘Make sure the veneer is good and its poor construction will avoid detection, dress it up with paint, make sure the curtains are expensive and tasteful and its lack of foundations will never be detected, except by a surveyor,’ I smiled at my therapist wryly, ‘or, if the house were human, by you.’

That I thought was my secret, one I hid well, but it was also my answer. As an adult I had lived the life I had to in order to survive. I had always known my limitations and tried, if not always succeeded, to stay within them. Understanding myself, I fell asleep.

I
n Ireland small towns such as Larne follow the old funeral customs. Men dressed in dark suits with black bands on their arms and black ties resting against white shirts walk behind the coffin: a solely masculine convoy showing their respect as the body makes its final journey. Behind them come the cars with the minister and female mourners. The women go as far as the cemetery before turning back, their role being to prepare food for the male mourners’ return. No woman’s hand picks up the soil to scatter on the coffin, no female eyes see it lowered into its final resting place. Instead they visit the grave the following day, admire the flowers that have been placed there and say their last good-byes.

Pulling my coat around me against the biting wind, for it was late October when my mother died, I left the funeral house. There my mother had lain in her open coffin during the service, her face reflecting the peace I hoped she had found.

My eyes swept across the people who had attended, friends who had cared both for me and for her, then they rested on my father and his associates. Which of them, I wondered, had been drinking with him the last night I had
spent at the hospice? Those men who were there to publicly support the grieving widower knew she had died without him. Those men were the group that would carry the coffin and follow it as a sign of their respect.

I ignored the car that was waiting to take me to the cemetery and walked in front of them to confront my father. With my mother dead and the last traces of my childhood ghost gone with her, there was only he and I left. No longer did I feel any remnants of my childhood fear as I looked him steadily in the face, ignoring his sheepish smile. I just calmly said, ‘They can walk behind me,’ and my hand swung out to gesture at his entourage.

He stood aside for me then, for with no more words between us he knew he had finally lost control and that all sympathy had died in the hospice. He silently took his place with the pallbearers. I waited as they lifted the coffin, placed it on their shoulders and commenced their slow walk. I squared my shoulders, much as I had done as a child, and looking neither to left nor right, walked behind my mother’s coffin with the men following behind me.

It was my hand, not my father’s, that scattered the soil on the coffin as I stood apart from him, the only female mourner by her grave, and said my last goodbye.

Then I turned and, still alone, walked from the graveyard to the waiting car.

The next day I returned to England, back to the world I had left, knowing that I had finally put Antoinette, the ghost of my childhood, to rest.

S
pecial thanks to Alison, Gerry and Gary, who have so enriched my life.

A big thank you to my agent Barbara Levy for her patience and the best Chinese food.

And thank you, Mavis Cheek, for writing your witty and humorous books, which saw me through the nights at my mother’s side.